Richard Sharkey THE TALES OF THE WALRUS The time has come, the Walrus said. To talk of many things: Of shoesand shipsand sealing wax Of cabbagesand Kings And why the sea is boiling hot And whether pigs have wings. Lewis Carroll It is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. Matthew 13:11, King James Bible

In the two decades between the Second World War and the Great Alaska Earthquake, Anchorage grew by a factor of 10. Money was, quite literally, washing down the street. The economic boom was so great that all you needed to make a million dollars was a cash register. At the same time Anchorage was one of the few cities in America where organized crime never got a firm foothold. Uptown, downtown, out of town, the locals were clever enough to keep the East Coast families out. Walrus With A Gold Tooth is a fictionalized version of crime in Anchorage over these two decades and a step-by-step history of how the local squeezed out the mob before it ever made it in. And if you know your Anchorage history, you just might be able to determine which characters are actual people whose names have been changed to protect the guilty.

A pop star’s death puts Los Angeles PI Shell Scott on the hit list in the mystery series with more than 40 million copies in print. With a national election going on, Shell Scott’s timing might have been less than perfect. Perhaps he did prevent the victory for the shoo-in candidate, but a lot of strange things were happening. There was Polly Plank, whom he encountered in her psychiatrist’s office in her birthday suit. What about the American singing idol Johnny Tray, who turned up dead? And of course Joe Rice, leader of the West’s underworld, who wanted Shell under the world too—six feet under. The Trojan Hearse is the 28th book in the Shell Scott Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

In 2000, the University of Southern California Trojans were named Collegiate Athletic Department of the 20th Century. However, it still seemed that the greatest historical football program was USC's biggest rival, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. In this lively history of USC football, Travers makes the case that under the guidance of coach Pete Carroll the Trojans have overtaken Notre Dame as the "greatest ever" collegiate tradition. Illustrated with both historic and contemporary photos and containing anextensive appendix listing college football's all-time greatest teams by year, this book celebrates college football's best and provides a blow-by-blow account of perhaps the greatest game ever played: the 2006 USC-Texas Rose Bowl.

North America Before the European Invasions tells the histories of North American peoples from first migrations in the Late Glacial Age, sixteen thousand years ago or more, to the European invasions following Columbus’s arrival. Contrary to invaders’ propaganda, North America was no wilderness, and its peoples had developed a variety of sophisticated resource uses, including intensive agriculture and cities in Mexico and the Midwest. Written in an easy-flowing style, the book is a true history although based primarily on archeological material. It reflects current emphasis within archaeology on rejecting the notion of “pre”-history, instead combining archaeology with post-Columbian ethnographies and histories to present the long histories of North America’s native peoples, most of them still here and still part of the continent’s history.

Michael and the angel army return to Earth to put an end to Satans ruination of Gods creations. They reunite with the Legends of Old, meet new friends, and face new enemies leading up to the ultimate battle with Satan and his demons.

Blatchley’s Second Law of Nautical Recreation: One meets a better class of people in collisions. Julian is a stout Englishman, no doubt about that: So why, when fortune deposits him in Greece, does he get the feeling that he has come home? He also appears to be without employment. With immediate and decisive action obviously called for, he relaxes and waits to see what will happen next. Early blooms are radiant in the Mediterranean sun as Greece’s sailing season comes fitfully to life. Easily seduced by this lifestyle and by the promise of the coming summer, the Falstaffian intruder decides to make his new employment as a yacht-charter skipper in the sun-drenched, pristine, watercolour amphitheatre of the Aegean Sea. They’ve already fallen for a Trojan horse… let’s see how they feel about a Trojan walrus. Follow Julian as he attempts to sidle into the Aegean yachting world, negotiating in turn the Byzantine complexities of navigation, customs, marine regulations, romance, peer-pressure and the roasting of entire pigs in the Wine-Dark Sea. A sequel to Adjacent to the Argonauts (which received many 5-star ratings) this is a comical romp through the Aegean in which we see, from the author’s affectionate perspective and through his maladroit experiences, the places, customs, history, cuisine and attitudes which go to make the anarchic jigsaw of this beautiful, captivating sea.