ContentsIllustrationsIntroductionChildhoodWhat Do Little Princesses Dream Of?The King of PrussiaHoly RussiaPeter the GreatPeter's SuccessorsElizabethThe Child of KielElizabeth & Her NephewCinderella at CourtSophiaYoung Love & Court IntrigueThe Grand Duchess CatherineJourney to Kiev, Family & Other TroublesA CatastropheTheir Imperial HighnessesThe WeddingThe NewlywedsPolitics & PlayRussiaThe CourtTroubles for the Grand Duke & DuchessThe Apprentice YearsLove & Reasons of StateThe Succession EnsuredPaul PetrovichLove & PoliticsAn Odd CoupleNew ThreatsThe Turning PointLove & ConspiracyMock EmperorThe Coup d'Etat of June 1762Assassination of the EmperorShe Who Would ReignThe New EmpressThe Faithful ServantsThe Neglected LoverThe EmpressThe PeoplePrivate Life of an EmpressMother & GrandmotherThe SovereignThe Semiramis of the NorthThe Empress DiesConclusionChronological TableGenealogical TableNote on the Princess of Anhalt-ZerbstBibliographyNotes & References

    When Victor is propositioned by the woman of his dreams, he knows it’s too good to be true. She offers him the perfect job, a prosperous future, and, best of all, when her tongue is in his mouth, she tastes like strawberries. But it isn’t long before Victor realizes that to keep these prizes, he must keep his client—currently in the clink for murder—from spilling the truth about what really happened the night of the killing. Is Victor ready to be bought? Hell yes. But not until he learns the truth. Someone is being protected, and Victor intends to find out who’s worth all the fuss. Because Victor Carl is willing to sell his soul, sure, especially for a bite of strawberry, but only if the price is right.

    Armentrout returns to the world of the Lux with The Burning Shadow, the steamy, shocking second installment of the Origin series that will leave readers reeling. Download a FREE sneak peek today!When Evelyn Dasher crossed paths with Luc, she was thrown headfirst into the world of the Lux—only to discover that she was already far more involved in their world than she ever suspected.Because the Luxen aren’t the only ones with a hidden past. There’s a gap in Evie’s memory, lost months of her life and a lingering sense that something happened, something she can’t remember and nobody is willing to tell her. She needs to find out the truth about who she is—and who she was. But every answer she finds only brings up more questions.Her search for the truth brings her ever closer to Luc, the Origin at the center of it all. He’s powerful, arrogant, inhumanly beautiful, extremely dangerous…and possibly in love with her. But even as Evie falls for him, she can’t help but wonder if his attraction is to her, or to the memory of a girl who no longer exists.And all the while, a new threat looms: reports of a flu-like, fatal virus that the government insists is being spread by Luxen. A horrifying illness that changes whoever it touches, spreading panic across a country already at its breaking point.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    He was a private investigator who had "decided to go from crooked to slightly bent," turning down the shady but lucrative work that New York's thugs and mobsters had long brought to his door. In "Karma," Walter Mosley tells us the story of the moment McGill decided to change his ways, when a seemingly classic femme fatale forced him to confront the reality of his life of corruption and betrayal. It was the culmination of a dark and tragic case that reached back through McGill's entire career, plumbing the full, complex history of the soul-scarred figure now hailed as "a poignantly real character . . . [and] a more than worthy successor to Philip Marlowe." (The Boston Globe) Originally published in Otto Penzler's anthology Dangerous Women, "Karma" was included in Best American Mystery Stories 2006, edited by Scott Turow.

    

    

    Set upon by kidnappers on horseback, the boy is stolen and the count wounded. Beautiful, musical and sheltered, Antonina is at first stunned and grief-stricken, then helpless as the count sickens and dies.Desperate, and surrounded by serfs and servants unsettled by the collapse of the old order, Antonina turns to Grisha, the estate steward, for help in getting her son back. He is a man of relentless competence and ambition, and she is drawn to his strength, unaware that he is both driven and crippled by secrets he hoped he'd left behind him in the land of his birth, Siberia. In her search for her lost boy, Antonina faces betrayals that are literally murderous, and finds strengths she had no idea she possessed as she wanders the crumbling halls of Angelkov, pitting her wits against people turned erratic and cruel. In the end, her fate, and the fate of her son, hangs on the way love can sometimes transform even the deepest of hatreds.

    Money and ego have turned the quest for art into a deadly business in which the superrich battle to possess the rarest and most beautiful objets d'art on Earth.  Sammu-ramat: Queen of Babylon. The first warrior queen in history, called by some the Whore of Babylon. Her golden death mask left a legacy of lust and violence to those who fought to possess it.  Madison Dupre: curator for the billion-dollar Piedmont collection. She fights for her career, her freedom--and her life--after she acquires the fifty-five-million-dollar golden mask of the long dead Babylonian queen.  Coby Lewis: an ex-Navy SEAL, who uses his frogman training to dive for sunken treasure. Madison knows she can't trust him… but she also can't resist him.  Abdul ibn Hussein: His father died protecting the golden mask from thieves. Abdul said that the mask was stolen when the Baghdad museum was looted as American troops entered the city. He also claims that Navy SEALs worked with Iraqis to loot the museum.  New York, London, Zurich, and Malaga are the venues as the heat is turned on Madison--and she goes on the run to clear her name and save her life.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Porphyry. One of the great classic novels of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

    Every summer he visits his grandmother in a dusty village overlooking the vast steppes. Here, during the warm evenings, they sit on Charlotte's narrow, flower-covered bacony and listen to tales from another time, another place: Paris at the turn of the century. She who used to see Proust playing tennis in Neuilly captivates the children with stories of Tsar Nicholas's visit to Paris in 1896, of the great Paris flood of 1910, of the death of French president Felix Faure in the arms of his mistress. But from Charlotte the boy also learns of a Russia he has never known, of famine and misery, of brutal injustice, of the hopeless chaos of war. He follows her as she travels by foot from Moscow half the way to Siberia; suffers with her as she tells of her husband - his grandfather - a victim of Stalin's purges; shudders as she describes her own capture by bandits, who brutalize her and left her for dead. Could all this pain and suffering really have happened to his gentle, beloved Charlotte? Mesmerized, the boy weaves Charlotte's stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. Yet, despite all the deprivations and injustices of the Soviet world, he like many Russians still feels a strong affinity with and "an indestructible love" for his homeland.

    Can she kick it and win back the love of her husband? Patrice, wealthy but damaged, wants another baby, but husband Jonty isn't interested in sex. Is it her imagination, or is he getting too close to the husband of one of her new friends? Carmen is living dangerously, determined to get pregnant by her cold, treacherous boyfriend. She doesn't see what is under her nose until it's nearly too late. Suzanne adores her sexy second husband, but is she neglecting him for her job? And has she realized what is happening to her teenage daughter? New best friends. Their friendship is about to be tested to the limit.

    In Driving a Hard Bargain, PI Kate Brannigan investigates a car theft with a twist. In The Road and the Miles to Dundee, a moving father-daughter relationship is remembered through Scottish songs.

    His novellas are celebrated as being in the tradition of great nineteenth-century Russian writing. In "Another Life," a woman suddenly widowed attempts to grasp the memory of her brilliant, erratic husband, and to understand their life together. "The House on the Embankment" is the story of an academic opportunist who rises to apparatchik but suffers the oppression of society, friends, and most of all his inability to make decisions.

    But after her father suddenly passed away, leaving none of his fortune behind, Eden forced herself to grow up and become practical. Step one was accepting a job at Camp Liberty, a summer camp for girls. Even a year after her world fell apart, Eden is still grappling with her new responsibilities—especially keeping the campers out of their neighbor’s apple orchard. Chase Elliot is overbearing, and very strict about trespassers. Eden is more than happy to stay out of his way, but soon she finds Chase bumping into her every chance he gets. Eden’s past relationship proved to be a sham, so she constantly brushes Chase off, but sometimes temptation is too hard to resist!The Best MistakeEx-model Zoe Fleming is now a hardworking single mom—and she wouldn’t have it any other way. She does need a tenant to help with the household expenses, and when she enlists for one, comfirmed bachelor J. Cooper McKinnon signs the lease. Handsome as he is, Zoe is too busy for romance, and even if she wasn’t, Coop is not the type of man she had in mind: a sports reporter who admits he doesn’t understand kids. Coop wasn’t planning on settling down anyway, and he certainly didn’t sign up to be a father, but the more time he spends getting to know Zoe and her son, Keenan, the more he can picture their future as a family. If only he can convince Zoe he’s finally ready to commit…