1933: A homeless veteran is found dead under railway arches in Berlin, apparently killed by an army dagger. Gereon Rath is brought onto the case just as the Reichstag mysteriously burns down. Unsettled by the Nazis’ tightening grip, he and Charlotte Ritter must also contend with their political colleagues. The new Germany is frightening, but police work must go on even among book-burning and marching, rising paranoia and fear.
In the last years of the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, cutting a 60-mile wide swath of pillage and destruction. That event comes back in this magisterial novel. High school & older.
Kristina Douglas’s sexy new series introduces a realm of fallen angels and ruthless demons, where an eternal rebellion is brewing . . . and one unsuspecting woman can change the fate of the Fallen forever. She was just an ordinary mortal . . . “You’re dead” is so not what Allie Watson wants to hear. Unfortunately, it explains a lot. Like the dark, angelically handsome man who ferried her to this strange, hidden land. The last thing she remembers is stepping off a curb in front of a crosstown bus. Now she’s surrounded by gorgeous fallen angels with an unsettling taste for blood—and they really don’t want her around. Not exactly how she pictured heaven. . . . until death catapulted her into a seductive world she never imagined. Raziel is unsure why he rescued Allie from hellfire against Uriel’s orders, but she stirs in him a longing he hasn't felt in centuries. Now the Fallen are bracing for the divine wrath brought by his disobedience, and they blame Allie for the ferocious Nephilim clawing at the kingdom’s shrouded gates. Facing impossible odds at every turn, the two must work together to survive. Raziel will do anything to defend his spirited lover against the forces of darkness—because Allie may be the Fallen’s only salvation.
"This edgy fantasy doesn't just blur boundaries of genre, of gender, of past and present, life and death--it explodes them." --Cinda Williams Chima, New York Times bestselling author of the Seven Realms series and the Shattered Realms series. Without the dead, she'd be no one. Odessa is one of Karthia's master necromancers, catering to the kingdom's ruling Dead. Whenever a noble dies, it's Odessa's job to raise them by retrieving their soul from a dreamy and dangerous shadow world called the Deadlands. But there is a cost to being raised: the Dead must remain shrouded. If even a hint of flesh is exposed, a grotesque transformation begins, turning the Dead into terrifying, bloodthirsty Shades. A dramatic uptick in Shade attacks raises suspicions and fears around the kingdom. Soon, a crushing loss of one of her closest companions leaves Odessa shattered, and reveals a disturbing conspiracy in Karthia: Someone is intentionally creating Shades by tearing shrouds from the Dead--and training them to attack. Odessa is forced to contemplate a terrifying question: What if her magic is the weapon that brings the kingdom to its knees? Fighting alongside her fellow mages--and a powerful girl as enthralling as she is infuriating--Odessa must untangle the gruesome plot to destroy Karthia before the Shades take everything she loves. Perfect for fans of Three Dark Crowns and Red Queen, Reign of the Fallen is a gutsy, unpredictable read with a surprising and breathtaking LGBT romance at its core.
THE BASIS FOR THE INTERNATIONAL TV SENSATION BABYLON BERLIN "Cabaret on cocaine...captures the dark glamour of a briefly exhilarating time between the wars." --NPR Babylon Berlin is the first book in the international-bestselling series from Volker Kutscher that centers on Detective Gereon Rath caught up in a web of drugs, sex, political intrigue, and murder in Berlin as Germany teeters on the edge of Nazism. It’s 1929 and Berlin is the vibrating metropolis of post-war Germany—full of bars and brothels and dissatisfied workers at the point of revolt. Gereon Rath is new in town and new to the police department. When a dead man without an identity, bearing traces of atrocious torture, is discovered, Rath sees a chance to find his way back into the homicide division. He discovers a connection with a circle of oppositional exiled Russians who try to purchase arms with smuggled gold in order to prepare a coup d’état. But there are other people trying to get hold of the gold and the guns, too. Raths finds himself up against paramilitaries and organized criminals. He falls in love with Charlotte, a typist in the homicide squad, and misuses her insider’s knowledge for his personal investigations. And as he gets further entangled with the case, he never imagined becoming a suspect himself. “The first in a series that’s been wildly popular in Germany is an excellent police procedural that cleverly captures the dark and dangerous period of the Weimer Republic before it slides into the ultimate evil of Nazism.”—Kirkus Reviews “Conjures up the dangerous decadence of the Weimar years, with blood on the Berlin streets and the Nazis lurking menacingly in the wings.”—The Sunday Times (London) “James Ellroy fans will welcome Kutscher’s first novel and series launch, a fast-paced blend of murder and corruption sent in 1929 Berlin.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Like Ypres, Arras was a front line town throughout the Great War. From March 1916 it became home to the British Army and it remained so until the Advance to Victory was well under way. In 1917 the Battle of Arras came and went. It occupied barely half a season, but was then largely forgotten; the periods before and after it have been virtually ignored, and yet the Arras sector was always important and holding it was never easy or without incident; death, of course, was never far away. The area around Arras is as rich in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries as anywhere else on the Western Front, including the Somme and Ypres, and yet these quiet redoubts with their headstones proudly on parade still remain largely unvisited. This book is the story of the men who fell and who are now buried in those cemeteries; and the telling of their story is the telling of what it was like to be a soldier on the Western Front. Arras-South is the companion volume to Arras-North and is written by the same author. It contains comprehensive coverage of over 60 Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries to be found in Arras and to the south of the town. It has a wealth of gallantry awards, including their citations, and features hundreds of officers and other ranks who fell, not just at the Battle of Arras in 1917, but also many of those who died in 1916 and the final year of the war. Many small actions, raids and operations are described in a book that tells the story of warfare on the Western Front through the lives of those who fought and died on the battlefields of Arras. There are personalities, interesting characters and the well-connected, ordinary soldiers and many unsung heroes, families torn apart by war, fathers, sons and brothers, poets and padres. There is a link to Ulster and the Curragh Incident and a connection to King George V and Queen Mary, a hero of the Messina earthquake disaster in 1908, a father whose search for his son's grave reaches its sad conclusion, a mysterious death in woodland, the moving spectacle of men waiting outside makeshift confessionals in a barn lit by candlelight before going up the line into battle, and a man whose father was a close collaborator with Sir Fabian Ware during the early days of the War Graves Registration Commission; there is even a remarkable prehistoric discovery and an improbable tale regarding an African hawk eagle that would not be out of place in a Harry Potter film. This is an essential reference guide for anyone visiting Arras and its battlefields.
More than eight million young men perished during the First World War—a staggering figure. The natural reaction to such a great loss of humanity was to forget the individuals and recast the conflict into one of faceless armies and battles commemorated in stone and metal monuments. War Letters of Fallen Englishmen was published following the war in order to remind the living of those who were lost in the name of the British crown—brothers, husbands, fathers, sons. This collection provides, in the very words of those who participated and died in combat, the closest approximation possible to the experience of war. Carefully selected from thousands of letters, those in this collection are poignant, powerful, and graphic and were chosen for their depth of perception, the intensity of their descriptions, and their messages to future generations. This edition contains a new foreword by the distinguished World War I historian Jay Winter.
In this acclaimed volume, prizewinning poet and nature writer Christopher Cokinos takes us on an epic journey from Antarctica to outer space, weaving together natural history, memoir, and in-depth profiles of amateur researchers, rogue scientists, and stargazing dreamers to tell the riveting tale of how the study of meteorites became a modern science.
A “well-written, superbly researched” biography of the man who answered the call of his mentor, Abraham Lincoln, and became the first Union officer to die (Civil War News). On May 24, 1861, Col. Elmer Ellsworth became the first Union officer killed in the Civil War. The entire North was aghast. This is the first modern biography of this nineteenth-century celebrity and mostly forgotten national hero. Ellsworth and his entertaining U.S. Zouave Cadets drill team had performed at West Point, in New York City, and for President James Buchanan before returning home to Chicago. He helped his friend and law mentor Abraham Lincoln in his quest for the presidency, and when Lincoln put out the call for troops after Fort Sumter was fired upon, Ellsworth responded. Within days he organized more than a thousand New York firefighters into a regiment of volunteers. When he was killed, the Lincolns rushed to the Navy Yard to view the body of the young man they had loved as a son. Mary Lincoln insisted he lie in state in the East Room of the White House. The elite of New York brought flowers to the Astor House and six members of the 11th New York accompanied their commander’s coffin. When a late May afternoon thunderstorm erupted during his funeral service at the Hudson View Cemetery, eyewitnesses referred to it as “tears from God himself.” But the death of the young hero was knocked out of the headlines eight weeks later by the battle of First Bull Run. The trickle of blood had now become a torrent that would not stop for four long years. Meg Groeling’s biography is grounded in years of archival research and includes diaries, personal letters, newspapers, and many other accounts. In the six decades since the last portrait of Ellsworth was written, new information has been found that provides a better understanding of the Ellsworth phenomenon and his deep connections to the Lincoln family. First Fallen examines every facet of Ellsworth’s complex, fascinating life and adds richly to the historiography of the Civil War. “Poignant . . . Groeling makes it clear why Lincoln was so powerfully drawn to the magnetic young man.” —Michael Burlingame, author of An American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Includes maps and photos
