Edgar Award finalist: When the strange new bus driver passes the last stop, the five teens on board know something’s wrong: “[A] gripping thriller.” —Publishers Weekly Valley Gardens is the last stop on the bus route after school. The neighborhood is known for its wealthy families, perhaps the richest in town. Marianne, Bruce, Glenn, Dexter, and Jesse live in Valley Gardens, and have no trouble guiding the new bus driver to the last stop of the day—but the strange substitute driver keeps driving. Soon the five teenagers are hostages deep in the mountains. Their kidnappers demand stacks of money from their families, even though most of the students aren’t as well off as the abductors assume. Without hope of raising the ransom money, the five teens must find a way out or face terrifying consequences. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lois Duncan including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

The New York Times #1 best-selling series. Includes 3 novels by Ransom Riggs and 12 peculiar photographs. Together for the first time, here is the #1 New York Times best seller Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and its two sequels, Hollow City and Library of Souls. All three hardcovers are packaged in a beautifully designed slipcase. Also included: a special collector's envelope of twelve peculiar photographs, highlighting the most memorable moments of this extraordinary three-volume fantasy. MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN: A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in this groundbreaking novel, which mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling new kind of reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob Portman journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. HOLLOW CITY: September 3, 1940. Ten peculiar children flee an army of deadly monsters. And only one person can help them—but she's trapped in the body of a bird. The extraordinary adventure continues as Jacob Portman and his newfound friends journey to London, the peculiar capital of the world. There, they hope to find a cure for their beloved headmistress, Miss Peregrine. But in this war-torn city, hideous surprises lurk around every corner. LIBRARY OF SOULS: A boy, a girl, and a talking dog. They're all that stands between the sinister wights and the future of peculiar children everywhere. Jacob Portman ventures through history one last time to rescue the peculiar children from a heavily guarded fortress. He's joined by girlfriend and firestarter Emma Bloom, canine companion Addison MacHenry, and some very unexpected allies.

When midshipman Marshall learns of Archer's sacrifice, he discovers what he feels for Archer runs stronger and deeper than friendship.

In his first novel in more than a decade, award-winning author David Malouf reimagines the pivotal narrative of Homer’s Iliad—one of the most famous passages in all of literature. This is the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and woeful Priam, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. A moving tale of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom is incandescent in its delicate and powerful lyricism and its unstated imperative that we imagine our lives in the glow of fellow feeling.

Winner of the inaugural Chicken House/London Times Children's Fiction Competition, which called it "a funny, clever, towering adventure."Because of climate change, much of 23rd-century England is underwater. Poor Lilly is out fishing with her trusty first mate, Cat, when greedy raiders pillage the town--and kidnap the Prime Minister's daughter. Her village blamed, Lilly decides to find the girl. Off she sails, in secret. And with a ransom: a mysterious talking jewel. Along the way she forms a wary friendship with Zeph, a punky raider boy. "If I save the Prime Minister's daughter," Lilly reasons, "he's sure to reward me." Little does Lilly know that it will take more than grit to outwit the tricky, treacherous piratical tribes!

The New York Times described what happened to New York businessman Jack Teich as a “front page horror.” Two hundred FBI agents and Nassau County police officers combined forces to form a dragnet, hunt for his kidnappers, and rescue him. Teich lay handcuffed and chained to the walls of a closet in the Bronx with a medical bandage wrapped around his head to cover his eyes. His captors demanded that his wife, Janet, drop a bag with $750,000 (the equivalent of four million dollars in today’s currency) in a locker at Penn Station, making the Jack Teich ransom one of the highest in U.S. history at the time. FBI and Nassau County police detectives spent over a year before finally uncovering the meticulously planned kidnapping ploy hatched by radical mastermind Richard Warren Williams. The FBI internally dubbed the Jack Teich kidnapping operation “Jacknap.” The real-life crime drama that followed proved stranger than fiction, involving a tense across-the-country manhunt, a trailer in California stuffed with tens of thousands of ransom dollars hidden inside, a contentious jury trial that dominated NYC headlines for months; a guilty verdict that was overturned twenty-one years later on a controversial technicality; a retrial stymied by a mysterious fire that incinerated court records; and a civil verdict ruling that the kidnapper pay Jack Teich back the ransom money, plus interest. Operation Jacknap tells the incredible true crime story that continues even now. Indeed, as of this writing, no one knows where the majority of the ransom money is located. Inside, Teich also details his offer of a reward to anyone helping track down the still missing money and kidnappers.

Ransom, Jay McInerney's second novel, belongs to the distinguished tradition of novels about exile. Living in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, Christopher Ransom seeks a purity and simplicity he could not find at home, and tries to exorcise the terror he encountered earlier in his travels—a blur of violence and death at the Khyber Pass.Ransom has managed to regain control, chiefly through the rigors of karate. Supporting himself by teaching English to eager Japanese businessmen, he finds company with impresario Miles Ryder and fellow expatriates whose headquarters is Buffalo Rome, a blues-bar that satisfies the hearty local appetite for Americana and accommodates the drifters pouring through Asia in the years immediately after the fall of Vietnam.Increasingly, Ransom and his circle are threatened, by everything they thought they had left behind, in a sequence of events whose consequences Ransom can forestall but cannot change.Jay McInerney details the pattern of adventure and disillusionment that leads Christopher Ransom toward an inevitable reckoning with his fate—in a novel of grand scale and serious implications.

Treasure-hunting team Sam and Remi Fargo’s search for a Romanov fortune brings them into perilous contact with an ambitious neo-Nazi clan in this New York Times bestselling adventure. In 1918, a ransom of enormous size was paid to free the Romanovs from the Bolsheviks, but, as history knows, the Romanovs died anyway. And the ransom? During World War II, the Nazis stole it from the Russians, and after that--it vanished. Until now. When a modern-day kidnapping captures the attention of husband-and-wife team Sam and Remi Fargo, the couple soon learn that these long-lost riches may be back in play, held in trust by the descendants of a Nazi guerrilla faction called the Werewolves. It is their mission to establish the Fourth Reich, and their time is coming soon. As the Fargos follow the trail across Europe, Northern Africa, and South America, they know only one thing. This quest is greater than anything they have ever done--it is their chance to make someone answer for unspeakable crimes, and to prevent them from happening again.

Recent interest in the life and works of John Crowe Ransom has brought to light the many apparent contradictions and discontinuities in the career of this important man of letters. A noted poet, Ransom chose to devote his energies primarily to the composition of prose. A southern agrarian in the 1930s, he later rejected the movement as nostalgic and unrealistic. But perhaps more central to his development as a man of letters, he came to renounce all traditional religious beliefs, even though he was descended from a line of Methodist ministers. In John Crowe Ransom’s Secular Faith Keiran Quinlan examines these and other incongruities within the context of the writer’s career and offers a substantially revisionist interpretation of his subject. Quinlan argues that the key to understanding Ransom’s development lies in “his early rejection of the tenets of Christian theology and in his consequent effort at articulating an alternative philosophy to live by.” Ransom’s literary efforts are viewed as a philosophical project aimed at discovering an empirical validity for the world rather than a transcendental one. Quinlan examines Ransom’s development against the background of the literary and philosophic movements that influenced the writer. He shows how thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Dewey, and the logical positivists, and poets like Arnold, Hardy, Stevens, Eliot, and Graves, all made significant contributions to Ransom’s progress. Although Ransom has often been allied with T.S. Eliot, who turned to religion and a transcendental knowledge of the world, Quinlan contends that Ransom’s real sympathies were with Wallace Stevens, who south a suitable substitute for religious faith in the celebration of a world he felt was emptied of its transcendental component. Ransom’s difficulties are in many ways symptomatic of the struggles of our age—the supplanting of God and a supernatural world view by scientific advances, the loss of faith, and thus the need to find an alternative meaning in existence. Quinlan stresses that although the gradual emergence of Ransom’s “secular faith” was a direct result of his lifelong dialogue with the Christian tradition, his final belief was that “‘this is the best of all possible worlds’; inasmuch as it is not possible for imagination to acquaint is with any other world.” Quinlan concludes, therefore, that Ransom belongs squarely in the American pragmatist tradition.

Sharon Kay Penman follows up her acclaimed novel Lionheart with this vivid and heart-wrenching New York Times bestseller about the last event-filled years in the life of Richard I of England, Coeur de Lion. November 1192. After his bloody crusade in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Richard and his crew are overcome by a sudden storm, its fierce winds propelling the ship onto the Sicilian shore. But this misfortune is just the beginning. Forced to make a dangerous choice, Richard finds himself in enemy territory, where he is captured—in violation of the papal decree protecting all crusaders—and handed over to the Holy Roman Emperor. Imprisoned in the notorious fortress at Trifels, from which few ever leave alive, Richard, for the first time in his life, experiences pure, visceral fear—while his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, moves heaven and earth to secure his release. Amid betrayals, intrigues, infidelities, wars, and illness, Richard’s courage and intelligence will become legend.