Grover Gardner

Germany, 1659: When a dying boy is pulled from the river with a mark crudely tattooed on his shoulder, hangman Jakob Kuisl is called upon to investigate whether witchcraft is at play in his small Bavarian town. Whispers and dark memories of witch trials and the women burned at stake just seventy years earlier still haunt the streets of Schongau. When more children disappear and an orphan boy is found dead, marked by the same tattoo, the mounting hysteria...

Edward Dugan left his home in Boston with a bequest from his father--mining certificates giving him ownership of the Christabel mine. Although they have a face value of $250,000, the mine has been declared worthless. However, Henry Christian, the man who originally sold the mining stock to Dugan's father, has offered to buy back the stock certificates for $1,500. since he has no money, Dugan decides to walk the 3,000 miles to Potts Valley in the Southwest...

In 1948 most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South. Escorted through the South's parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers,...

They are twelve men who shouldn't be alive. They have survived the sudden blinding sandstorm that crippled their air freighter. Survived a desperate crash landing in the Sahara of Central Libya. Survived to face the slow, dry, agonizing death of the desert. Twelve men with one hope: to build a new plane from the wreckage of their Skytruck and make a flight out of hell.

"Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has been enjoyed by generations of readers across the world since its publication in 1876. With its humorous glimpses into life in nineteenth-century, small-town America, this novel has provided unique social commentary that continues to be discussed in classrooms today. Tom Sawyer, a mischievous boy growing up in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, is constantly getting in and out of...

An unidentified corpse is found near Vigàta, a town known for its soil rich with potter's clay. Meanwhile, a woman reports the disappearance of her husband, a Colombian man with Sicilian origins who turns out to be related to a local mobster. Then Inspector Montalbano remembers the story from the Bible-- Judas's betrayal, the act of remorse, and the money for the potter's field, where those of unknown or foreign origin are to be buried-- and slowly,...

1648, a small village in the Alps: In the thick of a blizzard, a town priest discovers hes been poisoned. As numbness creeps up his body, he summons the last of his strength and scratches a sign in the frost that will lead the town hangman, his daughter, and the town physician in pursuit of a treasure of the Knights Templar. But the priests murderer is already on their trail, and hes not the only one after the legendary fortune: a dark monk is not...

John D. Rockefeller, Sr., - history's first billionaire and the patriarch of America's most famous dynasty - is an icon whose true nature has eluded three generations of historians. Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller's exceptionally rich trove of papers. Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world's...

Undoubtedly the most revered leader in American history, Abraham Lincoln has had more books written about him than all our nation's presidents put together. But for all that's been written, little has focused on his faith and how this quality shaped the man who led our country during its most tumultuous years. The author Joe Wheeler, a historian and scholar, brings to the pages of this insightful book the knowledge gleaned from over ten years of...

A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy in which an American president becomes a dictator in order to save the nation from welfare cheats, rampant promiscuity, crime, and a liberal press.