Publisher: Alien Ebooks
Colonel Holles, late of Cromwell's army, finds it impossible to obtain a commission with the royalists. Desperate for money, he becomes increasingly impatient and bitter, until finally he decides to undertake a kidnapping plot for the Duke of Buckingham. The abduction of a popular actress propels him into a strange and thrilling new set of adventures.
In search of a kidnapped boy, a gunslinger takes a young girl along for the rideRain looms over the prairie when Matt Holiday sees a gang of horsemen abduct the boy. The only man who could have kidnapped young Will Waverly is his father, an outlaw who rightfully belongs in prison. Holiday agrees to rescue Will, but the family demands he take something along: Will’s spirited sister Serenity, whose beauty disguises one of the fastest guns in the west.Although the girl’s presence irritates him, Matt cannot deny she’s a crack shot. But can he trust her? The boy isn’t the only thing missing: $20,000 in gold is gone, too, and there is no telling what the outlaw’s daughter will do to get her hands on it.Show book
For Emily, accepting the proposal of Philip, the Viscount Ashton, was an easy way to escape her overbearing mother, who was set on a grand society match. So when Emily's dashing husband died on safari soon after their wedding, she felt little grief. After all, she barely knew him. Now, nearly two years later, she discovers that Philip was a far different man from the one she had married so cavalierly. His journals reveal him to have been a gentleman scholar and antiquities collector who, to her surprise, was deeply in love with his wife.Emily's intellectual pursuits and her desire to learn more about Philip take her to the quiet corridors of the British Museum, one of her husband's favorite places. There, she uncovers a dark, dangerous secret involving stolen artifacts from the Greco-Roman galleries. And to complicate matters, she's juggling two very prominent and wealthy suitors, one of whose intentions may go beyond the marrying kind. As she sets out to solve the crime, her search leads to more surprises about Philip and causes her to question the role in Victorian society to which she, as a woman, is relegated.Show book
Originally published as a penny dreadful from 1845 until 1847, when it first appeared in book form, Varney the Vampyre is a forerunner to vampire stories such as Dracula, which it heavily influenced.Flora Bannersworth is attacked in her own room in the middle of the night, and although her attacker is seemingly shot dead, the body is nowhere to be found. The discovery of two small bite marks on Flora's neck leads Mr Marchdale, an old friend of the family, to the conclusion that she was bitten by a vampire. While Flora recovers, her brother Henry and Mr Marchdale begin their hunt for the vampire. Their suspicions soon fall on the mysterious Sir Francis Varney, who has just bought an old abbey near Bannersworth Hall, and who bears an uncanny resemblance to Marmaduke Bannersworth, a long-dead ancestor of the family. (Summary by Annika Feilbach) Note that the original text had no chapters numbered 124 or 125. This project has preserved the original chapter numbers.Show book
1864, Washington City. One has to be careful with talk of secession, of Confederate whispers falling on Northern ears. Better to speak only when in the company of the trustworthy, like Mrs. Surratt.A widow who runs a small boardinghouse on H Street, Mary Surratt isn't half as committed to the cause as her son, Johnny. If he's not delivering messages or escorting veiled spies, he's inviting home men like John Wilkes Booth, an actor who is even more charming in person than he is on the stage.But when President Lincoln is killed, the question of what Mary knew becomes more important than anything else. Was she a cold-blooded accomplice? Just how far would she go to help her son?Show book
War and Peace (Russian: ????? ? ???, Voyna i mir; in original orthography: ????? ? ????, Voyna i mir") is an epic novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russki Vestnik, which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world's greatest novels. War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, age and marriage. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy's time did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense. (Summary by Wikipedia)Note: The novel is split up in 15 books. This is the recording of book two, which covers events in the year 1805. The recording of the next book can be found here. The recording of book one can be found here.Show book
Against the electrifying backdrop of the 1960s, Danielle Steel unveils the gripping chronicle of a young woman discovering a passion for justice and of the unsung heroes she encounters on her quest to fight the good fight. The daughter and granddaughter of prominent Manhattan lawyers, Meredith McKenzie is destined for the best of everything: top schools, elite social circles, the perfect marriage. Spending her childhood in Germany as her father prosecutes Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, Meredith soaks up the conflict between good and evil as it plays out in real time. When her family returns to the United States, she begins blazing her own trail, swimming against the tides, spurred on by her freethinking liberal grandfather, determined to become a lawyer despite her traditional, conservative father's objections. She forges a lifelong friendship with a young German Jewish woman whose family died in the concentration camps. And while her grandfather rises to the Supreme Court, Meredith enlists in the most pressing causes of her time, fighting for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War. From the bright morning of JFK's inauguration through the tumultuous years that follow as America hurtles toward the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Meredith joins the vanguard of a new generation of women, breaking boundaries socially, politically, and professionally. But when the violence of the era strikes too close to home, her once tightly knit family must survive a devastating loss and rethink their own values and traditions in light of the times. Encompassing the remarkable people Meredith meets, the historic events she witnesses, and the sacrifices she must make, this is the story of a woman changing her world as she herself is changed by it. Beautifully told, brimming with unforgettable moments and characters, The Good Fight is an inspiring, uplifting novel with resonance for our own times.Show book
