The modern resurgence of the black death animates Hillerman's 14th tale featuring retired widower Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee. Bubonic plague has survived for centuries in the prairie-dog villages of the Southwest, where its continuing adaptation to modern antibiotics has increased its potential for mass destruction. Leaphorn is hired by a wealthy Santa Fe woman to search for her granddaughter, biologist Catherine Pollard, who has disappeared during her field work as a "flea catcher," collecting plague-carrying specimens from desert rodents.
In DC First Lady Jane Cox hires former secret service agents turned private investigators Michelle Maxwell and Sean King to rescue her abducted twelve year old year niece Willa, who daringly was kidnapped following a birthday party at Camp David; her mom, sister-in-law to President Cox was killed in the assault. Jane chose the pair because she knows they get results as King saved her husband’s life when he was a senator.
A wise research psychiatrist once told me that he had identified life's greatest problem: How to balance self and others, or your need for independence with your need for relationship? Since writing Rapt, I've come to believe that we now face a fundamental psychological challenge of a different sort: How to balance your need to know—for the first time in history, fed by a bottomless spring of electronic information, from e-mail to Wikipedia--with your need to be?
Read and Write has been specially written for students studying for the First Certificate Examination. More specifically, it aims to give practice in the skills and language needed in the Reading Comprehension Paper 1 and Composition Paper 2 of the examination. It is ideally suited for use with a full First Certificate course, but is equally useful for the general post-intermediate student who wants to improve his or her reading and writing.
Winston Churchill was not only a statesman and leader of historic proportions, he also possessed substantial literary talents. These two factors combine to make The Gathering Storm a unique work. The first volume of Churchill's memoirs, this selection is broken into two parts. The first, "From War to War," consists of Churchill's critical observations on the settlement of World War I and its place in the causes of the Second World War. The second volume contains letters and memoranda from the British government--of which Churchill was part--as the country plunged unprepared into war. This stands as the best of history: written as it was made, by the man who made it.
