Kirjahaku

Of all creatures, man is the most difficult to keep caged. There is no textbook on escape, yet every prison, no matter how "escape proof" it is claimed to be, has lost some of its unwilling guests. Here are twelve true tales of men whose ingenuity and determination would not permit them to languish in confinement. Some were famous, some not; some imprisoned justly, some unjustly, but all had that extra measure of human dignity that would not accept chains.

That's a knife in his chest, just like the kind my ex-wife used to use in her knife-throwing act. But that was a long time ago. Before she married the owner of this carny... And there's the owner now. He's the dead man.CARNY KILL. A mystery from the author of Swamp Sister and The Red Fathom.

The swamp had no name and no landmarks: just cypress, Spanish moss, and alligators--and a wrecked plane with eighty thousand dollars inside it. The man who found the Money Plane could have any woman he wanted--even the deliriously carnal Dorry Mears--as long as he kept the source of his fortune a secret. But in the swamp no secret was ever safe. And neither was anyone who had Dorry for a mistress.An inspired hybrid of crime fiction and Southern gothic, Swamp Sister is Tobacco Road written in acid and hellfire, populated by the most outrageously venal and benighted characters ever to crawl out of the collective unconscious.

Cheops' daughter, the story goes, earned the money for her pyramid by practicing what was even then the Oldest Profession. Her price had been one stone per man. She built a pretty big pyramid.Many centuries later, beautiful Greta Brandt also made some fancy burial plans -- but they were for her husband Farley, who wasn't dead yet. And until he was, Greta intended to leave no stone unturned.Then she met Dave Ferris, a young an not-too-scrupulous archaeologist, who could be bought for the price of bail. And although he was a new hand at Greta's game, he was learning fast...and he was not made of stone.

Shad Holly and Nat Towne are brought together when they are involved with a British patrol in the streets of Boston. Shad, an experienced frontier fighter, and Nat, a young actor, eventually are engaged in dangerous missions during the siege of Boston. Both are among the defenders of Breed's Hill, a name not so well known as nearby Bunker's Hill, thanks to the confusion of British army cartographers.

THE DARK KEEP is a story of 13th-century England. Martin of Tressling, an orphan raised by a Norman uncle, yet kept at an indefinable distance by the same uncle, while strangely befriended by their Saxon enemies. Martin struggles with divided loyalties until he must choose sides in the inevitable climax. Finally, he learns the mysterious circumstances surrounding his own background and why he has always felt more secure in the presence of his supposed enemies than in the company of his uncle and the men-at-arms of the great castle.The author weaves an adventure-filled tale of medieval Britain, depicting the customs and hardships of serfdom, feudal life in a moated castle, and the amazing siege machines of the Age of Chivalry.

Jess Hanna is shanghaied aboard a whaling ship. Unlike most boys in the 1820s, Jess has no desire for the danger of a sailor's life, and he suffers greatly from the filth and backbreaking labor of the whaler. From the beginning, the voyage is beset by storms, accidents, and an evil scheme of the first mate to "lose" the ship and its cargo in the icy Antarctic Sea. But Jess, who never intended a whaler's career, grows to maturity during this time at sea and learns that justice is not easily attained.

Robert Edmond Alter, best known as a mystery author, turns his considerable talents to stories of heroes and courage under difficult circumstances. These true-life historical retellings include tales of war, heroism, adventure, and survival-all of which required courage under extreme pressure or life-threatening circumstances.

One of famed crime author Robert Edmond Alter's less-well-known books, Henry M. Stanley: The Man from Africa concerns the life of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, explorer, journalist, soldier, colonial administrator, author and politician who was famous for his exploration of Central Africa and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone, whom he later claimed to have greeted with the now-famous line: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Matt Burnett joins the militia when he hears of pending French and Indian attacks upon colonial settlers. He immediately finds himself regarded as a hero and at the same time a spy-suspect, both situations arising from a series of incidents involving the young Major George Washington.Matt and Chief, his elderly Indian accomplice, begin their adventure by foiling an ambush of Washington. Shortly afterward, Matt is part of the young Washington's first military command. The colonial militia, augmented by British regulars, sets out to intercept a French and Indian invasion.Washington is beset by the resentment of regular British officers at being subordinate to a colonist. He is also hampered by the lack of discipline in his militia, and by the nagging doubt about whether one of the colonials in his command is practicing treachery. The climax comes when the young colonel, abandoned by the British and outnumbered by the enemy, decides to erect a primitive defense which history remembers as Fort Necessity

Thurms, seventeen-year-old son of an Egyptian general, is banished from Thebes by his father for insubordination. Banishment means a tedious assignment of patrolling at the edge of the Sinai desert. But rather than a monotonous life, Thurms runs into adventure when he rescues Kemheb from Khabiri bandits. Kemheb, younger than Thurms, hints he is more than a runaway slave, as Thurms had supposed. His tale results in the pursuit of the treasure of the lost Tenakertom.

It takes guts to challenge death. Vern Rigby, professional diver, beach-bum and ladies' man, was the best in the business until the day he helplessly watched while a tiger shark chewed his best friend to shreds. From the Red Sea to Singapore, the word went out: Rigby had lost his nerve. He'd joined the losers. Now there was a second chance-- a diving job on an old schooner chrtered by a pampered, pretty young couple and run by a crew of misfits--all of them hung up on a quarter of a million dollars' worth of sunken treasure. End-of-the-rainbow stuff? Sure it was. But what did he have to lose?

"Heroes in Blue and Gray" presents the stories of famous people from the american civil war.