"Jasmine Bashara never signed up to be a hero. She just wanted to get rich. Not crazy, eccentric-billionaire rich, like many of the visitors to her hometown of Artemis, humanity's first and only lunar colony. Just rich enough to move out of her coffin-sized apartment and eat something better than flavored algae. Rich enough to pay off a debt she's owed for a long time. So when a chance at a huge score finally comes her way, Jazz can't say no. Sure,...

"It's the summer of 1964, and recent college graduates Walt Longmire and Henry Standing Bear read the writing on the wall and enlist to serve in the Vietnam War. As they catch a few final waves in California before reporting for duty, a sudden storm assaults the shores and capsizes a nearby cargo boat. Walt and Henry jump to action, but it's soon revealed by the police who greet them ashore that the sunken boat carried valuable contraband from underground...

Anabel Lee and her father have made a middle-of-the-night move from their former home to a remote hilltop house. When a young boy calls to the house, he brings trouble for Anabel and her father.

"Down time" is not a phrase in Tempe Brennan's vocabulary. A string of disturbing cases has put her vacation plans on hold; instead, she heads to the lab to analyze charred remains from a suspicious fire, and a mysterious black residue from a small plane crash. But most troubling of all are the bones....Tempe's daughter's new boyfriend invites them to a picnic -- a pig pickin' -- in the North Carolina countryside, where a cache of bones turns up....

"On the border between Maine and Canada, a dangerous smuggling operation is taking place. Drugs, cash, weapons, even people-- and something ancient and powerful and evil..."

Doug Pearce, recently laid off from his brewery job, is hired by a wealthy Canadian woman to investigate the murder of his own uncle. Doug travels from Toronto, across the Middle East and Asia, and eventually to Singapore, where his uncle was shot in 1948. During the course of his investigation Doug is pursued by killers and held in an Egyptian prison.

Joe Gunther, a Brattleboro, Vermont, cop, is the head of the new Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI), a joint task force charged with statewide responsibility for major crimes. In The Marble Mask, the VBI's first case takes the force north to Stowe, where a fifty-year-old corpse has turned up in a crevasse on Mt. Mansfield.

Some of the more interesting minor characters in author Archer Mayor's long-running series about the amiable

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While smuggling whiskey, Lottie Livingstone captures the ship--and the heart--of Captain Aulay Mackenzie.

Delilah Swanpoole, Countess of Derring, learns the hard way that her husband, "Dear Dull Derring," is a lot more interesting--and perfidious--dead than alive. It's a devil of an inheritance, but in the grand ruins of the one building Derring left her are the seeds of her liberation. And she vows never again to place herself at the mercy of a man. But battle-hardened Captain Tristan Hardy is nothing if not merciless. When the charismatic naval hero...

In order to inherit a large fortune, Christopher "Kit" Ellingsworth must marry within a month and chooses Tamsyn Pearce, who runs a secret smuggling operation, only to discover after their wedding that she now controls the money.