In a ruined and desolate land, a young woman finds herself stranded and alone, with no memory of her past and only a single clue to identity: an engagement ring with the inscription, 'Cybil'. Even if she can navigate the hostile realm of homicidal, hybridised beasts, what hope does she have of ever finding home? An encounter with some unlikely allies, offers her a chance of survival. But will the 'smash and grab' tactics of the continent's most notorious smuggling crew be enough to see her through this dystopian nightmare? They quickly find themselves caught up in the intensifying discord between the fascist City States and the anarchic Outlands. Cybil's unyielding desire to find her lost love must take a back seat to the bonds of friendship, as her unfailing sense of loyalty draws her into a conspiracy that threatens to tear civilization apart. Can a handful of misfit rebels thwart the most powerful entity on the continent and change the course of history...? "A well conceived story, with a furious pace and a half-dozen twists that completely blindside you."

A routine Coast Guard inspection of a cargo ship in the Caribbean turns into a vicious firefight with unidentified Asian commandos. The second attempt to board the vessel ends with a nuclear detonation. North Korea has been smuggling short and intermediate-range missiles into Cuba. An unknown number of nuclear warheads are hidden less than 100 miles from the tip of Florida. Every American city east of San Antonio is in the target zone. Scrambling to stop the flow of weapons to Cuba, the president orders the Atlantic Fleet to surround the island, cutting off all access. It’s the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again, but this time there won’t be a diplomatic resolution. The North Koreans have developed a secret weapon that rips through the blockade with ease, leaving burning ships and floating bodies in its wake. Against this unimagined threat stand a small detachment of United States Marines and a cutting-edge destroyer that’s never been tested in combat. It’s a battle we never expected to fight, against an enemy we can barely comprehend...

Mark Noce returns to Medieval Wales with Dark Winds Rising, his second book about the Braveheart-like Queen Branwen in this epic historical series. Three years after uniting the Welsh to defeat the Saxons and settling down with her true love, Artagan, Queen Branwen finds her world once again turned upside down as Pictish raiders harry the shores of her kingdom. Rallying her people once more, she must face her most dangerous foe yet, the Queen of the Picts. Ruthless and cunning, the Pictish Queen turns the Welsh against each other in a bloody civil war. All the while Branwen is heavy with child, and finds her young son’s footsteps dogged by a mysterious assassin who eerily resembles her dead first husband, the Hammer King. In the murky world of courtly intrigue, Queen Branwen must continually discern friend from foe at her own peril in the ever-shifting alliances of the independent Welsh kingdoms. Branwen must somehow defeat the Picts and save her people before the Pictish Queen and the assassin destroy their lives from the inside out. Just as the Saxons threatened Branwen’s kingdom from the landward side of her realm in Between Two Fires, now the Picts threaten her domain from sea in this thrilling sequel. But she soon finds that the enigmatic Picts are unlike any foe she has faced before. Mark Noce bases his novel on primary sources, as well as myths and legends that help bring the Dark Ages to life. Set in a time and era in which very little reliable written records or archeological remains have survived, the characters and some of the place names are fictional, but the physical environment, the historical details, and the saga of the Welsh people is very real. This continuation of Branwen's story combines elements of mystery and romance with Noce's gift for storytelling.

This book discusses performance-based seismic and wind-resistant design for high-rise building structures, with a particular focus on establishing an integrated approach for performance-based wind engineering, which is currently less advanced than seismic engineering. This book also provides a state-of-the-art review of numerous methodologies, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), extreme value analysis, structural optimization, vibration control, pushover analysis, response spectrum analysis, modal parameter identification for the assessment of the wind-resistant and seismic performance of tall buildings in the design stage and actual tall buildings in use. Several new structural optimization methods, including the augmented optimality criteria method, have been developed and employed in the context of performance-based design. This book is a valuable resource for students, researchers and engineers in the field of civil and structural engineering.

Selected, peer reviewed papers from the 4th International Conference on Advanced Engineering Materials and Technology (AEMT 2014), June 14-15, 2014, Xiamen, China

The Structural Defects Reference Manual for Low-Rise Buildings has been written to assist professionals and students involved in building construction to identify causes of structural failure. Each chapter carefully addresses design, materials and workmanship factors which contribute to structural defects. The main structural elements - roofs, wall

Sustainable development of smart cities infrastructures is of paramount importance and need to be planned, designed, constructed, operated and de-commissioned in a manner that ensures economic, social, environmental and institutional sustainability over the entire infrastructure life cycle. Smart cities infrastructure however be cost effective, disaster resilient, environmentally friendly, conserving natural resources, and sustainable ensuring faster delivery of quality and durable structures which include roads, building, bridges, energy and water infrastructures. Government of India is going to encourage Public Private Partnership (PPP) as an alternate option to build most of the infrastructures, which can be useful both for green-field as well as brown-field smart cities projects. The present book is a collection of contributed research and review papers presented at the ‘National Conference on Sustainable Development of Smart Cities Infrastructure’ (SDSCI-2023) held at National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra in May 2023.The subject matter is grouped into nine sessions which include research articles pertaining to sustainable development of smart cities, urban and rural planning, transportation, built environment and management, sustainable and smart technologies, materials, construction and maintenance, advance modelling, characterization of structures, energy and environment, performance of smart cities infrastructure under extreme loading conditions, green buildings, structural health monitoring, and ICT in smart cities, data mining and machine learning for sustainable infrastructure, GIS and remote sensing, future trends and prospects of smart cities, innovative technologies, building energy and efficiency and sobriety, and sustainable resilience to natural and man-made disasters, and smart materials, etc. The book would be a valuable reference for researchers, students, structural designers, site engineers, and all related engineers involved in the field of sustainable development of smart cities infrastructure.

A literature survey and state-of-the-art study was complied using 233 primary source documents, research papers, and texts. Over 800 documents were scanned to arrive at the primary source documents. The problem of structural deflections is discussed and reviewed in its component areas of static and dynamic deflections as related to forcing functions and structural characteristics. Also the interactions of major structural dflections with building structures subsystems and human occupants is reviewed. Emphasis is placed on serviceability limit states of deflections. Detailed comparisons of human response to structural vibrations are also made. The report is broad in scope and covers the areas of analysis, design and experimentation. (Author).