The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (Audiobook, MP3)
Twin 15-year-old siblings Sophie and Josh Newman take summer jobs in San Francisco across the street from one another: she at a coffee shop, he at a bookstore owned by Nick and Perry Fleming. In the vey first chapter, armed goons garbed in black with "dead-looking skin and... marble eyes" (actually Golems) storm the bookshop, take Perry hostage and swipe a rare Book (but not before Josh snatches its two most important pages). The stolen volume is the Codex, an ancient text of magical wisdom. Nick Fleming is really Nicholas Flamel, the 14th-century alchemist who could turn base metal into gold,
The catastrophic power of a giant hurricane can raise coastal waves 30 feet high and blow through houses at amazing speeds. When meteorologist Perry Stuart goes on a hurricane-chasing ride in the Caribbean, he learns about more than wind speed.
Perry's new hero is William Monk, a Victorian London police detective whose memory has vanished because of an accident. Trying to hide that fact, Monk returns to work and is assigned to the murder case of an exalted war hero. Slowly, the darkness fades as each new revelation leads Monk to a terrifying conclusion.
This promising first in a new series from bestseller Baldacci (First Family) introduces Beth Perry, chief of the District of Columbia's Metropolitan Police, and Beth's younger sister, Mace Perry, a former police officer dubbed the Patty Hearst of the twenty-first century after she was seized by bandits, drugged and taken along on a series of armed robberies around Washington. Mace, who's just getting out of prison after serving a two-year sentence, is willing to risk everything to clear her name and reclaim her life as a cop by cracking a big case on her own.
