Urban Historical

The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm - that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict. Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon.

Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of four centuries of witches - a family given to poetry and incest, murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being called Lasher who haunts the Mayfair women. Moving in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and the France of Louis XIV, from the coffee plantations of Port-au-Prince to Civil War New Orleans and back to today, Anne Rice has spun a mesmerizing tale.

Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California; a father he loathes in Brooklyn; and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex-film star given to shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway. He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with 20 years ago, and this discovery will send him off course, far away from wife and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?

In a warren of crumbling buildings and desperate people called the Old City, there stands a hospital with cinderblock walls that echo the screams of the poor souls inside. In the hospital, there is a woman. Her hair, once blond, hangs in tangles down her back. She doesn't remember why she's in such a terrible place. Just a tea party long ago, and long ears, and blood.

Report from Engine Co. 82 is the story of one company of New York firefighters battling unimaginable death and destruction every day. Dennis Smith worked as a firefighter in the South Bronx, New York City, and the graphic detail and gripping prose of this firefighting classic drives the most important, accomplished, terrifying audiobook ever published on firefighting.

In 1992, the deadliest year in Chicago’s history, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot and killed in front of his elementary school inside the public housing complex Cabrini-Green. What happened to Dantrell led to a truce among Chicago’s gangs, but it also ignited a national panic about poverty and violence in America’s cities. Dantrell’s name would soon be used to demolish all of Chicago’s high-rise public housing, displacing tens of thousands of low-income families.

Once upon a time, there was a forgotten era of magic and monster. But the remnants—and all memory—of the old world have been replaced by the sane, the scientific, and the rational. But sometimes the magical past isn’t content to stay past. That’s where Jack Damian comes in. It’s his joy to protect our present from the supernatural remnants of an earlier time, a different history. It’s his job to make the past safe. Jack is called to the Tate Museum, where dozens of people have disappeared beneath the surface of a painting.

Teenage beauty Johnnie Wise has seen her share of hardship. Sold into prostitution at an early age, she is an accessory to a murder that sparks terrible race riots. Her boyfriend, Lucas, wants to give her a better life, but Johnnie has a powerful effect on men, and gangster Napoleon Bentley will stop at nothing to have her.

Chosen by the Companion Rolan, a mystical horse-like being with powers beyond imagining, Talia, once a runaway, has now become a trainee Herald, destined to become one of the Queen's own elite guard. For Talia has certain awakening talents of the mind that only a Companion like Rolan can truly sense. But as Talia struggles to master her unique abilities, time is running out. For conspiracy is brewing in Valdemar, a deadly treason that could destroy Queen and kingdom. Opposed by unknown enemies capable of both diabolical magic and treacherous assassination, the Queen must turn to Talia.

France, 1714: In a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever - and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is a handsome, stylish nonconformist with wry wit, a classic Mustang, and a massive library. He is also a recovering alcoholic and a practicing warlock, able to speak with the dead through film. His house is a maze of sorcerous booby traps and escape tunnels, as yours might be if you were sitting on a treasury of Russian magic stolen from the Soviet Union thirty years ago.

In 1939, Lavender flees London to escape the German bombs and her shattered marriage. Settling in a small town, she pulls together a makeshift orchestra to help cope with the times.

Thinking that she has been summoned by German immigrant Agnes Otto to usher a new life into the world, midwife Sarah Brandt is greeted by the news of an untimely death instead. It seems that Agnes' beautiful younger sister, Gerda, had fallen into the life of a "charity girl". Caught up in the false glamour of the city's nightlife, she would trade her company and her favors for lavish gifts. And now she was dead - victim, no doubt, of one of her "gentlemen friends".

Set in 1950s New Orleans, Little Black Girl Lost is a powerful tale filled with sex, greed, and the explosive political and social climates of an America long gone. Fifteen-year-old beauty Johnnie Wise lives her life devoted to God. But her innocence is shattered when her mother, who has been a prostitute for years, sells Johnnie's body to lecherous insurance man Earl Shamus.

It is 1890, and in the days before Christmas, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson are visited at Baker Street by a new client. Eve Allerthorpe, eldest daughter of a grand but somewhat eccentric Yorkshire-based dynasty, is greatly distressed, as she believes she is being haunted by a demonic Christmas spirit. Her late mother told her terrifying tales of the sinister Black Thurrick, and Eve is sure that she has seen the creature from her bedroom window. What is more, she has begun to receive mysterious parcels of birch twigs, the Black Thurrick’s calling card.

After a routine delivery, midwife Sarah Brandt visits her patient in a rooming house and finds that another boarder, a young girl, has been killed. At the request of sergeant Frank Malloy, she searches the girl's room and discovers that the victim is from one of the most prominent families in New York - and the sister of an old friend. The powerful family, fearful of scandal, refuses to permit an investigation. But with Malloy's help, Sarah begins a dangerous quest to bring the killer to justice before death claims another victim.

A national best seller in both hardcover and paperback, the first book of the masterful Cairo Trilogy introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s.

The most reckless and fierce of the MacLeod brothers, Quinn is a prisoner of the god inside him, tormented by his inability to save his family from slaughter. His fury governs him, and day by day he loses himself to the darkness in his soul. But Quinn has a profound yearning for a woman's love. . . . Raised by Druids, the achingly beautiful Marcail is as spellbinding as the ancient magic that surges through her body. To Quinn, she is the most desirable woman he has ever known. But to his enemy Deirdre, she is the perfect bait to lure Quinn into her trap.

In 1947 St. Louis, Ms. Etta's is the place where a sinner can get all the boozy action he craves - that is until ladies' man Baltimore Floyd rolls into town and falls in the sack with the wrong woman.

Skif was an orphan who would have died from malnutrition and exposure if he had never met Deke the pickpocket. By the time he was twelve, Skif was an accomplished cat burglar. But it wasn't until he decided to steal a finely tacked-out white horse, which was, oddly enough, standing unattended in the street, that this young thief discovered that the tables could turn on him - and that he himself could be stolen!