Time for Cool Madness: Marble Grant

By Dean Wesley Smith

Six really, really, really whacked out Marble Grant stories. Ghosts Marble Grant and her partner Sims crawl around in people's heads to help solve problems.

Includes:

"Blind Date"

"That Old Tingling"

"A Lady in Heat"

"Whistle for Help"

"Obvious Creeper"

"Reluctant with Intent"

Nothing at all like a Marble Grant story. Solving puzzles, saving lives, drinking, and having sex. These two ghosts do it all while having far, far too much fun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201884208

Dean Wesley Smith

Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA Today bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith published far more than a hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds of short stories across many genres. At the moment he produces novels in several major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the Old West, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, a superhero series starring Poker Boy, and a mystery series featuring the retired detectives of the Cold Poker Gang. His monthly magazine, Smith’s Monthly, which consists of only his own fiction, premiered in October 2013 and offers readers more than 70,000 words per issue, including a new and original novel every month. During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, he wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown. Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing, where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as series editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series. For more information about Dean’s books and ongoing projects, please visit his website at www.deanwesleysmith.com and sign up for his newsletter.

Book preview

Time for Cool Madness

Time for Cool Madness

Six Crazy Marble Grant Stories

Dean Wesley Smith

WMG Publishing, Inc.

Contents

Introduction

Blind Date

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

That Old Tingling

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

A Lady in Heat

Introduction

A Lady In Heat

Whistle for Help

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Obvious Creeper

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Reluctant with Intent

Introduction

Reluctant with Intent

Also by Dean Wesley Smith

Newsletter sign-up

About the Author

Introduction

Six Really, Really Strange Marble Grant Stories

Marble Grant lives in the Poker Boy Universe. She started off as a superhero in real estate, living in Boise, and managed to get killed in a mugging on a blind date. She was then recruited as a ghost agent to try to help people. Soon after her death, she met another superhero, freshly dead as well, and turned into a ghost agent. They fell in love.

It was like instantly.

And as a team, their job is to crawl into people’s minds and help save the day. It seems kind of strange, but they do it so well.

In this collection, I wanted to include both the origin story of Marble Grant (Blind Date) and Sim’s origin story (That Old Tingling). Both also are the start of the Marble Grant novel The First Year because simply put, that is how the first year for Marble and Sims started.

But besides those two origin stories in this volume, there are four more very, very strange Marble Grant stories. I suppose calling a Marble Grant story strange is redundant. Sorry.

A Lady in Heat is about a really hot, beautiful woman who overdoses on Fremont Street and Marble and Sims manage to not have sex while trying to save her. Afterwards, maybe.

Whistle for Help has Marble and Sims getting angry at a guy who is wolf-whistling at women. Only he should have never been able to see them.

Obvious Creeper forces Marble and Sims to find a way to help out a really creepy pervert of a guy. Kind of uggy, but they manage.

And Reluctant with Intent forces Marble and Sims to figure out who killed who and who was just dreaming about killing the person. Strange things get mixed up when crawling around in other people’s heads.

This collection gives Marble Grant fans even more fun stories of the two ghosts living in Las Vegas and trying to help living people with their problems.

And be warned, Marble and Sims do a little drinking and have a little sex along the way. After all, it is Las Vegas.

—Dean Wesley Smith

Las Vegas, Nevada

Introduction

Dying on a first date sucks. Dying on a blind date sucks even worse.

Marble Grant, superhero, finds herself suddenly dead in a disgustingly smelly back alley and not catching a white-beam ride to the other side of whatever.

As a superhero, she knew about Ghost Agents. Never met one, but knew they existed.

She never heard of superheroes making the transition to Ghost Agent before, either.

The first story in a new and fun Ghost of a Chance series, where ghosts solve problems and help people. And look damn sexy in the process.

1

Dying on a first date sucks. Dying on a blind date sucks even worse.

Especially when your date dies with you. And then goes off through some tunnel of light into the next life or something, leaving you sitting alone, dead, in a dark alley, waiting for your own tunnel of light.

Hands down, the worst ending to any date in recorded history.

The alley we had been forced to go into was blacker than the inside of a latrine, and seeming how it smelled, I would have not been surprised to be in a latrine, but I knew I wasn’t since it seemed that being dead meant I could see just fine in the dark.

And smell just fine as well. Holy crap. The nearby Chinese restaurant garbage smelled like my fridge after six days of feeling sorry for myself and laying on the couch and eating take-out without taking out the uneaten food. And no telling how many homeless and drunks had used this alley for a bathroom.

I was sitting on a big green dumpster owned by a nearby office, so thankfully it didn’t have the odor of the other dumpsters coming up between my legs.

The scum with the greasy black hair and dirty ski parka that had killed us was going through my date’s pockets as I sat and watched.

The guy looked skinny and no doubt drug-addicted. His motions were jerky, his eyes darting around him like a rat trying to find a way out of a maze.

My blind date, dear old Handsome Bob, as I had started to think of him for the full thirty minutes I had known him, had caused this mess by thinking he could be a macho asshole or something.

The scum with the greasy black hair had approached us on the sidewalk and Bob had