Three best-selling Jerry Pournelle masterpieces in one volume for the first time: Janissaries and Tran. A modern soldier is transported by aliens to a world filled with warriors through the ages including medieval knights, Roman soldiers. His task: survival. Janissaries Some days it just didn't pay to be a soldier. Captain Rick Galloway and his men had been talked into volunteering for a dangeorus mission--only to be ruthlessly abandoned when faceless CIA higher-ups pulled the plug on the operation. They were cut off in hostile teritory, with local troops and their Cuban "advisors" rapidly closing in. And then the alien spaceship landed... Clan and Crown and Storms of Victory He didn't want to conquer the world. He had to. Captain Rick Galloway, formerly of the US Army, more recently a mercenary commander, was now Lord Rick on the planet Tran. Rescued by an alien spaceship from certain death when a mercenary assignment went sour, he and his men were dropped on a world distant from Earth, but inhabited by humans transplanted in the past from medieval Europe, from Imperial Rome, and from other now-vanished nations. Now the time of the Demon Star approaches, whose close approach and fierce heat will render much of Tran uninhabitable. To survive this fiery apocalypse, the warring nations of Tran must be united. Lord Rick doesn't want to conquer the world, but the alternative is certain extinction! At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). About Janissaries: "On the cover... is the clain 'No. 1 Adventure Novel of the Year.' And well it might be." - Milwaukee Journal

Yashim is no ordinary detective. It's not that he's particularly brave. Or that he cooks so well, or reads French novels. Not even that his best friend is the Ambassador from Poland, whose country has vanished from the map. Yashim is a eunuch. As the Sultan plans a series of radical reforms to his empire, a concubine is strangled in the palace harem. And a young cadet is found butchered in the streets of Istanbul. Delving deep into the city's crooked alleyways, and deeper still into its tumultuous past, Yashim discovers that some people will go to any lengths to preserve the traditions of the Ottoman Empire. Brilliantly evoking Istanbul in the 1830s, The Ottoman Detective is a fast-paced literary thriller with a spectacular cast, from mystic orders and lissom archivists to soup-makers and a seductive ambassador's wife. Darker than any of these is the mysterious figure who controls the Sultan's harem.

Finding himself on the distant world of Tran, which is populated by humans from all Earth times, former mercenary Rick Galloway, now known as Lord Rick, must unite the warring nations of the planet to survive the time of the Demon Star. Includes: Clan & Crown and Storms of Victory At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Kidnapped from Earth by the Shalnuksi slavemasters, Rick Galloway and his band of mercs are trapped on the planet Tran. Doom is hurtling toward the planet in the form of the devastating Demon Star. Earth's transplanted warriors--Romans, Huns, Vietnam vets--must unite, or be exterminated.

"A work of dazzling beauty...the rare coming together of historical scholarship and curiosity about distant places with luminous writing." --The New York Times Book Review Since the Turks first shattered the glory of the French crusaders in 1396, the Ottoman Empire has exerted a long, strong pull on Western minds. For six hundred years, the Empire swelled and declined. Islamic, martial, civilized, and tolerant, in three centuries it advanced from the dusty foothills of Anatolia to rule on the Danube and the Nile; at the Empire's height, Indian rajahs and the kings of France beseeched its aid. For the next three hundred years the Empire seemed ready to collapse, a prodigy of survival and decay. Early in the twentieth century it fell. In this dazzling evocation of its power, Jason Goodwin explores how the Ottomans rose and how, against all odds, they lingered on. In the process he unfolds a sequence of mysteries, triumphs, treasures, and terrors unknown to most American readers. This was a place where pillows spoke and birds were fed in the snow; where time itself unfolded at a different rate and clocks were banned; where sounds were different, and even the hyacinths too strong to sniff. Dramatic and passionate, comic and gruesome, Lords of the Horizons is a history, a travel book, and a vision of a lost world all in one.

The Ottoman Empire began in 1300 under the almost legendary Osman I, reached its apogee in the sixteenth century under Suleiman the Magnificent, whose forces threatened the gates of Vienna, and gradually diminished thereafter until Mehmed VI was sent into exile by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk). In this definitive history of the Ottoman Empire, Lord Kinross, painstaking historian and superb writer, never loses sight of the larger issues, economic, political, and social. At the same time he delineates his characters with obvious zest, displaying them in all their extravagance, audacity and, sometimes, ruthlessness.

Lefèvre, a French archaeologist, has arrived in Istanbul determined to uncover a lost Byzantine treasure. Yashim is commissioned to find out more about him. But when Lefèvre's mutilated body is discovered outside the French embassy, it turns out that there is only one suspect: Yashim himself. Once again, Yashim finds himself in a race against time to find the startling truth behind a shadowy secret society dedicated to the revival of the Byzantine Empire, caught in a deadly game deep beneath the city streets, a place where the stakes are high - and betrayal is death.

The historian and author of Strolling Through Istanbul presents a detailed portrait of the fifteenth century Ottoman sultan, revealing the man behind the myths. Sultan Mehmet II—known to his countrymen as The Conqueror, and to much of Europe as The Terror of the World—was once Europe's most feared and powerful ruler. Now John Freely, the noted scholar of Turkish history, brings this charismatic hero to life in evocative and authoritative biography. Mehmet was barely twenty-one when he conquered Byzantine Constantinople, which became Istanbul and the capital of his mighty empire. He reigned for thirty years, during which time his armies extended the borders of his empire halfway across Asia Minor and as far into Europe as Hungary and Italy. Three popes called for crusades against him as Christian Europe came face to face with a new Muslim empire. Revered by the Turks and seen as a brutal tyrant by the West, Mehmet was a brilliant military leader as well as a renaissance prince. His court housed Persian and Turkish poets, Arab and Greek astronomers, and Italian scholars and artists. In The Grand Turk, Freely sheds vital new light on this enigmatic ruler.

Biography of Abdul Hamid, 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire by Sir Edwin Pears [1835-1919], a British historian and lawyer who practiced law in Constantinople.