Things weren't right in the little kingdom of Maggiar, so the princes Bogdan and Tamas set off to seek an answer to the kingdom's troubles in the world over the mountain, a world they knew only from legends. But that glorious place was great no more. The goblins had declared war, and no one--especially not visitors were safe from the raging battles, the darkest sorcery, and the evil that roamed the land

King Jorian was rather attached to his head. Hence, he felt his promise to steal the Kist of Avlen, a treasure trove of ancient manuscripts containing magical lore, was a small enough price to pay for a chance to escape his own beheading. But when the quest pitted him against one peril after another - a murderous wizard and his giant squirrel, a castle full of executioners, a marauding troupe of ape men, and a voluptuous 500-year-old princess who was also a serpent - Jorian began to wonder whether he'd made such a good bargain

This highly stylized novel tells the story of one very fractured family from the southernmost tip of India. Here is an unhappy family unhappy in its own way, and through flashbacks and flashforwards The God of Small Things unfolds the secrets of these characters' unhappiness. First-time novelist Arundhati Roy twists and reshapes language to create an arresting, startling sort of precision. The average reader of mainstream fiction may have a tough time working through Roy's prose, but those with a more literary bent to their usual fiction inclinations should find the initial struggle through the dense prose a worthy price for this lushly tragic tale. Rahel and Estha are fraternal twins whose emotional connection to one another is stronger than that of most siblings: Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities. Now, these years later, Rahel has a memory of waking up one night giggling at Estha's funny dream. She has other memories too that she has no right to have. Their childhood household hums with hidden antagonisms and pains that only family members can give one another. Blind Mammachi, the twins' grandmother and founder of Paradise Pickles & Preserves, is a violin-playing widow who suffered years of abuse at the hands of her highly respected husband, and who has a fierce one-sided Oedipal connection with her son, Chacko. Baby Kochamma, Rahel and Estha's grandaunt, nurses deep-seated bitterness for a lifetime of unrequited love, a bitterness that plays out slyly against everyone in the family; in her youth she fell in love with an Irish Roman-Catholic priest and converted to his faith to win him, while he eventually converted to Hinduism. Chacko, divorced from his English wife and separated from his daughter since her infancy, runs the pickle factory with a capitalist's hand, self-deluding himself all the while that he is a Communist at heart even as he flirts with and beds his female employees. Ammu, the twins' mother, is a divorcee who fled her husband's alcoholism and impossible demands, a woman with a streak of wildness that the children sense and dread and that will be her and her family's undoing. The family's tragedy revolves around the visit of Chacko's ex-wife, widowed by her second husband, and his daughter, Sophie Mol. It is within the context of their visit that Estha will experience the one horrible thing that should never happen to a child, during their visit that Ammu will come to love by night the man the children love by day, and during their visit that Sophie Mol will die. Her death, and the fate of the twins' beloved Untouchable Velutha, will forever alter the course of the lives of all the members of the family, sending them each off on spinning trajectories of regret and pain. The story reveals itself not in traditional narrative order, but in jumps through time, wending its way through Rahel's memories and attempts at understanding the hand fate dealt her family. The God of Small Things has been favorable reviewed all over the place, generating a lot of excitement in the current literary establishment. What you think of it will depend heavily on your opinion of Roy's prose style – is it ostentatious, or is it brilliant? Whether or not you fall in love with her style, the truth of the heartbreaking story she tells and the lovable/hate-able characters who people it make this novel an experience not to be missed

In Laurie R. King's latest Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes mystery, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author delivers a thriller of ingenious surprises and unrelenting suspense – as the famous husband and wife sleuths are pursued by a killer immune from the sting of justice. It began as a problem in one of Holmes' beloved beehives, led to a murderous cult, and ended – or so they'd hoped – with a daring escape from a sacrificial altar. Instead, Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, have stirred the wrath and the limitless resources of those they've thwarted. Now they are separated and on the run, wanted by the police, and pursued across the Continent by a ruthless enemy with powerful connections. Unstoppable together, Russell and Holmes will have to survive this time apart, maintaining tenuous contact only by means of coded messages and cryptic notes. With Holmes' young granddaughter in her safekeeping, Russell will have to call on instincts she didn't know she had. But has the couple already made a fatal mistake by separating, making themselves easier targets for the shadowy government agents sent to silence them? From hidden rooms in London shops and rustic forest cabins to rickety planes over Scotland and boats on the frozen North Sea, Russell and Holmes work their way back to each other while uncovering answers to a mystery that will take both of them to solve. A hermit with a mysterious past and a beautiful young female doctor with a secret, a cruelly scarred flyer and an obsessed man of the cloth, Holmes' brother, Mycroft, and an Intelligence agent who knows too much: Everyone Russell and Holmes meet could either speed their safe reunion or betray them to their enemies – in the most complex, shocking, and deeply personal case of their career

A widow’s New England peace is interrupted by her feelings for two brilliant men, one much younger and the other quite older — and the dilemma of choosing between them. At forty-three, Edith has lost a husband, and has children who have children of their own. Living in a large Vermont house, her days are spent idly reading and playing music. But all of this is to change when two candidates for her affection arrive on the scene. The first is thirty years her senior, a philosopher named Edwin with whom she enjoys an enriching intellectual friendship. The second, Jared, is twenty years her junior: a handsome scientist, he attracts Edith in mind and body. But even if Jared shares her passion, does he have enough life experience to know whether such a union is in his best interests? In this exquisite and probing examination of desire, contrasting passions come to a head

When Drake Ramsey gets an invitation he can't refuse to embark on a treasure hunt in India, little does he know that it will be a headlong rush into danger that will require all his wits to survive. A breakout novel in the tradition of Raise the Titanic and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Adventure listeners are sure to enjoy the third volume in the adventures of Drake Ramsey, written by a NY Times and USA Today best seller

Set in ancient Athens, The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies is the new book from the celebrated author of The Good Fairies of New York and the Kalix Werewolf series. This is Martin Millar at his best, gently poking fun while tugging at our heart strings, surprising us with sudden and sharp insights into the life of the outsider. It comes complete with a struggling playwright (a little-known bloke called Aristophanes), excess cavorting, an assortment of divinities, the odd Amazon and some truly execrable poetry. Fans of Kalix, here you will find no laudanum but a lot of drinking. No carnage, but plenty of intrigue and danger. And humour (of course). And a love story. And a few very troublesome phalluses. Praise for Martin Millar 'These mortals do keep on writing.' — The Goddess Athena 'It's not a bad book, I suppose.' The Poet Luxos (who might have given a more enthusiastic quote if Martin had let him write an introduction to the book LIKE HE PROMISED but unfortunately Martin is a prosaic soul with no true appreciation of lyric poetry) 'Is there any more wine?' — Aristophanes

What if, by the passing of just two events, Japan and Germany had won World War 2? The Goddess of Fortune is a work of speculative fiction in which alternate history is explored, and consequences examined. – Beautiful Louise, while only 24 years old, uses her intelligence, wiles, and body to dominate the so-called “stronger sex.” – Kaito Sasaki of the Bank of Tokyo, inspired by Lenin (“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency”), proves just that with his printing of U.S. 100 dollar bills. – The treachery of Hermann “Fatso” Goering is uncovered and his punishment is swift. – The duplicity of Roosevelt and his so-called Brains Trust is exposed and the doubts of the urbane gentleman, Henry Morgenthau, are made clear. As a work of historical fiction, Goddess reveals the private foibles, quirks, and lusts of the famous (and often rich) of the period. How could the end goals of the Axis come to fruition given these events? Goddess explores just how, and in doing so brings to light in imaginative prose the lives of historical figures we have only known from our history books. Prepare to reimagine history

An internationally best-selling debut novel about the life, marriage, and legacy of one of the greatest mathematicians of the last century. Princeton University 1980. Kurt Gödel, the most fascinating, though hermetic, mathematician of the twentieth century, has just died of anorexia. His widow, Adele, a fierce woman shunned by her husband’s colleagues because she had been a cabaret dancer, is now consigned to a nursing home. To the great annoyance of the Institute of Advanced Studies, she refuses to hand over Gödel’s precious records. Anna Roth, the timid daughter of two mathematicians who are part of the Princeton clique, is given the difficult task of befriending Adele and retrieving the documents from her. As Adele begins to notice Anna’s own estrangement from her milieu and starts to trust her, she opens the gates of her memory and together they travel back to Vienna during the Nazi era, Princeton right after the war, the pressures of McCarthyism, the end of the positivist ideal, and the advent of nuclear weapons. It is this epic story of a genius who could never quite find his place in the world, and the determination of the woman who loved him, that will eventually give Anna the courage to change her own life

The story of Don Vito Corleone, the head of a New York Mafia family, inspired some of the most successful movies ever. It is in Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” that Corleone first appears. As Corleone’s desperate struggle to control the Mafia underworld unfolds, so does the story of his family. The novel is full of exquisitely detailed characters who, despite leading unconventional lifestyles within a notorious crime family, experience the triumphs and failures of the human condition. Filled with the requisite valor, love, and rancor of a great epic, The Godfather is the definitive gangster novel

Even before you open the book, the stark red, white and black cover sparks the strains of Nino Rota's "The Godfather Waltz" begin playing in your mind. Mark Winegardner has been granted to task of writing a sequel to Mario Puzo's essential 1969 novel The Godfather, a novel which not only must pick up the story of that book, but must also fit the characters and situations Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, and others traced through three epic films. The result in The Godfather Returns. Perhaps most of Winegardner's readers will be more familiar with the films than with the novel, which followed several different characters, many of whom, such as Johnny Fontane or Lucy Mancini, are only peripheral to the films. Winegardner returns to Puzo's novel to follow several different characters. Taking a technique for the second film, however, he also moves through time to present Michael Corleone's story before the first film, between the first two films, and between the second and third films. Winegardner's decisions to fill in the blanks between the films is one of the weaknesses of The Godfather Returns. The films left out much of the empire building Michael had to do between them in his attempt to go legitimate. While Winegardner manages to add interesting layers of intrigue to Michaels' quest, and to the characters who surround him, the novel really works best when the characters are engaging in mafioso wheeling and dealing. One of the strengths of Puzo's work was the characters he made come to life, and Winegardner does an excellent job not only with the lives of Puzo's characters, but with his own. Just as Puzo eventually picked up the story of Santino's son, Vincent, in "The Godfather, Part III," Winegardner also elects to follow Santino's offspring, in this case his twin daughters, as they take their first steps at breaking from the family business. Fredo, a pivotal character in the first two films, is actually fleshed out in The Godfather Returns, in which Winegardner adds to the appetites he exhibits in the first films and gives a deeper look into his need to become his own man and gain his older brother's approval. The central character to the novel, however, is Nick Geraci, a member of the Corleone family who, Winegardner reveals, becomes the button man who killed Sal Tessio, his mentor. After proving his loyalty to the Corleones, it is clear that Geraci will eventually turn on the family as he tries to strike out on his own, setting up an eventual confrontation with Michael. Although it is clear Michael will be victorious, the cost of his victory helps build tension. In many ways, Winegardner manages to recapture the style and spirit of Puzo's original novel. Nevertheless, there is the feeling that something is missing from The Godfather Returns. Winegardner successfully captures every individual aspect of Puzo's work, whether in the original novel or the films, but there is a magic beneath it that is missing. Despite missing the Puzo magic, The Godfather Returns is a welcome reintroduction to the Corleone clan. Steven H Silver

On the edge of a war-weary and devastated galaxy, charismatic Lewis Orne makes planetfall on Hamal. His assignment: to detect any signs of latent aggression in this planet’s population. To his astonishment, he finds that his own latent extrasensory powers have suddenly blossomed, and he is invited to join the company of “gods” on this planet. And people place certain expectations on their gods…

IN THE RIVETING NEW COURTROOM THRILLER FROM #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR MICHAEL CONNELLY, LINCOLN LAWYER MICKEY HALLER DEFENDS A MURDER CASE IN WHICH THE VICTIM WAS HIS FORMER CLIENT. IS MICKEY TO BLAME? Mickey Haller gets the text “Call me ASAP—187,” and the California penal code for murder immediately gets his attention. Murder cases have the highest stakes and the biggest paydays, and they always mean Haller has to be at the top of his game. When Mickey discovers that the victim was a prostitute he once represented and thought he had rescued, he knows there is no way he’ll let this one go. The case is suddenly about more than the guilt or innocence of the defendant — it’s about finding out what happened to a woman he cared for, a woman who he learns was back in L.A. and back in the life. Far from saving her, Mickey might have been the one who put her in danger. Mickey must follow his gut instinct directly into a dangerous world of intrigue and double-dealing to get justice for both of his clients, living and dead. As he faces the “gods of guilt” — the jurors who will deliver the ultimate verdict — he’s forced to struggle with his personal demons for a shot at his own redemption. The Gods of Guilt shows once again why “Michael Connelly excels, easily surpassing even John Grisham in the building of courtroom suspense” (Los Angeles Times)

Beginning with John Carter's return to Barsoom (Mars) after a ten year hiatus — separated from his wife Dejah Thoris, his unborn child, and the Red Martian people of the nation of Helium, whom he has adopted as his own — John Carter materializes in the one place on Barsoom from which nobody is allowed to depart: the Valley Dor, the Barsoomian heaven

Only a few know the terrifying truth—an outcast Earth scientist, a rebellious alien inhabitant of a dying planet, a lunar-born human intuitionist who senses the imminent annihilation of the Sun. They know the truth—but who will listen? They have foreseen the cost of abundant energy—but who will believe? These few beings, human and alien, hold the key to the Earth’s survival

Rorqual Maru was a cyborg—part organic whale, part mechanized ship.and part god. She was a harvester—a vast plankton rake, now without a crop—abandoned by Earth Society when the seas died. So she selected an island for her grave hoping to keep her carcass visible for possible salvage. Although her long ear heard nothing, she believed that Man still lived in his Hive. If he should ever return to the sea she wanted to serve. She longed for the thrill of Man's bare feet touching the skin of her deck. She missed the hearty hails, the sweat and the laughter. She needed Man!

"Robert B. Parker has taken his place beside Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald".-The Boston Globe. *** This is the first Spenser book. Spenser is hired by a local university to recover a rare stolen manuscript and along the way gets embroiled with campus politics and murder

21st century Orange County, CA is full of designer drugs, freeways that glide and soar. It's a mass-culture, video-saturated world for Jim McPherson who is adrift in society. He lives his life through dreams of the past. Dennis, his dad, is an aerospace engineer involved in military research, a fact that Jim ignores -- until he becomes a minor urban terrorist out of boredom. Father and son, separate for so long, are finally on a collision course

Ruth was sitting rigidly, white-faced; Gregor tried the door handles; the doors were locked! Ahead, the edge of the cliff was coming closer and closer as the heavy car picked up momentum, the deep ruts of the worn dirt road keeping the wheels locked on their inevitable juggernaut course, the sea below frothing over rocks beneath a sheer drop. Suddenly Gregor leaned back in his seat, raising his two feet, jamming his shoes through the glass that divided the empty front seat from the enclosed rear; a moment later he had forced himself through the shards of broken glass still embedded in the frame, unaware either of the ripping of his clothes or the shredding of his skin as he slithered on his stomach across the seat and under the dashboard, pulling with all his force on the emergency brake. The car responded slowly, as if resenting this interference with its unexpected freedom, swaying from side to side as its great weight seemed determined to overcome the demands of the tightening brake bands. Gregor blanked his mind to the thought of the approaching cliff, or of Ruth sitting petrified and frightened in the rear of the car; he gritted his teeth and pulled on the emergency brake with all his power

Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work. The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even appending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text — but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise

This Halcyon Classics ebook collection contains fifty science fiction short stories and novellas by more than forty different authors. Most of the stories in this collection were published during the heyday of popular science fiction magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s. Included within this work are stories by H. Beam Piper, Murray Leinster, Poul Anderson, Mack Reynolds, Randall Garrett, Robert Sheckley, Stanley Weinbaum, Alan Nourse, Harl Vincent, and many others. This collection is DRM free and includes an active table of contents for easy navigation

Рассказ вошёл в сборники: The Golden Apples of the Sun (Золотые яблоки солнца) R Is For Rocket (Р — значит ракета) The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)

Ostap Bender, the "grand strategist," is a con man on the make in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. He’s obsessed with getting one last big score—a few hundred thousand will do—and heading for Rio de Janeiro, where there are "a million and a half people, all of them wearing white pants, without exception." When Bender hears the story of Alexandr Koreiko, an "undercover millionaire"—no Soviet citizen was allowed to openly hoard so much capital—the chase is on. Koreiko has made his millions by taking advantage of the wide-spread corruption and utter chaos of the NEP, all while serving quietly as an accountant at a government office and living on 46 rubles a month. He's just waiting for the Soviet regime to collapse so he can make use of his stash, which he keeps hidden away in a suitcase. Teaming up with two petty criminals and a hopelessly naïve driver, Bender leads his merry band of mischief makers on a raucously hilarious jaunt across the "wild west" of the early Soviet Union. One of the true classics of Russian literature, this new translation of The Golden Calf—the first complete translation of the novel—restores the absurd, manic energy of the original and reaffirms the judgment of the Soviet censors, who said: "You have a very nice hero, Ostap Bender. But really, he's just a son of a bitch."

For two years, Oriana Paredes has been a spy among the social elite of the Golden City, reporting back to her people, the sereia, sea folk banned from the city’s shores....  When her employer and only confidante decides to elope, Oriana agrees to accompany her to Paris. But before they can depart, the two women are abducted and left to drown. Trapped beneath the waves, Oriana’s heritage allows her to survive while she is forced to watch her only friend die.  Vowing vengeance, Oriana crosses paths with Duilio Ferreira—a police consultant who has been investigating the disappearance of a string of servants from the city’s wealthiest homes. Duilio also has a secret: He is a seer and his gifts have led him to Oriana.  Bound by their secrets, not trusting each other completely yet having no choice but to work together, Oriana and Duilio must expose a twisted plot of magic so dark that it could cause the very fabric of history to come undone

A world that exists in the shadow of our own… the thrilling conclusion to John Twelve Hawks's Fourth Realm trilogy, The Golden City is packed with the knife-edge tension, intriguing characters, and startling plot twists that made The Traveler and The Dark River international hits. John Twelve Hawks's previous novels about the mystical Travelers and the Brethren, their ruthless enemies, generated an extraordinary following around the world. The Washington Post wrote that The Traveler 'portrays a Big Brother with powers far beyond anything Orwell could imagine…' and Publishers Weekly hailed the series as 'a saga that's part A Wrinkle in Time, part The Matrix and part Kurosawa epic.' Internet chat rooms and blogs have overflowed with speculation about the final destiny of the richly imagined characters fighting an epic battle beneath the surface of our modern world. In The Golden City, Twelve Hawks delivers the climax to his spellbinding epic. Struggling to protect the legacy of his Traveler father, Gabriel faces troubling new questions and relentless threats. His brother Michael, now firmly allied with the enemy, pursues his ambition to wrest power from Nathan Boone, the calculating leader of the Brethren. And Maya, the Harlequin warrior pledged to protect Gabriel at all costs, is forced to make a choice that will change her life forever. A riveting blend of high-tech thriller and fast-paced adventure, The Golden City will delight Twelve Hawks's many fans and attract a new audience to the entire trilogy

In a landmark epic of fantasy and storytelling, Philip Pullman invites readers into a world as convincing and thoroughly realized as Narnia, Earthsea, or Redwall. Here lives an orphaned ward named Lyra Belacqua, whose carefree life among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College is shattered by the arrival of two powerful visitors. First, her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, appears with evidence of mystery and danger in the far North, including photographs of a mysterious celestial phenomenon called Dust and the dim outline of a city suspended in the Aurora Borealis that he suspects is part of an alternate universe. He leaves Lyra in the care of Mrs. Coulter, an enigmatic scholar and explorer who offers to give Lyra the attention her uncle has long refused her. In this multilayered narrative, however, nothing is as it seems. Lyra sets out for the top of the world in search of her kidnapped playmate, Roger, bearing a rare truth-telling instrument, the compass of the title. All around her children are disappearing—victims of so-called "Gobblers"—and being used as subjects in terrible experiments that separate humans from their daemons, creatures that reflect each person's inner being. And somehow, both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are involved. The Golden Compass forms the first part of a story in three volumes. The first volume is set in a universe like ours, but different in many ways. The second volume is set partly in the universe we know. The third volume will move between the universes

Circe Quinn goes to sleep at home and wakes up in a corral filled with women wearing sacrificial virgin attire - and she is one of them. She soon finds out that she’s not having a wild dream, she’s living a frightening nightmare where she’s been transported to a barren land populated by a primitive people and in short order, she’s installed very unwillingly on her white throne of horns as their Queen. Dax Lahn is the king of Suh Tunak, The Horde of the nation of Korwahk and with one look at Circe, he knows she will be his bride and together they will start The Golden Dynasty of legend. Circe and Lahn are separated by language, culture and the small fact she’s from a parallel universe and has no idea how she got there or how to get home. But facing challenge after challenge, Circe finds her footing as Queen of the brutal Korwahk Horde and wife to its King, then she makes friends then she finds herself falling in love with this primitive land, its people and especially their savage leader

Over the years, the Donna Leon's best-selling Commissario Guido Brunetti series has conquered the heart of lovers of finely-plotted character-driven mysteries all over the world. Brunetti, both a perceptive sleuth and a principled family man, has exposed readers to Venice in all its aspects: its history, beauty, architecture, seasons, food and social life, but also the crime and corruption that seethe below the surface ofLa Serenissima.  InThe Golden Egg,as the first leaves of autumn begin to fall, Brunetti's ambitious boss, Patta, asks him to look into a seemingly insignificant violation of public vending laws by a shopkeeper, who happens to be the future daughter-in-law of the Mayor. Brunetti, who has no interest in helping Patta enrich his political connections, has little choice but to ask around to see if the bribery could cause a scandal.  Then, Brunetti's wife Paola comes to him with an unusual request of her own. The deaf, mentally disabled man who worked at their dry-cleaners has died of a sleeping-pill overdose, and Paola's kind heart can't take the idea that he lived and died without anyone noticing him, or helping him.  To please her, Brunetti begins to ask questions. He is surprised when he finds that the man left no official record: no birth certificate, no passport, no driver's license, no credit cards. The man owns nothing, is registered nowhere. As far as the Italian government is concerned, the man never existed. It is even more surprising because, with his physical and mental handicaps, both he and his mother were entitled to financial support from the state. And yet, despite no official record of the man's life, there is his body.  Stranger still, the dead man's mother is reluctant to speak to the police and claims that her son's identification papers were stolen in a burglary. As clues stack up, Brunetti suspects that the Lembos, a family of aristocratic copper magnates, might be somehow connected to the death. But could anyone really want this sweet, simple-minded man dead?  Donna Leon's Brunetti series has gotten better and better in recent years, with countless reviews praising her remarkable ability to keep the books fresh, the depths of feeling genuine. This story of a troubled life is undoubtedly one of her most touching, emotionally powerful books, a standout for the series

The second in the thrilling new fantasy series, from the author of the bestselling Assassin trilogy. Fitz has succeeded in rescuing Prince Dutiful from the clutches of the Piebald rebels, and has returned with him to Buckkeep castle. With Dutiful safe again, Queen Kettricken can proceed with plans to marry him to the Outislander princess, Elliania. However, with tensions building among the peoples of the Six Duchies over Kettricken's tolerance of the Wittted, even Buckkeep is no longer safe. A reluctant Fitz is assigned to protect the young prince, and also train him in the Skill, and in doing so he finally makes contact not only with his estranged daughter, Nettle, but with someone in Buckkeep who may possess a greater Skill talent even than Fitz. And who may represent a terrible threat to the Farseers. Meanwhile, Elliania arrives and, before she will accept Prince Dutiful's betrothal, challenges him to undertake an impossible quest. He must kill a legendary Outislander dragon

A tense and nerve-shattering classic from the highly acclaimed master of action and suspense. A ROLLING FORT KNOX is how the journalists describe the Presidential motorcade as it enters San Francisco across the Golden Gate. Even the ever-watchful FBI believe it is impregnable – as it has to be with the President and two Arab potentates aboard. But halfway across the bridge the unthinkable happens. Before the eyes of the world a master criminal pulls off the most spectacular kidnapping in modern times…

Uncle Slater O’Shea was loaded. Uncle Slater was supporting the lot of them — five freeloaders. And in spite of liberal daily applications of whisky, Uncle Slater had his health. He intended to keep it, so he had made a new will. So long as he continued to enjoy life, he would continue to maintain them. But the minute he died, his estate would be cut up among them, plus seventeen additional assorted O’Sheas. Cut up into twenty-two pieces, the freeloaders wouldn’t get enough from Uncle Slater O’Shea’s estate to live in the manner to which they had become accustomed. Several weeks later, benevolently trailing a fragrant haze of good Irish whisky behind him, Uncle Slater went upstairs for a nip and a nap. He never came down. Which of them had been foolish enough to do the old boy in?

This riveting novel of adventure is based on a true story, one of the most daring hijacking exploits in recent history, which, despite the conviction of over a score of men and women for alleged complicity, continues to baffle both the Italian police and Interpol. When the Allies landed in Italy during the last war, Mussolini’s vast personal treasure, consisting of four tons of gold, millions in currency and jewels, and some of the most important Government archives, was moved north in a German S.S. convoy. As the convoy neared the Liguarian coast, it vanished. It has never been recovered. Desmond Bagley has cleverly reconstructed this coup and devised an ingenious fiction about the treasure’s fate and an attempt, years afterwards, by a group of men in the know to get hold of it and smuggle it out of Italy. For this purpose, a successful Cape Town boat-builder designs an ocean-going yacht and sails to the Mediterranean, aided and abetted by a South African, and an Englishman, both former P.O.W.’s in Italy. Between them, they have evolved a technically ingenious plan. To reach the treasure proves difficult enough; to get it out of Italy and dispose of it is even worse, especially since the Italian Government, a group of former partisans led by a ruthless and beautiful Contessa, and a piratically inclined British smuggler are all hot on the trail. The fate of the yacht and her crew is charted with breathtaking skill and suspense, and without revealing the outcome, it can be safely said that Desmond Bagley’s sea chase across the Mediterranean puts him straight into the great narrative tradition of those who write of small boats on big seas

Ian MacLeod’s novel, The Golden Wheel, is just out from Harcourt Brace, and his short story collection, Voyages by Starlight, will be out soon from Arkham House. In a departure in style and setting from his previous Asimov’s tales, Mr. MacLeod takes us to an eerie time and place for a terrifying glimpse of… The Golden Keeper