The end is in sight. Or not. As the fall Feria comes to a close, Halvar is ready to snatch Leon di Vicenza from the fratery and head back to Al-Andalus. No such luck. An Afrikan merchant dies of poisoning, and there are enough suspects to populate half of Manatas. Then a Bretain student is also murdered, and the Calif's Hireling is once again up to his boot tops in mystery.
A dead boy, a cougar, and peanuts… There's no time for celebrating the holidays when a young messenger boy's corpse is discovered just outside Manatas. Snake had ambitions of bettering himself, but as Halvar, Selim, and the Town Guard seek for the lad's killer, they discover signs of a plot that could endanger the entire city. Then a noted master of mathematics is discovered dead in the Madrassa. Halvar's instincts tell him the two deaths are connected, but unearthing that link may present his most complicated puzzle to date. And, of course, make him a target yet again.
Who killed the captain? It's not bad enough that Halvar is stuck in Manatas while Don Felipe is off exploring the New World. Now he's got a dead ship captain on his hands, a nobleman and his virago wife complaining about their living accommodations, and an enemy from his past who claims to be just passing through. The bodies, though, seem to keep piling up, while the clues continue to be elusive. There's something rotten going on, but finding out exactly what it is and whose killing people is turning out to be tougher than any job he's had so far.
The Saga of Halvar the Hireling Book 6 Ned Cooper had made plenty of enemies with his loud vocal attacks on every religion that wasn’t his, but it didn’t seem to Halvar that was enough to justify a knife in the back. Nevertheless, there he is—dead as one of his own barrels. Then Guardsman Zoltan meets a similar fate, and with even more suspects given his protection racket on the docks and his constant harassment of the women in the souk. Are these murders personal, or might they be connected to the muskets the captain of the Belle Fleur was smuggling into Manatas? Was Master Albrecht making gunpowder for those guns? Will Halvar still have a job after his contract expires on New Year’s Day? The intrepid Dane is once again knee-deep in corpses and on the wrong end of pointed weapons. Can he solve all the mysteries before his term of office ends? And what will he do, stuck in Nova Mundum, if someone doesn’t renew his contract?
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #19 features the best in contemporary and classic mystery fiction, with a great lineup of stories and columns. Here are: Features: From Watson's Notebook, by John H. Watson, M. D. Ask Mrs Hudson, by (Mrs) Martha Hudson Non Fiction: Screen of the Crime, by Kim Newman Podcasting, by Lisa Cotoggio Fiction: A Breton Homecoming: Conclusion, by Peter James Quirk The Perfesser and the Kid, by Roberta Rogow A Business Proposition, by Janice Law A King’s Ransom, by John M. Floyd Running in Place, by J.E. Irvin Letter of the Law, by J.P. Seewald CLASSIC REPRINT: The Boscombe Valley Mystery, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ART & CARTOONS: Wolf Forrest (Front Cover) Cartoon by Marc Bilgrey
'So I began thinking again of those two white blanks on the map, of penguins and humming birds, of the pampas and of gauchos, in short, of Patagonia, a place where, one was told, the natives' heads steam when they eat marmalade.' So responded H. W. 'Bill' Tilman to his own realisation that the Himalaya were too high for a mountaineer now well into his fifties. He would trade extremes of altitude for the romance of the sea with, at his journey's end, mountains and glaciers at a smaller scale; and the less explored they were, the better he would like it. Within a couple of years he had progressed from sailing a 14-foot dinghy to his own 45-foot pilot cutter Mischief, readied for her deep-sea voyaging, and recruited a crew for his most ambitious of private expeditions. Well past her prime, Mischief carried Tilman, along with an ex-dairy farmer, two army officers and a retired civil servant, safely the length of the North and South Atlantic oceans, and through the notoriously difficult Magellan Strait, against strong prevailing winds, to their icy landfall in the far south of Chile. The shore party spent six weeks crossing the Patagonian ice cap, in both directions, returning to find that their vessel had suffered a broken propeller. Edging north under sail only, Mischief put into Valparaiso for repairs, and finally made it home to Lymington via the Panama Canal, for a total of 20,000 nautical miles sailed, in addition to a major exploration 'first' all here related with the skipper's characteristic modesty and bone-dry humour, and many photographs.
The first novel from the award-winning author of Brightness Falls from the Air, a writer “known for gender-bending, boundary-pushing work” (Tor.com). Up the Walls of the World is the 1978 debut novel of Alice Sheldon, who had built her reputation with the acclaimed short stories she published under the name James Tiptree Jr. A singular representation of American science fiction in its prime, Tiptree’s first novel expanded on the themes she addressed in her short fiction. “From telepathy to cosmology, from densely conceived psychological narrative to the broadest of sense-of-wonder revelations, the novel is something of a tour de force” (The Science Fiction Encyclopedia). Known as the Destroyer, a self-aware leviathan roams through space gobbling up star systems. In its path is the planet Tyree, populated by telepathic wind-dwelling aliens who are facing extinction. Meanwhile on Earth, people burdened with psi powers are part of a secret military experiment run by a drug-addicted doctor struggling with his own grief. These vulnerable humans soon become the target of the Tyrenni, whose only hope of survival is to take over their bodies and minds—an unspeakable crime in any other period of the aliens’ history . . . Praise for James Tiptree Jr. “[Tiptree] can show you the human in the alien and the alien in the human and make both utterly real.” —The Washington Post “Novels that deal with the mental gymnastics of superminds, or with concepts like eternity and infinity, are doomed to fall short of the mark. But Tiptree’s misses are more exciting than the bulls‐eyes of less ambitious authors.” —The New York Times
Touching on indigenous Maori relationships with the now-extinct, flightless moa; the attitudes of Pakeha, or European, settlers toward sheep; the iconography of whales and dolphins; the problems of pest-control; and the pleasures of pet-keeping, this modern-day bestiary is a fascinating study of human&–animal relations. In the book's four parts, the authors unravel the contradictory ways New Zealanders nurture and eradicate, glorify and demonize, cherish and devour, and describe and imagine animals. The study brings together insights from New Zealand's arts and literature, popular culture, historiography, media, and everyday life to describe and analyze their interactions with nga kararehe and nga manu, the beasts and birds of the land. In doing so, it illuminates fundamental aspects of New Zealand society: how New Zealanders understand their own identities and those of others; how they regard, inhabit, and make use of the natural world; and how they think about what they buy, eat, wear, watch, and read. Rich, multifaceted, and engaging, A New Zealand Book of Beasts satisfyingly explores how culture both shapes and is shaped by the &“beasts&” of Aotearoa.
