January is shaping up to be one pulse-pounding thrill ride. Coming on the heels the latest Anniversary Day Saga novel release last week, A Murder of Clones, tomorrow marks the release of the latest Fiction River volume, and I promise it will make your heart race.

Pulse Pounders is a special volume for several reasons: The incredible Kevin J. Anderson served as guest editor for the volume, Pulse Pounders features an original, never-before-published story by the late Frank Herbert, we’ve again partnered with Kobo for an expanded Kobo Special Edition, and one more reason I’ll get to in a minute <grin>.

For those of you unfamiliar with Kevin J. Anderson’s background, he is a bestselling novelist with more than 125 novels published, but he has also spent time in the editing trenches. His three Star Wars anthologies (Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, Tales from Jabba’s Palace, and Tales of the Bounty Hunters) are the three bestselling science fiction anthologies of all time. He also created and edited War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches (alternate stories of H.G. Wells’s Martian invasion), and the humorous horror Blood Lite series for the Horror Writers of America, as well as the Five by Five military SF series and the Fantastic Holiday Season series for WordFire Press, the first of which won a Silver Award from the Independent Publishers Group.

As an author, Kevin has 54 national or international bestsellers and 23 million copies of his books in print. He wrote the new Dune series and the Hellhole trilogy with Brian Herbert, as well as numerous novels in the Star Wars, X-Files, Batman, and Superman universes. His original works include the SF epics The Saga of Seven Suns and The Saga of Shadows, the Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, and his popular series featuring Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.

Kevin has crafted a spectacular volume for us. Here’s the synopsis:

Starts with a bang.

Ends with a bang.

And a lot of bang in between.

Pulse Pounders. Ranging from straight thriller to science fiction, fantasy to pulp adventure, these stories make your heart race. Share the excitement as a woman held hostage in a chair has only a few minutes to escape; a man trapped in a time loop revisits a crisis point in the past; and a mother hunts after a psychotic lover who has stolen her child. These page-turners show why Adventures Fantastic says Fiction River “is one of the best and most exciting publications in the field today.”

The acclaim is already coming in for this incredible volume. For example, Publishers Weekly says, “A wide range of styles powers this anthology of genre-bending stories,” and adds that “fans of the unconventional will be well satisfied.”

And like Past Crime before it, Pulse Pounders has an expanded Kobo Special Edition available in ebook only through, you guessed it, Kobo. If you’re going to buy the ebook, that’s the one I’d recommend: Same price, three additional stories.

Now, I promised you there was one more special thing about Pulse Pounders. And it relates to the Anniversary Day Saga. You see, they’re tied together in more than just release date proximity. You see, one of the stories in Pulse Pounders, “Sole Survivor,” is a short story from Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Retrieval Artist Universe. In fact, that story has been incorporated into the seventh book in the saga, Starbase Human. So, if you have already blown through the pages of A Murder of Clones and can’t wait even a month for the next book, you can get a taste of what’s to come by reading this story in Pulse Pounders.

So, win, win, win, win.

Now, stop reading this and go pick up a copy of Pulse Pounders. I promise you won’t be sorry.

Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer.