No one knows how Faye's great-great-grandmother Cally, a newly freed slave barely out of her teens, came to own Joyeuse in the aftermath of the Civil War. No one knows how her descendants hung onto it through Reconstruction, world wars, the Depression, and Jim Crow, but Faye has inherited the island plantation--and the family tenacity. When the property taxes rise beyond her means, she sets out to save Joyeuse by digging for artifacts on her property and the surrounding National Wildlife Refuge and selling them on the black market. A tiny bit of that dead glory would pay a year's taxes. A big valuable chunk of the past would save her home forever.But instead of potsherds and arrowheads, she uncovers a woman's shattered skull, a Jackie Kennedy-style earring nestled against its bony cheek. Faye is torn. If she reports the forty-year-old murder, she'll reveal her illegal livelihood, thus risking jail and the loss of Joyeuse. She doesn't intend to let that happen, so she probes into the dead woman's history , unaware that the past is rushing up on her like a hurricane across deceptively calm Gulf waters. Because the killer is still close at hand, ready to kill again to keep his secrets dead and buried.

    On arrival, her friend puts off their meeting and then disappears. After Lara witnesses a brazen robbery of a valuable statue of the ancient Mayan civilization and stumbles on a corpse in a museum of antiquities, she becomes a police suspect. Afraid of the police and unsure whom to trust, Lara follows clues pointing to black marketeers and zealous revolutionaries. This dangerous trail takes her to remote archaeological ruins, lush jungles, and bustling streets filled with revelers. Lara engages in a thrilling battle of wits and courage to unmask a killer and stop a tomb-robber in the shadowy world of Xibalba, the Lords of Death.@71, 330 words

    I knew what it meant, that clasp and the mischievous grateful glance that accompanied it: it meant I was thanked, that there were secrets here. I could accept that. I too had secrets - who doesn't?Sent abroad to Egypt in 1922 to recover from the typhoid that killed her mother, eleven-year-old Lucy is caught up in the intrigue and excitement that surrounds the obsessive hunt for Tutankhamun's tomb. As she struggles to comprehend an adult world in which those closest to her are often cold and unpredictable, Lucy longs for a friend she can love. When she meets Frances, the daughter of an American archaeologist, her life is transformed. As the two girls spy on the grown-ups and try to understand the truth behind their evasions, a lifelong bond is formed. Haunted by the ghosts of her past, the mistakes she made and the secrets she kept, Lucy disinters her past, trying to make sense of what happened all those years ago in Cairo and the Valley of the Kings. And for the first time in her life, she comes to terms with what happened after Egypt, when Frances needed Lucy most.

    Brilliant and utterly breathtaking, Radasky’s is a powerful new voice in romance, fantasy, and historical fiction. Bravo!The Romans’ path of destruction jeopardizes a Caledonian clan unless they are able to strike a bargain with the Gods, which ultimately means a human sacrifice. Jahna is a member of this first century tribe. She has the power to merge minds, which she chooses to do with a twenty-first century woman, Aine MacRae and her contemporary, a young man Lovern, to whom she was hand-fasted in her time and of whom she shared a child, in order to save her people. In the name of the gods, Lovern was killed. Druids place his body in the sacred Black Lake, but through a visit from his ghost, Jahna sends their child away thus securing their bloodline. In the midst of madness, Jahna lives just long enough to reveal to Aine, her grief. Two thousand years later, in the year 2005, Aine is hoping to reestablish her career as an archaeologist and assists in the excavation in the Highlands of Scotland of a first century Caledonian chieftain’s tomb with fellow archaeologist, Marc Hunt. As the fates align, Jahna, guides Aine to one bronze bowl, then another, and when she is led by a ghost, Aine uncovers a two thousand year old man encased in a bog. As the circle goes unbroken, a heart’s chains are loosened and it is understood that Aine and Marc are able to rediscover their past love.

    He reveals 20-million-year-old quartzite tools discovered in the remains of extinct fauna in Argentina and other evidence of ancient pre-human cultures from which we are not descended. He traces the genesis of modern human civilization to Indonesia and the Central Pacific 75,000 years ago, launched by a catastrophic volcanic eruption that abruptly reduced humanity from two million to a few thousand individuals worldwide.Further investigating the evolutionary branches of humanity, he explores the mounting biological evidence supporting the aquatic ape theory--that our ancestors spent one or more evolutionary phases in water--and shows how these aquatic phases of humanity fall neatly into place within his revised timeline of ancient history. Examining the profound similarities of megaliths around the world, including Nabta Playa, Gobekli Tepe, Stonehenge, New Hampshire’s Mystery Hill, and the Japanese Oyu circles, the author explains how these precisely placed monuments of quartz were built specifically to produce altered states of consciousness, revealing the spiritual and technological sophistication of their Neolithic builders--a transoceanic civilization fractured by the cataclysmic effects of comets.Tying in his extensive research into Atlantis and Lemuria, Joseph provides a 20-million-year timeline of the rise and fall of ancient civilizations, both human and pre-human, the evolutionary stages of humanity, and the catastrophes and resulting climate changes that triggered them all--events that our relatively young civilization may soon experience.

    A vast and powerful alliance of thousands of farming hamlets and nearly 100 spectacular towns integrated the region through economic and religious ties, and the whole system was interconnected with hundreds of miles of roads. It took these Anasazi farmers more than seven centuries to lay the agricultural, organizational, and technological groundwork for the creation of classic Chacoan civilization, which lasted about 200 years--only to collapse spectacularly in a mere 40.Why did such a great society collapse? Who survived? Why? In this lively book anthropologist/archaeologist David Stuart presents answers to these questions that offer useful lessons to modern societies. His account of the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi brings to life the people known to us today as the architects of Chaco Canyon, the spectacular national park in New Mexico that thousands of tourists visit every year.

    Early excavators uncovered a clay-lined shaft containing layers of soil interspersed with wooden platforms, but when they reached a depth of ninety feet, water poured into the shaft and made further digging impossible.Since then the mystery of Oak Island’s “Money Pit” has enthralled generations of treasure hunters, including a Boston insurance salesman whose obsession ruined him; young Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and film star Errol Flynn. Perplexing discoveries have ignited explorers’ imaginations: a flat stone inscribed in code; a flood tunnel draining from a man-made beach; a torn scrap of parchment; stone markers forming a huge cross. Swaths of the island were bulldozed looking for answers; excavation attempts have claimed two lives. Theories abound as to what’s hidden on Oak Island—pirates’ treasure, Marie Antoinette’s lost jewels, the Holy Grail, proof that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays—yet to this day, the Money Pit remains an enigma.The Curse of Oak Island is a fascinating account of the strange, rich history of the island and the intrepid treasure hunters who have driven themselves to financial ruin, psychotic breakdowns, and even death in pursuit of answers. And as Michigan brothers Marty and Rick Lagina become the latest to attempt to solve the mystery, as documented on the History Channel’s television show The Curse of Oak Island, Sullivan takes readers along to follow their quest firsthand.

    Ruth Galloway is in her late thirties and lives happily alone with her two cats in a bleak, remote area near Norfolk, land that was sacred to its Iron Age inhabitants—not quite earth, not quite sea. But her routine days of digging up bones and other ancient objects are harshly upended when a child’s bones are found on a desolate beach. Detective Chief Inspector Nelson calls Galloway for help, believing they are the remains of Lucy Downey, a little girl who went missing a decade ago and whose abductor continues to taunt him with bizarre letters containing references to ritual sacrifice, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Then a second girl goes missing and Nelson receives a new letter—exactly like the ones about Lucy. Is it the same killer or a copycat murderer, linked in some way to the site near Ruth’s remote home?

    He’ll get his chance at all three in the first of John H. Cunningham’s thriller series, RED RIGHT RETURN. Set against the stunning scenery and freaky fabulousness of the Florida Keys, Cunningham joins the ranks of Carl Hiaasen, Randy Wayne White and Papa himself in a rich new series for thrill seekers everywhere.But Buck Reilly’s no ordinary hero. A product of his times and ours, too, he’s laying low and trying to fly under the radar in the aftermath of economic catastrophe. Back in his bad old days on Wall Street, Buck ran e-Antiquity, plundering the world’s treasures, (and a few of his investors’ pockets) for some pretty handsome profit. He wasn’t a bad guy back then, he just didn’t know any better. But life turned ugly when the market crashed, the company cratered and the FBI investigated the bankruptcy. When his marriage ended and his parents were killed in a car crash, Buck found out for certain that business wasn’t just business anymore.These days, Buck’s a lot like the rest of us—trying to make ends meet and hoping for better times. He operates Last Resort Charter and Salvage, flying a 1946 amphibious Grumman Widgeon, hunting for sunken treasure and taking on an occasional passenger, no questions asked. But when he faces down the dark forces of Santero priests, the underbelly of the Havana underworld and a pissed-off FBI agent, Buck has nothing but ingenuity, guts and his ancient flying boat to save his skin, and the lives he put in peril. For more information see: www.jhcunningham.com or find John on Facebook and Twitter.

    From north to south, east to west it cradles astonishing beauty. The human story here is a million years old, and counting. But the tolerant, easygoing peace we enjoy has been hard won. We have made and known the best and worst of times. We have been hero and villain and all else in between, and we have learned some lessons.The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places is Neil’s very personal account of what makes these islands so special, told through the places that have witnessed the unfolding of our history. Beginning with footprints made in the sand by humankind’s earliest ancestors, he takes us via Romans and Vikings, the flowering of religion, through civil war, industrial revolution and two world wars. From windswept headlands to battlefields, ancient trees to magnificent cathedrals, each of his destinations is a place where, somehow, the spirit of the past seems to linger. Beautifully written, his book is majestic, awe-inspiring, a kaleidoscopic history of a place with a story like no other.

    Before he dies in her arms, he gasps a few cryptic words about a vast conspiracy to hide an awesome historical artifact and tells Dilara that the only person who can help her is a decorated former Army combat engineer named Tyler Locke.Two days later, Locke is consulting on a North Atlantic oil platform when a ferry helicopter carrying Dilara suffers a mechanical failure and goes down next to the rig. With only minutes before the survivors freeze to death in the frigid waters, the quick-thinking Locke manages to rescue everyone on board, including Dilara. She tells him that the helicopter crash was no accident. Someone wants to stop her from finding Noah’s Ark.A second attempt on Dilara’s life convinces a skeptical Locke that there is truth to her story. When a movie star’s private jet crashes into the Mojave desert, it proves to be another link to the conspiracy. Locke and Dilara head to Arizona, and their investigation reveals a chilling discovery. A group of religious fanatics has recovered a weapon from the Ark that will let them recreate the effects of the biblical flood and mold the remnants of humanity according to their leader’s twisted vision.Now Locke and Dilara have just seven days to find the Ark and the secret hidden inside before it is used to wipe out civilization again…

    If they’d kept it a secret, fewer people would have died. When archaeologists uncover the largest ancient safe in the world, the wrong kinds of people will show up: criminals, mercenaries, treasure hunters. THEIR SECOND MISTAKE was opening it.Why would an ancient culture devote three generations to build a giant stone safe? Why would they bury it so the jungle could hide it from the world? Why ritually sacrifice one hundred thousand people to ensure its secrecy?THEIR LAST MISTAKE proved the biggest.This last mistake hurt the most. Their last mistake was to assume that nothing had been left behind to keep guard….Special note for Kindle format: PLAZA has an active table of contents, is approximately 90,000 words, and displays seamlessly with Kindles and all other eBook reading devices.

    It's 318 BC in the deserts of Libya, and Alexander the Great is buried as only a God should be, placed in a Crystal Sarcophagus in a catacomb of chambers, each packed with diamonds, rubies and gold. This was how he should have remained, but time waits for no-one. It's 2007 and underwater archaeologist Daniel Knox has been on the trail of Alexander's Gold ever since he can remember. When a tomb is uncovered on the construction site of a new hotel, Daniel believes he has found the clue to what he has been working towards for years. But the discovery has alerted two of the most dangerous men in the world, and Daniel is now a marked man.

    Urged to tell what he was seeing through the small opening he had cut in the door to the tomb, the Egyptologist famously replied, "I see wonderful things." Carter's fabulous discovery is just one of the many spellbinding stories told in Three Stones Make a Wall.Written by Eric Cline, an archaeologist with more than thirty seasons of excavation experience, Three Stones Make a Wall traces the history of archaeology from an amateur pursuit to the cutting-edge science it is today by taking the reader on a tour of major archaeological sites and discoveries, from Pompeii to Petra, Troy to the Terracotta Warriors, and Mycenae to Megiddo and Masada. Cline brings to life the personalities behind these digs, including Heinrich Schliemann, the former businessman who excavated Troy, and Mary Leakey, whose discoveries advanced our understanding of human origins. The discovery of the peoples and civilizations of the past is presented in vivid detail, from the Hittites and Minoans to the Inca, Aztec, and Moche. Along the way, the book addresses the questions archaeologists are asked most often: How do you know where to dig? How are excavations actually done? How do you know how old something is? Who gets to keep what is found?Taking readers from the pioneering digs of the eighteenth century to the exciting new discoveries being made today, Three Stones Make a Wall is a lively and essential introduction to the story of archaeology.

    Paul that could rewrite the history of the Church. What they discover is that an old journal, also stolen but little thought of, was the real object of the theft. An art preservationist, Rei begins to decipher clues in the journal, and finds that they lead to a treasure: the long lost throne of King Solomon. As they embark on a treasure hunt, following the Portuguese Spice Route through east Africa, the Middle East and into India, they must rely on letters from a long dead Jesuit priest. They must also keep one step ahead of the secret militant order that carried out the robbery and is after the same goal: the prize of a lifetime.Filled with fast paced action and having broad appeal, Solomon’s Throne is an ingenious adventure that sweeps the reader around the globe in a race against time.