Book picks similar to
The Tontine Part 2 Of 2 by Thomas B. Costain
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The Einstein Papers
Craig Dirgo - 1999
With the Chinese on the brink of unraveling a theory missing since Einstein's death -- is fabled Unified Field Theory, which would put them in possession of a weapon more devastating than any nuclear arsenal -- antiterrorist operative John Taft must act swiftly or the United States will soon be on the bottom rung of a new world order.
The House of Secrets
Brad Meltzer - 2016
He should know. Hazel's father is Jack Nash, the host of America's favorite conspiracy TV show, The House of Secrets.Even as a child, she loved hearing her dad's tall tales, especially the one about a leather book belonging to Benedict Arnold that was hidden in a corpse.Now, years later, Hazel wakes up in the hospital and remembers nothing, not even her own name. She's told she's been in a car accident that killed her father and injured her brother. But she can't remember any of it because of her own traumatic brain injury. Then a man from the FBI shows up, asking questions about her dad - and about his connection to the corpse of a man found with an object stuffed into his chest: a priceless book that belonged to Benedict Arnold.Back at her house, Hazel finds guns that she doesn't remember owning. On her forehead she sees scars from fights she can't recall. Most important, the more Hazel digs, the less she likes the person she seems to have been.Trying to put together the puzzle pieces of her past and present, Hazel Nash needs to figure out who killed this man - and how the book wound up in his chest. The answer will tell her the truth about her father, what he was really doing for the government - and who Hazel really is.Mysteries need to be solved. Especially the ones about yourself.
The Table of Less Valued Knights
Marie Phillips - 2014
The first was the Round Table, with King Arthur as companion and lord. The second, the Table of Errant Companions, were those who went seeking adventure and waited to become companions of the Round Table. Those of the third table never left court and did not go on quests or in search of adventures, either because of illness or because they lacked courage. These knights were called the Less Valued Knights.'Sir Humphrey du Val of the Table of Less Valued Knights - Camelot's least prestigious table, boringly rectangular in shape and with one leg shorter than the other so that it always has to be propped up with a folded napkin to stop it from rocking - has been banned by King Arthur from going on quests, and hasn't left the castle in fifteen years. He's tempted out of his imposed retirement by Elaine, who is looking for her kidnapped fiancé. She appears to be the classic damsel in distress, but turns out to have a big secret to hide.Across the border in Puddock, the new young queen, Martha, is appalled to be married off against her will to the odious Prince Edwin of Tuft. She disguises herself as a boy and runs away, but doesn't get very far before the Locum of the Lake - standing in for the full-time Lady - intercepts her with some startling news: Martha's brother, the true heir to the throne of Puddock, is not dead as she has always thought, and Martha must go on her own quest to find him.The two quests collide, entangling Humphrey, Elaine and Martha's lives, and introducing a host of Arthurian misfits, including a twelve-year-old crone, a magic sword with a mind of her own, a freakishly short giant, and not one but three men in iron masks.With Gods Behaving Badly Marie Phillips showed that she has a rare gift for comedy, taking familiar characters from legend and giving them an ingenious contemporary twist. In The Table of Less Valued Knights it's Thomas Malory's turn, and I'm afraid you'll never read him in quite the same way again.
Secrets We Left In Greece
Ian Wilfred - 2018
Every year, Miriam, her daughter, Heather, and young granddaughter Amy would spend the long summer holidays enjoying the picturesque scenery, visiting local landmarks and integrating with the local community. However, life had moved on, and now with Amy having grown up, married and set up her own business, Miriam suddenly decided to take her family back to this idyllic holiday location. This news brought back poignant memories for all three of them. Thoughts of love and romance combined with dilemmas, choices and a cocktail of emotions would force life to never be quite the same again. Is it always wise to revisit memorable locations? Should the past remain in the past? Learn how Miriam, Heather and Amy all confront their secret fears. Discover whether previous friendships and relationships stand the test of time. Add in the intriguing stories of newcomers whose lives intertwine with the family trio. and how events of the past, present and future merge to form unexpected outcomes.. A subtle blend of engaging, interesting characters, thoughtful life dilemmas with lessons learned makes ‘Secrets we left in Greece’ a compelling summer read.
Tomb of the Lost
Julian Noyce - 2011
In four parts.Tomb of the Lost is an action/adventure novel that spans 2300 years.Babylon, Persia 323bc.On a bed a man lays dying. Alexander the great, King, the Lion of Macedon has a mysterious fever. He became king at twenty, dying at thirty three, having conquered the known world. Following his death his General and friend Ptolemy takes the body and inters it into a magnificent tomb in Alexandria, Egypt. The very city Alexander founded.Two thousand three hundred years later and the leader of Germany Adolf Hitler who is a great collector of antiquities orders the sarcophagus, lost two thousand years before by Julius Caesar's legionaries, to be found and brought to Berlin.Hitler assigns a team of his Wehrmacht commanded by a General and his Colonel and a team of SS led by a fanatical Major to locate it.With their mission a success the Germans descend on the port town of Gabes, Tunisia just as the town is about to be over run by the British and as the battle for North Africa reaches its brutal climax the sarcophagus is lost once again leaving only one man alive to tell the tale.That man is Alfred Dennis.Nearly seventy years later and marine archaeologist Natalie Feltham and her team with the help of Peter Dennis, a journalist and grandson of Alfred Dennis, make the greatest discovery in modern archaeology.Now it's a race against time for Natalie and her team as dark powers from Germany's Nazi past try to take what is rightfully hers.
Drums Along the Khyber
Philip McCutchan - 1969
James Ogilvie is the third generation.Pitchforked with mixed feelings into imperial Britain’s elite military academy, Sandhurst, and then into the family regiment, he finds himself in 1894 a subaltern en route to India – a torrid journey out that teaches him the first lessons of military life and the command of men.His initiation is made more difficult by the vindictive attentions of the adjutant, Captain Black, and by the high expectations placed on him by his own irascible father, his Divisional Commander on the North West Frontier of India.Ogilvie gets his first taste of action when the Royal Strathspeys are sent through the Khyber Pass to contain the rebel Ahmed Khan outside Jalalabad. Fighting the border tribesmen brings brushes with death, but also many opportunities for the kind of glory that can forge a distinguished military career. But as the campaign goes on, Ogilvie also starts to doubt the entire Imperial project.‘Drums Along the Khyber’ is a thrilling historical adventure story, rich in period detail. It is the first in the Ogilvie series of novels by Philip McCutchan. ‘The adventure-writer succeeds who makes you read faster than you really can…Drums Along the Khyber has something of this quality’ – The Sunday Times Philip McCutchan (1920-1996) grew up in the naval atmosphere of Portsmouth Dockyard and developed a lifetime's interest in the sea. Military history was an early interest resulting in several fiction books, from amongst his large output, about the British Army and its campaigns, especially in the last 150 years.Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.
The Good Thief
Hannah Tinti - 2008
How it was lost is a mystery that Ren has been trying to solve for his entire life, as well as who his parents are, and why he was abandoned as an infant at Saint Anthony’s Orphanage for boys. He longs for a family to call his own and is terrified of the day he will be sent alone into the world. But then a young man named Benjamin Nab appears, claiming to be Ren’s long-lost brother, and his convincing tale of how Ren lost his hand and his parents persuades the monks at the orphanage to release the boy and to give Ren some hope. But is Benjamin really who he says he is? Journeying through a New England of whaling towns and meadowed farmlands, Ren is introduced to a vibrant world of hardscrabble adventure filled with outrageous scam artists, grave robbers, and petty thieves. If he stays, Ren becomes one of them. If he goes, he’s lost once again. As Ren begins to find clues to his hidden parentage he comes to suspect that Benjamin not only holds the key to his future, but to his past as well.
Ten O'Clock Horses
Laurie Graham - 2000
The first avocado pears are appearing at the greengrocer's, people are thinking about carpeting their lavatories and boxing in their banisters, and Ronnie Glover, housepainter, husband and father, is feeling the first vague stirrings of discontent with his life. Then, out of the blue, the fabulous, sophisticated (and married) Jacqueline bursts into his life and teaches him to tango. She seems to offer everything he ever dreamt of. But is it all too good to he true?
Redemption: The Further Adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer
Andrew Joyce - 2013
Huck Finn is a famous lawman not afraid to use his gun to protect the weak. He has come to right a terrible wrong. After his wife’s death, Tom Sawyer does not want to live anymore; he has come to die. The third man, the Laramie Kid, a killer Huck and Tom befriended years earlier has come to kill a man. For these three men Death is a constant companion. For these three men it is their last chance for redemption.
Plaguewalker
Gemma Tarlach - 2012
That is what they said. I was a conjure of night and fog, and the grave was the womb from which I emerged. Abandoned as a baby outside the cemetery gates and raised by the town's executioner, Marcus grows into a giant as unfeeling as Death.Traveling fanatics arrive in his Bavarian town bringing not the Word of God, but the Great Dying. As plague consumes his world, Marcus searches for his missing daughter.Following her tracks in the snow, he encounters the mad, the desperate, and the wicked-and a resourceful young child whose hope and resiliency infect him as the plague did not.Plaguewalker is a dark but ultimately redemptive historical novel set in Bavaria in the mid-fourteenth century and told from the perspective of its protagonist, the amoral executioner Marcus of Ansberg. As readers journey through a world upended by the plague, they will experience both the brutality of the period and the awakening of a conscience in a man who had believed himself damned."A stunning and thoroughly satisfying debut...A riveting, moving tale of atonement and reconciliation, redemption and salvation. The author's audacious choices-a fearsome executioner and expert in torture as point-of-view character and protagonist; the Black Death as catalyst for this same anguished man's evolution and deliverance-pay off in a page-turner of a book that's near-impossible to put down. Tarlach's feel for time and place is authentic and evocative, her language crisp and poetic, and her characterization spot-on: Marcus, stoic and struggling, is an effective, affecting narrator, while bold little Brenna wins the reader's heart right along with her protector's. All told, Plaguewalker is one of the best novels I've read in years."-Paul McComas, author of Unforgettable, Planet of the Dates, and Unplugged
At the Edge of the Orchard
Tracy Chevalier - 2016
They and their five children work relentlessly to tame their patch of land, buying saplings from a local tree man known as John Appleseed so they can cultivate the fifty apple trees required to stake their claim on the property. But the orchard they plant sows the seeds of a long battle. James loves the apples, reminders of an easier life back in Connecticut; while Sadie prefers the applejack they make, an alcoholic refuge from brutal frontier life.1853: Their youngest child Robert is wandering through Gold Rush California. Restless and haunted by the broken family he left behind, he has made his way alone across the country. In the redwood and giant sequoia groves he finds some solace, collecting seeds for a naturalist who sells plants from the new world to the gardeners of England. But you can run only so far, even in America, and when Robert's past makes an unexpected appearance he must decide whether to strike out again or stake his own claim to a home at last.Chevalier tells a fierce, beautifully crafted story in At the Edge of the Orchard, her most graceful and richly imagined work yet.
The Signature of All Things
Elizabeth Gilbert - 2013
Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker—a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father's money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma's research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction — into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian artist — but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life.Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, The Signature of All Things soars across the globe—from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam, and beyond. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. But most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who — born in the Age of Enlightenment, but living well into the Industrial Revolution — bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas. Written in the bold, questing spirit of that singular time, Gilbert's wise, deep, and spellbinding tale is certain to capture the hearts and minds of readers.
Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy Collection 4 Books Set (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl in the Spider's Web: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series)
Stieg Larsson
Description:- The Girl in the Spider's Web: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist have not been in touch for some time.Then Blomkvist is contacted by renowned Swedish scientist Professor Balder. Warned that his life is in danger, but more concerned for his son's well-being, Balder wants Millennium to publish his story - and it is a terrifying one.More interesting to Blomkvist than Balder's world-leading advances in Artificial Intelligence, is his connection with a certain female superhacker. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest Salander is plotting her revenge - against the man who tried to kill her, and against the government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. But it is not going to be a straightforward campaign. After taking a bullet to the head, Salander is under close supervision in Intensive Care, and is set to face trial for three murders and one attempted murder on her eventual release. The Girl Who Played with Fire Lisbeth Salander is a wanted woman. Two Millennium journalists about to expose the truth about sex trafficking in Sweden are murdered, and Salander's prints are on the weapon. Her history of unpredictable and vengeful behaviour makes her an official danger to society - but no-one can find her. Mikael Blomkvist, editor-in-chief of Millennium, does not believe the police.
Quest
Richard Ben Sapir - 1987
Leaving the Midwest for New York City, she seeks the help of Detective Artie Modelstein of the NYPD’s Frauds/Jewels Squad, hoping to recover the lost treasure and clear her father’s sullied name. But there are others on the trail of the missing saltcellar, and their interests lie not in the precious stones but in a secret hidden within. Suddenly, Claire and Artie have unwittingly become marked targets in a deadly game that has wound through the centuries like a poisonous snake—following a trail of death and terror from the ancient world to Elizabethan England, through the flames of world war to the present day—as a hunt for stolen jewels becomes a mythic quest that could change their world forever. Rich in action, color, and invention, an epic thriller that spans centuries, Richard Ben Sapir’s Quest is a stunning tale of adventure, love, mystery, and revelation.
The Ballad of John MacLea
A.J. MacKenzie - 2019
Tasked with routing out enemy agents and thwarting an elaborate espionage ring, which includes beautiful American double agent Josephine Lafitte, MacLea’s mission is betrayed. Now, trapped in a dramatic showdown aboard a captured American warship headed for the breach at Niagara Falls, battle-hardened MacLea finds himself fighting not just for freedom, but for his life.