Susan Michaels was once the hottest reporter on the Beltway Beat until a major scandal ruined her life and left her writing stories about alien babies and Elvis sightings. Life as she once knew it is over, or so she thinks, but then she gets a lead on a story that could salvage her extinct career. She heads to the local animal shelter, expecting a hot news tip, which she gets in the form of a major police cover-up . . . for a ring of soul-sucking vampires out to take over Seattle. So much for saving her credibility.
Meltzer builds suspenseful fiction on a previously little-explored historical nugget: Jerry Siegel, the teenage creator of Superman, lost his father in an unsolved murder in 1932. The author offers a compelling theoretical solution by way of an adult protagonist who is dealing with his conflicted feelings about his own father. Cal works for a rescue mission, picking up vagrants in need of shelter, when he stumbles across a man who turns out to be the father who abandoned him in childhood. The two men join forces in pursuit of what they believe is the lost Book of Cain, the weapon used in the Bibles original murder scene.
The Nature of Design - Ecology, Culture and Human Intention
The environmental movement has often been accused of being overly negative--trying to stop "progress." The Nature of Design, on the other hand, is about starting things, specifically an ecological design revolution that changes how we provide food, shelter, energy, materials, and livelihood, and how we deal with waste.
The Anglo-Saxon race was in its boyhood in the days when the Vikings lived. For every heroic vice, the Vikings laid upon the opposite scale an heroic virtue. They plundered and robbed, as most men did in the times when Might made Right. Yet the heaven-sent instinct of hospitality was in the marrow of their bones. No beggar went from their doors without alms; no traveller asked in vain for shelter. As cunningly false as they were to their foes, just so superbly true were they to their friends. Above all, they were a race of conquerors, whose knee bent only to its proved superior.
John "Preacher" Middleton is about to close the bar when a young woman and her three-year-old son come in out of the wet October night. A marine who has seen his share of pain, Preacher knows a crisis when he sees one-the woman is covered in bruises. He wants to protect them, and he wants to punish whoever did this to her, but he knows immediately that this inclination to protect is something much more. Paige Lassiter has stirred up emotions in this gentle giant of a man-emotions that he has never allowed himself to feel.
