Celebrated author Laurie R. King dazzles mystery lovers once again in this, her second Kate Martinelli mystery. The story unfolds as a band of homeless people cremate a beloved dog in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. When it comes to incidents like this, the authorities are willing to overlook a few broken
regulations. But three weeks later, after the dog's owner gets the same fiery send-off, the SFPD knows it has a serious problem on its hands. Other than the fact that they're dealing with a particularly grisly homicide, Inspector Kate Martinelli and her partner, Al Hawkin, have little else to go on. They have a homeless victim without a positive ID, a group of witnesses who have little love for the cops, and a possible suspect, known only as Brother Erasmus. Kate
learns that Erasmus is well-acquainted with the park's homeless and with the rarefied atmosphere of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, yet he remains an enigma to all. It's apparent that he is by no means crazy—but he is a fool. Kate begins the frustrating task of interrogating a man who communicates only
through quotations. Trying to learn something of his history leads her along a twisting road to a disbanded cult, long-buried secrets, the thirst for spirituality, and the hunger for bloody vengeance.

Hailed for her rich and powerful works of psychological suspense as well as her New York Times bestselling mysteries, Laurie R. King now takes us to a remote cottage in Cornwall where a gripping tale of intrigue, terrorism, and explosive passions begins with a visit to a recluse upon whom the fate of an entire nation may rest—a man code-named . . .

It’s eight years after the Great War shattered Bennett Grey’s life, leaving him with an excruciating sensitivity to the potential of human violence, and making social contact all but impossible. Once studied by British intelligence for his unique abilities, Grey has withdrawn from a rapidly changing world—until an American Bureau of Investigation agent comes to investigate for himself Grey’s potential as a weapon in a vicious new kind of warfare. Agent Harris Stuyvesant desperately needs Grey’s help entering a world where the rich and the radical exist side by side—a heady mix of the powerful and the celebrated, among whom lurks an enemy ready to strike a deadly blow at democracy on both sides of the Atlantic.

Here, among a titled family whose servants dress in whimsical costumes and whose daughter conducts an open affair with a man who wants to bring down the government, Stuyvesant finds himself dangerously seduced by one woman and—even more dangerously—falling in love with another. And as he sifts through secrets divulged and kept, he uncovers the target of a horrifying conspiracy, and wonders if he can trust his touchstone, Grey, to reveal the most dangerous player of all ….

Building to an astounding climax on an ancient English estate, Touchstone is both a harrowing thriller by a master of the genre and a thought-provoking exploration of the forces that drive history—and human destinies.

I can't think of any moments in recent mysteries that equal the sheer physical and emotional terror of Kate Martinelli's discovery—about halfway through this third book in Laurie R. King's excellent series, now available in paperback—that the 12-year-old girl she is looking after has disappeared. Kate, a just-out lesbian, is under fire for that and other reasons at the San Francisco Police Department, and the missing girl is the daughter of the woman whom Kate's work partner has just married. Kate's relationship with her life partner, Lee, is in serious trouble, and she has strong feelings about wanting children of her own. The motel from which the girl has vanished is in the middle of a notorious serial killer's terrortory. As she does in her equally smart and visceral series about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes (The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary), King balances all the elements perfectly, and keeps us involved every inch of the way. Her other Martinelli books are A Grave Talent and To Play the Fool.

Here are the results of our 1997 Philadelphia restaurant survey covering 977 restaurants in the Philadelphia area, including Lancaster/Berks county, Atlantic City/Cape May/Shore, Wilmington and nearby Delaware. This year more than 2,850 people participated in this survey having eaten some 474,000 restaurant meals.

Zagat surveyors offer written commentary and score each establishment on a 0 to 30 scale for Food, Decor and Service, as well as providing an average cost-per-meal. Extensive indexes make it possible to find just the restaurant you want.

If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula—Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century—was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.

As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight—one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland—sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.

Although the book is appropriately suspenseful and a delight to read—even the minor characters are distinctive and vividly seen—its most powerful moments are those that describe real horrors. Our narrator recalls that after reading descriptions of Vlad burning young boys or impaling "a large family," she tried to forget the words: "For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth." The reader, although given a satisfying ending, gets a strong enough dose of European history to temper the usual comforts of the closing words. —Regina Marler

What warps when you're traveling at warp speed? What's the difference between the holodeck and a hologram? What happens when you get beamed up? What is the difference between a Wormhole and a Black Hole? What is antimatter and why does the Enterprise need it?
Discover the answers to these and many other fascinating questions as a renowned physicist and deicated Trekker explores The Physics of Star Trek.

75 SCRAMBLES IN OREGON
CLIMBING

This oversized, coffee-table volume is devoted to the industrial design of every product made at Apple Computer over the course of 20 years. Lavishly illustrated with over 400 large color photographs by photographer Rick English, the book transforms the plastic cases, LCD displays, and disk drives from old Apple IIcs, Lisas, Macs, PowerBooks, and Newtons (and a few technologies that never made it to the street) into objects of fine art. The book's attention to detail, even in the small peripherals, such as the stylus of the Newton—the ubiquitous round stick-on microphone that ships with the Mac—contributes to the technological identity of the Apple brand.

Remember that 20 years ago, when you walked into a campus computing center or office building, you could distinguish an Apple system from an IBM system from across a room. The early IBM PCs were box-shaped—as close to pure squares and rectangles as possible—and buttoned down with garters on the socks like the Big Blue executives who sold them to the world as business machines. In contrast, the physical design of the Apple machines has always represented the company's "alternative" (and borderline arrogant) mindset, appealing to the more artistic user and fueling the left-versus-right-brain debates. In addition to the packaging of the machine, the Mac's graphical user interface and Motorola CPUs provided the artistic cover by which this innovative book could safely be judged.

Today other computer companies casually imitate the technofuturistic curvedness of the once-almost-shocking Apple design. Much like how the set of the movie Blade Runner has influenced many films that followed it, the industrial design of Apple machines continues to shape other companies' computer designs. AppleDesign is interesting both as an historical document and an artistic appreciation of these designs.

For the past half century, the Sony Corporation has been highly successful at tapping the seductive nature of consumer electronics. Around the globe their ubiquitous products are recognized as symbols of cutting-edge technology and innovative design, making Sony the undisputed leader in high tech and one of the most recognized brand names in the world. Digital Dreams takes an unprecedented look inside the world's most influential design center and their products—many never before published—for the next millennium.

With nearly 250 industrial designers; graphic, packaging, and logotype designers; user-interface specialists and Web designers working in offices from Tokyo to San Francisco to Cologne, the Sony Design Center is responsible for nearly 2,000 new products, concepts, packaging schemes and design strategies every year, driving sales of products and services totalling nearly $50 billion per year. By shaping the most pivotal technologies of our time, the Design Center exerts a greater influence on popular culture and current trends in industrial and graphic design than any other single entity.

As Sony stands perched on the new millennium, its design team is now redefining virtually every major product line in the company's vast consumer electronics sector—launching Sony's definitive leap from analog to digital technology.

Until now, the work of the Design Center has been shrouded in secrecy. Digital Dreams is the first comprehensive preview of the technological and aesthetic vision that will dominate the landscape of the next century.

This book surveys Sony's twenty-first-century product line, examining more than 100 new products, concepts and prototypes. Following the transition to digital technology, Digital Dreams reveals the corporation's techniques and design philosophy at work. Everyone who listens to music, watches movies or TV, carries a Walkman, or communicates by telephone or the Internet will be affected by the "digital dream" now taking shape at Sony.

Harumi Kurihara, Japan's most popular cooking expert, earned raves from critics and home cooks around the world for her award-winning English-language debut, Harumi's Japanese Cooking. Now she returns with a second-and more intimate- collection written specifically with the Western palate in mind.

Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking presents seventy new recipes that exemplify her irresistible, down-to-earth style and simplicity-from Clear Soup with Pork, Spinach Dumplings, and Prawns in Chili Sauce to Potato Salad Japanese Style and Harumi's Baked Cheesecake. In addition, the book presents authentic preparation techniques and serving suggestions

Louis L'Amour brings you the Wild West as you've never heard it before.  Crackling with the atmosphere of frontier days, this classic tale sweeps listeners into the late 1800s, when life on the land was hard—and dying often came easy.

The life of a mail-order bride was no breeze.  It seemed to Laurie Bonnet she couldn't do even the simplest thing right.  She couldn't make a cup of coffee fit for a dog, so how was she going to help her man in a war over his land?  When things get too tough, Laurie decides to flee back home.  On the trail she gets lost and meets up with a mysterious old man who teaches her a few things about love and courage.  And she'll need plenty of both when she returns to stand by her husband.  Because now the Miller clan has hired themselves a gunman to run Steve Bonnet off his land—or put him under the ground.

Look for these and other exciting dramatizations of Louis L'Amour short stories, available only from BDD Audio!

A new compendium of humor from the creator of The Far Side and author of Unnatural Selections presents 150 cartoons, as well as a full-color fold-out of the cows of the planet. Original.

Gary Larson created eight original color cartoons exclusively for this collection—including portrayals of Wiener Dog Art in the style of the great masters. The book also exhibits more than 100 "Far Side" cartoons for the first time in book form, displaying in breadth of humor that "Far Side" fans have come to expect.