Tileman could make our fantasies come true - create reality from your dreams - for a very high fee. Catering to the desires of London's most powerful - and decadent - figures, Tileman had top-level connections to guarantee him protection and influence. But he had killed Laird Walker's best friend - and Walker, the dead man's sister, and a bizarre nightclub entertainer began a private war on Tileman...a war whose final battle was unimaginable horror.
In what would be A.D. 600 in our history, the Roman Empire still stands, supported by the Legions and Thaumaturges of Rome. Now the Emperor of the West, the Augustus Galen Atreus, will come to the aid of the Emperor of the East, the Augustus Heraclius, to lift the siege of Constantinople and carry a great war to the very doorstep of the Shahanshah of Persia. It is a war that will be fought with armies both conventional and magical, with bright swords and the darkest necromancy. Against this richly detailed canvas of alternate history and military strategy, Thomas Harlan sets the intricate and moving stories of four people: Woven with rich detail youd expect from a first-rate historical novel, while through it runs yarns of magic and shimmering glamours that carry you deeply into your most fantastic dreams At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
“I present to you . . . the truth about this man’s death and my life.” Baltimore, 1849. The body of Edgar Allan Poe has been buried in an unmarked grave. The public, the press, and even Poe’s own family and friends accept the conclusion that Poe was a second-rate writer who met a disgraceful end as a drunkard. Everyone, in fact, seems to believe this except a young Baltimore lawyer named Quentin Clark, an ardent admirer who puts his own career and reputation at risk in a passionate crusade to salvage Poe’s. As Quentin explores the puzzling circumstances of Poe’s demise, he discovers that the writer’s last days are riddled with unanswered questions the police are possibly willfully ignoring. Just when Poe’s death seems destined to remain a mystery, and forever sealing his ignominy, inspiration strikes Quentin–in the form of Poe’s own stories. The young attorney realizes that he must find the one person who can solve the strange case of Poe’s death: the real-life model for Poe’s brilliant fictional detective character, C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of ingenious tales of crime and detection. In short order, Quentin finds himself enmeshed in sinister machinations involving political agents, a female assassin, the corrupt Baltimore slave trade, and the lost secrets of Poe’s final hours. With his own future hanging in the balance, Quentin Clark must turn master investigator himself to unchain his now imperiled fate from that of Poe’s. Following his phenomenal debut novel, The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl has once again crossed pitch-perfect literary history with innovative mystery to create a beautifully detailed, ingeniously plotted tale of suspense. Pearl’s groundbreaking research–featuring documented material never published before–opens a new window on the truth behind Poe’s demise, literary history’s most persistent enigma. The resulting novel is a publishing event that, through sublime craftsmanship, subtle wit, and devious twists, does honor to Poe himself
The Adventures of Sally Bang charts an unruly anti-heroine’s coming of age, and a ghost writer’s need to possess her. At sixteen there’s insight and beauty that never come again, and within every adult is a wish to get it back. What is gained and lost with growing up, and whose story is it anyway? Commitment ensnares a standoffish narrator in relationship dilemmas, in a psychologic navel-gaze in cliffhanger style on the elusive as romance, the tango of intimacy and distance, conformism and the irrational. In Search of Francesca Mars exposes an artist’s vision of a self-immolating media star who tilts at strange liberation, who toys with all who need to put her on a pedestal or drag her down. A close-skinned portrayal of ambition and use, the politics of giving, glamour and ugliness, the artifice of art, the problem of value. Innocence asks, who doesn’t want innocence, no matter how obtuse the path? Dancer Libby Castro submits to demanding and needy people: husband, employer, spiritual mentor, analyst. Yet beyond insouciant roles and lazy vacancies she’ll be no-one’s shadow: a straw, a girl unmarked, woman alone…
A cutting-edge novel of international crime and its consequences, from Nigeria to Russia to Washington, from the former deputy assistant secretary of state. We laugh when it pops up in our inbox: the scam letter promising a windfall. We wonder: How does anybody fall for these things? But it is no laughing matter. It is one of the biggest organized crime rackets in the world, it is deadly - and State Department crisis manager Judd Ryker has fallen right into the middle of it. The disappearance of a young American in London sends Ryker into the heart of a corruption scandal in Nigeria, at the same time his CIA agent wife Jessica finds herself chasing a Russian master criminal known as the Bear. Unknown to either of them, they are pulling at two ends of the same lethal thread, a staggeringly vicious enterprise of piracy, extortion, and murder. The world is messy and dangerous, Jessica warns her husband.More dangerous than you know. But he is about to find out.
"An old woman who spends her days scrubbing the floors might be an unlikely damsel in distress, but Lord Dunsany proves once again his mastery of the fantastical. The Charwoman's Shadow is a beautiful tale of a sorcerer's apprentice who discovers his master's nefarious usage of stolen shadows, and vows to save the charwoman from her slavery."--Publisher's description.