The Pirates Daughter

By Margaret Cezair-Thompson

In 1946, a storm-wrecked boat carrying Hollywood’s most famous swashbuckler arrived dramatically and accidentally in Jamaica, and the glamorous world of 1940’s Hollywood converged with that of a small West Indian society.  After a long and storied career on the silver screen, Errol Flynn spent much of the last years of his life on a small island off of Jamaica, throwing parties and sleeping with increasingly younger girls.   Based on those years, The Pirate’s Daughter is the story of Ida, a local girl who has an affair with Flynn that produces a daughter, May, who meets her father but once.  Spanning tow generations of women whose destinies become inextricably linked with the Hollywood star, The Pirate’s Daughter tells the provocative history of a vanished era, of uncommon kinship, compelling attachments, betrayal, and atonement in a paradisal tropical setting.                                                                                                                            

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run:  My Adventures as a Botswana Safari Guide

By Peter Allison

A hilarious, highly original collection of essays based on the Botswana truism: “only food runs!”  In the tradition of Bill Bryson, a new writer brings us the guide’s-eye view of living in the bush, confronting the world’s fiercest terrain of wild animals and, most challenging of all, managing herds of gaping tourists.  No one could make up these outrageous-but-true tales: the young woman who rejected the recommended safari-friendly khaki to wear a more “fashionable” hot pink ensemble; the lost tourist who happened to be drunk, half-naked, and a member of the British royal family, establishing a real friendship with the continent’s most vicious animal; the Japanese tourist who requested a repeat performance of Allison’s being charged by a  lion so he could videotape it; and spending a crazy night in the wild after blowing a tire on a tour bus, revealing that Allison has as much good-natured scorn for himself.

Breakfast with Budda

By Roland Merullo

The only thing certain about a journey is that it has a beginning and an end– for you never know what may happen along the way.  And so it is with this journey into the minds and souls of tow very different men-one of them in search of the truth, the other a man who may have already found it.  When Otto Ringling, a husband, father and editor, departs on a cross country drive from his home in a New York City suburb to the North Dakota farmhouse in which he grew up, he is a man on a no-nonsense mission: to settle the estate of his recently deceased parents.  However, when his flaky sister convinces him to give a ride to her guru, a crimson-robed Skovordinian monk, Otto knows there will be a few bumps in the road.  As they venture across America, Otto and the affable, wise, irritating, and inscrutable holy man engage in a battle of wits and wisdom.

Interred with Their Bones

By Jennifer Lee Carrell

 

A long-lost work of Shakespeare, newly found.

 

A killer who stages the Bard’s extravagant murders as flesh-and-blood realities.

 

A desperate race to find literary gold, and just to stay alive . . .

 

On the eve of the Globe’s production of Hamlet, Shakespeare scholar and theater director Kate Stanley’s eccentric mentor Rosalind Howard gives her a mysterious box, claiming to have made a groundbreaking discovery.  But before she can reveal it to Kate, the Globe burns to the ground and Roz is found dead . . . Murdered precisely in the manner of Hamlet’s father.  Inside the box Kate finds the first piece in a Shakespearean puzzle, setting her on a deadly, high stakes treasure hunt.  From London to Harvard to the American West, Kate races to evade a killer and decipher a tantalizing string of clues, hidden in the words of Shakespeare, that may unlock literary history’s greatest secret.  At once suspenseful and elegantly written, Interred with Their Bones is poised to become the next bestselling literary adventure in the tradition of The Thirteenth Tale and The Historian.

The Art Thief

By Noah Charney

Rome:  In the small Baroque church of Santa Giuliana, a magnificent Caravaggio altarpiece disappears without a trace in the middle of the night.

 

Paris: In the basement vault of the Malevich Society, curator Genevieve Delacloche is shocked to discover the disappearance of the Society’s greatest treasure, White-on-White by Supremacist painter Kasimir Malevich.

 

London: At the National Gallery of Modern Art, the museum’s latest acquisition is stolen just hours after it was purchased for more than six million pounds.

 

In The Art Thief, three thefts are simultaneously investigated in three cities, but these apparently isolated crimes have much more in common that anyone imagines.  A dizzying array of forgeries, over paintings, and double-crosses unfolds as the story races through auction houses, museums, and private galleries — and the secret places where priceless works of art are made available to collectors who will stop at nothing to satisfy their hearts’ desires.