Tom Lichtenberg: 40 books

Some psycho kidnaps his would-be girlfriend, gets chased by the cops halfway across the state, runs out of gas right outside your house, where you and your spouse are enjoying a quiet evening at home, and now you’re held hostage at gunpoint and surrounded by police. It could happen.

A collection of stories, including the Legend of the Wandering Cashier, the roadside diner Angel of Death and the classic tale of the Bathroom on the Bus.

Three stories of a lonely youth. Jimmy Kruzel's bad luck is that his worst enemies are always his best friends, or is it the other way around, and that sometimes his darkest hours seem to come right after the dawn. In tales more bitter than sweet, Jimmy finds that you can attract more flies with honey than you can with vinegar, but really, who wants to attract flies anyway?

The world's #1 (if not only) Big-Data Detective returns in yet another extremely unlikely (if not impossible) adventure. This time things that should never move are apparently moving, and hidden dangers are lurking just beneath the surface. Part Freakonomics, part Sherlock Holmes, part Doctor Who,...

A gang of street kids, an anonymous radio announcer, a detective from the future, a presidential assassination attempt and a frequently mistaken narrator all play a part in this jumble of introductions to an open-source novel inspired by the works of Macedonio Fernandez. Cover painting by Delma Soult.

When a city commissioned a famous artist to create a masterpiece for their newly refurbished downtown, they only forgot one thing: to tell him when to stop. Now his greatest work is threatening to take over everywhere. It's a race against time and space and dimensions nobody even knew were there!

Dillon Sharif was the world's greatest big-data detective. It helped to be the handsome grandson of the billionaire founders of the AllDat Corporation - legal owners of all the world's information - but would it be advantage enough to solve the riddle of those invisible things that go beep in the...

A haunted desk, a case of mistaken identity, and ominous threats from mysterious strangers can be seriously annoying when all you want is to get your job done and go home to your family. Sometimes you just have to take the horns by the bull and deal with it. Close to Nowhere, a short novel of danger...

This is not your father’s time travel. There’s no machine, no dial. There’s no telling where or when you’ll go. The only thing that can change is you. It will make you what it needs to make you. And if you come back, it won’t be the same you. You’re messing with the nature of things, and...

Told in the style of a combined social media feed, 'This and That' relates several overlapping and interwoven stories; a woman facing treatment for cancer, a man held hostage for no reason by a foreign government, a global corporation enamored of its power and reach, an unstable future world...

Secret Sidewalk is a kind of '1001 Nights' as told by a boy to his younger brother in the hopes of getting him to sleep on one very hot night. Among the tales it contains is the legend of Beauregaard Sweet, who became invisible, but whose troubles began when he suddenly reappeared. Then everybody...

It's the end of the world as we know it, when the dreaded Singularity finally occurs and happens to be captured, live on tape, by agents of the Frantic News Network, which freaks out, as usual, and causes a lot of trouble for the mild-mannered nanobot exterminator who happens to get caught in the crossfire.

The world's #1 Big-Data Detective returns in yet another extremely unlikely, if not impossible adventure. This time the wrong things are happening at the wrong times in the wrong places while pasts and futures hang in the balance. Part Freakonomics, part Sherlock Holmes, part Doctor Who, part somewhere...

They weren't exactly the crew the President had in mind when he announced his plan to build a permanent base on the moon so the Chinese wouldn't do it first, but there they were, a boring collection of peaceful, happy settlers who couldn't even get a decent reality TV show rating. Life was perfectly...