Simon Prebble

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Germany was the Mecca of science and technology in the world. However, by the beginning of the First World War, Germany began to display some of the features that would blight the conduct of ideal science through the rest of the century.After Hitler came into power in 1933, science and technology were quickly pressed into service by racist, xenophobic idealologies. From 1939 to the war's end, scientists...

Rome, AD 71. Marcus Didius Falco is desperate to leave the notorious Lautumiae prison-though being bailed out by his mother is a slight indignity. Things go from bad to worse when a group of nouveau riche ex-slaves hire him to outwit a fortune-hunting redhead, whose husbands have a habit of dying accidentally, leaving him up against a female contortionist, her extra-friendly snake, indigestible cakes, and rent racketeers. All the while Falco tries...

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson traverse the British Isles and the Italian peninsula in a rousing new series of adventures. After a thrilling jaunt in the Far East, Holmes and Watson return to England to address an inheritance left by one of Watson's relatives in Cornwall, half of which he gave to his dear friend, Sherlock Holmes. Financially secure, the two are now free to spend as much time on Baker Street and the Continent as they please, and the...

James Allen's From Poverty to Power (1901) and As a Man Thinketh (1902) stand as seminal texts in the self-help genre that have served as sources of inspiration since their publication at the beginning of the twentieth century. Loosely based in its principles around the Biblical proverb "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he," As a Man Thinketh asserts the powerful idea that belief is central to bringing about positive events in one's life. From...

2007 - Florida Book Award Bronze Medal Winner "As an archeological tour alone the book would be worth reading, but it's the fascinating and complex characters that give the story life and vibrancy." -Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author Faye Longchamp and Joe Wolf Mantooth have traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi, to help excavate a site near Nanih Waiya, the sacred mound where tradition says the Choctaw nation was born. When farmer...

The Sign Of Four is the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote four novels and 56 stories starring the fictional detective. The story is set in 1888. The SIGN OF THE FOUR has a complex plot involving service in East India Company, India, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a stolen treasure, and a secret pact among four convicts ("the Four" of the title) and two corrupt prison guards. It presents the detective's...

Ancient Rome's organized crime syndicates have never been more dangerous or more cunning than in this latest adventure featuring first-century sleuth Marcus Didius Falco. In the Italian town of Ostia outside Rome, Falco appears to be enjoying a relaxing holiday. But when Helena arrives carrying a batch of past issues of the Daily Gazette with the intention of catching up on the latest scandal, Falco is forced to admit his real reason for being there....

A young governess turns up at a country estate in Essex to care for Miles and Flora, two young orphans left in care of their absentee uncle. Soon after her tenure begins, the governess begins to see strangers walking the grounds, and interacting with the siblings in odd and disturbing ways. The governess begins to feel they are not wholly human-but rather are ghosts haunting Miles and Flora, and their influence upon the children has tragic consequences....

Dark offers chilling stories, both fiction and real life, about the things that scare us the most: murder, hauntings, visitations, insanity and our own vulnerability! Examined through the eyes of some of the world's most gifted writers— Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, W.W. Jacobs, Iain Banks, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Paul Bowles, Will Self, Marjorie Bowen, A.M. Burrage, Blue Balliett —we feel the malice of serial murderers, the...