Feared by humans, envied by werewolves, the Dire wolves are immortal shifters, obeying no laws but their own bestial natures. Once they were many, but now only a few remain, a dangerous wolfpack forever on the hunt… Jinx is a Dire wolf without a pack. Kicked out of the house by his king, and living with a vampire named Jez, Jinx has been trying to undo the damage he’d unintentionally caused during the reign of the Dire ghost army, which unleashed some of Purgatory’s worst monsters on the world at large. But when he hears that an unshifted Were is being held in a psychiatric hospital, he immediately drops everything to help her. Gillian Black has no idea what’s happening to her—and Jinx discovers that she’s not just any Were, but a Dire wolf from the original Greenland pack. He helps her escape and promises to keep her safe from the men—and wolves—who are hunting her, and teach her everything about being a wolf. He must also fight his feelings, wanting to claim her as his mate…at least until after he defeats the supernatural enemies that threaten all of them.

In this book, James Boon ranges through history and around the globe in a series of provocative reflections on the limitations, attractions, and ambiguities of cultural interpretation. The book reflects the unusual keyword of its title, extra-vagance, a term Thoreau used to refer to thought that skirts traditional boundaries. Boon follows Thoreau's lead by broaching subjects as diverse as Balinese ritual, Montaigne, Chaucer, Tarzan, Perry Mason, opera, and the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Burke, and Mary Douglas. He makes creative and often playful leaps among eclectic texts and rituals that do not hold single, fixed meanings, but numerous, changing, and exceedingly specific ones. Boon opens by exploring links between ritual and reading, focusing on commentaries about the seclusion of menstruating women in Native American culture, trance dances in Bali, and circumcision (or lack of it) in contrasting religions. He considers the ironies of "first-person ethnography" by telling stories from his own fieldwork, reflecting on ethnological museums, and making seriocomic connections between Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss. In expansive discussions that touch on Manhattan and Sri Lanka, the Louvre and the "World of Coca-Cola" museum, willfully obscure academic theory and shamelessly commercial show business, Boon underlines the inadequacies of simple ideologies and pat generalizations. The book is a profound and eloquent exploration of cultural comparison by one of America's most original and innovative anthropologists.

From the New York Times bestselling author who “delivers lively lovers” and “entertaining, sensual historical romance” (Booklist) comes the first in her new series The Duke’s Men, featuring the Duke of Lyons and the illegitimate daughter of a viscount. They are the Duke’s Men—an investigative agency born out of family pride and irresistible passion...and they risk their lives and hearts to unravel any shocking deception or scandalous transgression. Maximilian Cale, the Duke of Lyons, accepted long ago that his kidnapped brother was dead. When a cryptic note from investigator Tristan Bonnaud claims otherwise, Max seeks out Tristan’s sister, Lisette—and is infuriated to learn that Tristan has mysteriously vanished. Have the siblings perpetrated an elaborate hoax? Or is the fiercely protective beauty as innocent as she claims? Fearful that the powerful duke will destroy Tristan’s career in his zeal for the truth, the clever Lisette convinces Max to accompany her to Paris in a joint search for their loved ones. But their journey takes a seductive twist when they pose as an ordinary husband and wife—not an English duke with a tarnished family name and the illegitimate daughter of a viscount—and discover an exhilarating passion free from the damning secrets of the past. With the line between danger and desire enticingly blurred, they discover that some mysteries, like those of the heart, are answered tenfold in the bliss of a true and trusting love.

The full moon is their mistress. They are predators of pleasure and pain. Feared by humans, envied by werewolves, the Dire wolves are immortal shifters, obeying no laws but their own bestial natures. Once they were many, but now only eight remain, a dangerous wolfpack forever on the hunt… The supernatural world is rising up against the human one. The weretrappers want to control the humans, and only the immortal Dire wolves stand in the way of total destruction. Stray, a Dire, and his long-lost brother, Killian, emerge as the leaders of their pack. To keep themselves and the humans safe, the Dires must find a witch as powerful as the one who has been helping the weretrappers. They find what they are looking for in Kate, a human who survived a horrible car accident that left her back scarred with a handprint no one else is able to see. Stray senses in Kate the powers of a witch and recruits her to help the Dires—all the while knowing that she is so powerful that they will need to kill her once she helps defeat the weretrappers. Stray doesn’t expect the powerful connection that he feels with Kate, or his irresistible need to protect her. They cannot hide their feelings for each other, and what once was taboo now seems inevitable...