The Enchantress picks up where its predecessor, The Warlock left off. Two of its central characters, the fifteen year old twins, Sophie and Josh Newman, have been re-united after being briefly separated. The twins, along with John Dee and Virginia Dare, go back in time to the Isle of Danu Talis, where Osiris and Isis are revealed to be Dee''s masters and the twins'' parents. Osiris removes Dee''s immortality, but Dee does not immediately die (he is later found by Marethyu, who restores his health and sight). Virginia Dare chooses to side with Osiris and Isis. Meanwhile, the Flamels, Niten, and Prometheus discover that Mars, Hel, and Odin are not faring well and that Machiavelli and Billy the Kid have joined them. The Flamels decide to join them on Alcatraz, but Billy mistakenly throws the spears with the Words of Power at her (he also used them to kill the Sphinx earlier). The Morrigan throws herself in front of Perenelle and dies instead. Odin and Hel both die slaying an army of Anpu. After finding Aerop-Enap''s cocoon, the Flamels and Machiavelli attempt to awake her while Billy and Black Hawk fight a Karkinos (giant crab). Billy is mortally wounded and Black Hawk is thrown into the water, presumably eaten by the Nereids. Machiavelli heals Billy and Aerop-Enap kills the Karkinos after Mars uses his aura to lead it away from the group, which causes him to spontaneously combust. Tsagaglalal returns herself to her youthful immortal state and it is discovered that she is one of the First People that were awakened by Prometheus. After putting on an ancient suit of ceramic armour, she goes to the Golden Gate Bridge to fend off an army of Spartoi (dragon teeth sewn in the ground and watered with blood that become reptilian soldiers) that were animated by Quetzalcoatl and the present Bastet. In the center of the bridge, Niten and Prometheus defeat quite a few of the Spartoi, but both are mortally wounded. After slaying the rest of the Spartoi, Tsagaglalal finds them, but only has enough of her aura left to heal Prometheus. The dismayed Elder convinces her to use his aura to heal Niten, asking her to tell him to marry Aoife, whom Niten loves. On Danu Talis, Scathach, Joan of Arc, Saint-Germain, Palamedes, Shakespeare, and the young Prometheus crash their vimana on the original Yggdrasill and meet Hekate and Mars (then Huitzilopochtli), who plan to lead the human inhabitants of Yggdrasill to liberate the incarcerated Aten. Anubis and the younger Bastet prepare to take over Danu Talis, but Isis and Osiris have other plans. Telling Sophie and Josh to don silver and gold suits of armour, they prepare to present the twins to the council of elders as the rightful rulers of Danu Talis. Marethyu finds Virginia Dare and presents her with an emerald tablet from Abraham the Mage, persuading Dare to side with the humani. Dare meets Dee in front of the prison, later telling him that she had only wanted a world so that she could make it completely free. She leads the humani against the Elders along with Dee, who dies when allowing her to draw energy off of his aura. Scathach, Joan, Saint Germain, Shakespeare, and Palamedes fight the final battle along with the twins. Osiris and Isis admit that Sophie and Josh aren''t their children (Josh was found in a Neanderthal camp shortly after the Fall of Danu Talis, and Sophie was found in Russia in the ninth or tenth century 30,000 years after) and they transform into their true forms, revealing that they aren''t Elders, but Earthlords. After defeating the pair, Sophie and Josh reach an agreement and Sophie leaves with the other warriors. Josh sits on the center of the Pyramid of the Sun and begins to read the Codex, discovering that Sophie, Joan, Scathach, Dare, and Aten lead the survivors onto the new Earth and assist them for several hundred years before returning to the present time. He then combines the Four Swords of Power (Clarent, Excalibur, Durendal, and Joyeuse) to create the fifth power--- Aether. The swords form a hook, revealing that Josh becomes Marethyu. He plunges his hook into the center of the Pyramid of the Sun, speaking aloud the last words he read in the Codex ("Today I become Death, the destroyer of worlds") and thereby destroying Danu Talis. On Alcatraz, Nicholas and Perenelle spend their last moments together. Marethyu tells Perenelle and the Alchemyst that he is Josh and takes them to Paris, where the Flamels die. In a letter to Sophie, Josh (Marethyu) reveals that he and the Flamels were present at Aoife and Niten''s wedding, where Scathach was the bridesmaid.

The Enchantress: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

SMERSH, the Soviet counterintelligence agency, plans to commit a grand act of terrorism in the intelligence field. For this, it targets British secret service agent James Bond. Due in part to his role in the defeat of Le Chiffre, Mr. Big and Hugo Drax, Bond has been listed as an enemy of the Soviet state and a "death warrant" has been issued for him. His death is planned to precipitate a major sex scandal, which will run through the world press for months and leave his and his service''s reputation in tatters. Bond''s killer is to be SMERSH executioner Red Grant, a psychopath whose homicidal urges coincide with the full moon. Kronsteen, SMERSH''s chess-playing master planner, and Colonel Rosa Klebb, head of Operations and Executions, devise the operation. They persuade an attractive young cipher clerk, Corporal Tatiana Romanova, to falsely defect from her post in Istanbul, claiming to have fallen in love with Bond after seeing his file photograph. As an added incentive, Tatiana will provide the British with a Spektor, a Russian decoding device much coveted by MI6. She is not told the details of the plan. An offer of the Spektor is subsequently received by MI6 in London, ostensibly from Romanova, and contains the condition that Bond collects her and the machine in Istanbul. MI6 is unsure of Romanova''s story, but the prize of the Spektor is too tempting to ignore and Bond''s superior, M, orders him to go to Turkey and meet her. Bond meets and quickly forms a comradeship with Darko Kerim, head of the British service''s station in Turkey. Kerim takes Bond to a meal with some Gypsies, in which Bond witnesses a brutal catfight, interrupted by an attack by Soviet agents. In retaliation, Bond helps Kerim assassinate a top Bulgarian agent. Bond duly encounters Romanova and the two plan their route out of Turkey with the Spektor. He and Kerim believe her story and in due course she, Bond and Kerim board the Orient Express with the Spektor. Bond and Kerim quickly discover three MGB agents on board travelling incognito. Kerim uses bribes and trickery to have the two taken off the train, but he is later found dead in his compartment with the body of the third agent, both having been killed by Grant. At Trieste a fellow MI6 agent, "Captain Nash", arrives on the train and Bond presumes he has been sent by M as added protection for the rest of the trip. Tatiana is suspicious of Nash, but Bond reassures her that Nash is from his own service. After dinner, at which Nash has drugged Romanova, Bond wakes up to find a gun pointing at him and Nash reveals himself to be the killer, Grant. Instead of killing Bond immediately, Grant reveals SMERSH''s plan, including the detail that he is to shoot Bond through the heart and that the Spektor is booby-trapped to explode when examined. As Grant talks, Bond slips his metal cigarette case between the pages of a magazine he is holding in front of him and positions it in front of his heart to stop the bullet. After Grant fires, Bond pretends to be mortally wounded and when Grant steps over him, Bond attacks him: Grant is killed, whilst Bond and Romanova subsequently escape. Later, in Paris, after successfully delivering Tatiana and the Spektor to his superiors, Bond encounters Rosa Klebb. She is captured but manages to kick Bond with a poisoned blade concealed in her shoe; the story ends with Bond fighting for breath and falling to the floor.

From Russia with Love

During the 19th century it was believed that the Panic originated within the economic system itself, since the event could not be readily attributed to any specific government blunder or disaster as had previous crises. Rothbard suggests instead that the Panic of 1819 grew largely out of the changes wrought by the War of 1812 on the still-fledgling republic, and by the postwar boom that followed. The outbreak of war stifled foreign trade and spurred the growth of domestic manufacturing, which mushroomed to fill the gap left by declining imports and also served to satisfy the nation''s appetite for war goods. The war also brought a rash of paper money, as the government borrowed heavily to finance the war. The credit expansion also led to rising prices, as economic theory from the Austrian School—which includes Rothbard—would predict. Austrian theory also predicts the bust that must inevitably follow the non-specie-based credit expansion. Rothbard lays out the events of both bust and boom.

The Panic of 1819

At the start of the novel, the United States, having won over Japan, is in no mood to enter a new war, and Americans accept the fait accompli of German domination over Europe. An alternate Cold War seems in the offing; even the British, with a German-dominated Europe at their doorstep, squander much of their resources on a colonial war in the former French Indochina. US President Andrew Harrison (a fictional character) has a summit with Hitler at Reykjavík, Iceland. The meeting goes badly, the two leaders sharply confront each other, and Hitler secretly decides to accelerate preparations for a surprise attack on both the US and Britain. As part of these preparations, a beautiful German spy seduces and suborns the White House Chief of Staff and makes him a key German spy. The book''s protagonist, Lieutenant Commander James Martel, at the incipient Head of Naval Intelligence at the American Embassy in Berlin, is one of the few who suspects the gathering storm, watching the new weapons displayed at the parade commemorating Germany''s victory over the Soviet Union and encountering the well-known commando Otto Skorzeny who is his main opponent throughout the book. Skorzeny makes meticulous secret preparations for raids to destroy the US atomic bomb programs in Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory. (During the war with Japan, because the Manhattan Project was put on the backburner so that in 1945, the US is far from already possessing a nuclear bomb.) The bulk of the book is devoted to Martel, back in the US, getting a glimmering of the threatened attack and unsuccessfully trying to sound a warning. The German raid takes place, and though the Germans are eventually beaten back, the raid causes great damage, killing key scientists and setting the US nuclear program behind Germany''s; moreover, the Germans seize the uranium mines in the Congo region, while launching all-out war against the United Kingdom. The book ends with a cliffhanger: Erwin Rommel invades Scotland, the British facing a desperate fight, and Churchill imploring the Americans "come quickly, this is much worse than 1940", but a promised sequel, provisionally called Fortress Europa, has yet to be written, though many years have passed and the writers had meanwhile completed a different alternate history trilogy (beginning with Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War). In our history, "Fortress Europe" was the Nazi concept of making German-occupied Europe impregnable to the invasion, which was clearly coming since the Allies started massing their forces in Britain in 1943. In D-Day this "fortress" was decisively breached. The projected book''s name seems to suggest that the same would happen in this alternate history, some years behind schedule.

1945

Flannery Culp is a senior at Roewer High School in San Francisco. Over the course of the year, Flan records the events of her life in a diary - which, after some heavy editing by Flannery herself, some years after the fact, becomes the narrative. She and her seven close friends refer to themselves as "The Basic Eight"; they are an exclusive clique, hosting the Grand Opera Breakfast Club, and regular dinner and garden parties, as they cope with the stresses of their final year of high school. The plot begins in letters written by Flannery to her love interest, Adam, while on summer vacation, and reaches a dark conclusion in which lives of the members of the Basic Eight are turned upside down by revealed secrets, horrifying self-discoveries, and murder. The Basic Eight consists of: Flannery Culp, the protagonist; Kate Gordon, the Queen Bee; Lily Chandly, a classical musician; Douglas Wilde, Flan''s ex-boyfriend; V__, whose rich parents have had her name expunged from the story; Jennifer Rose Milton, a name so beautiful that Flan must always write it out in full; Gabriel Gallon, the kindest boy in the world; Natasha Hyatt, Flan''s exuberant and beautiful best friend. In Handler''s third novel, Adverbs, Kate is mentioned as the girlfriend to a minor character, Garth, in the chapter "Soundly". In The Basic Eight, Kate frequently gives relationship advice from her only, two-week relationship with Garth, much to Flannery''s annoyance.

The Basic Eight

Unlike most of the novels featuring Byomkesh, this one does not involve any violent crime or major plot twists. The story revolves around the theft of a priceless heirloom, the Seemanto-heera or "Frontier Diamond", belonging to the heir of the Roy clan, one of the minor rulers of North Bengal. Byomkesh and Ajit have been invited by the current heir, a young Rai Bahadur Tridibendra Narayan Roy to recover the diamond. The diamond had been in the possession of the ruler for generations and a legend had been built around it. According to the legend, if the diamond were to ever be lost, then the line of succession would end. Tridibendran was the sole heir of his line according to the rules of succession where only the eldest son became ruler, but he did have an uncle, Sir Digindra Narayan Roy who was the younger brother of his father. Sir Roy was an established painter and sculptor who worked with mixed media such as plaster of paris. Sir Roy received a lavish monthly pension but since he wasn''t heir-apparent, he did not get possession of the diamond. Consumed by greed, he did steal it while the diamond was on display in Calcutta and he replaced it with a fake that looked exactly the same to the untrained eye. He then notified his nephew that he had taken the diamond. Tridibendra had sought the services of Byomkesh and Ajit to recover the diamond but also requested the utmost secrecy, since he didn''t want the press to get wind of this loss. Byomkesh and Ajit returned to Calcutta and checked Sir Roy''s house in Ballygunge. The house was very well protected by high walls and a number of guards. Both Ajit and Byomkesh then applied for the post of a secretary to Sir Roy but were detected by the latter and thoroughly humiliated. Not one to lose heart, Byomkesh still boasted that he would find and recover the diamond by the end of the week to which the arrogant Sir Roy took immediate offence. Sir Roy then offered to let him search the house for seven days because he was so confident it wouldn''t be discovered. Byomkesh immediately took up the challenge because he realized that this might be the only chance to examine the house and he had already inferred that Sir Roy had hidden it there. Searching for the diamond turned out to be an aruduous task with the work been made even harder by the constant scorn of Sir Roy. Byomkesh could not find anything but he did notice that there were quite a few plaster sculptures including various figurines of Nataraj of different sizes. One was placed on a table in the living room and Byomkesh noticed that Sir Roy stared at the table often though the other items on the table were inconspicuous. Byomkesh asked if he could have the small Nataraj figurine to which Sir Roy said he could, but he also said that this was a priceless work-of-art that had been exhibited at the Louvre and he didn''t want Byomkesh to break it because there was nothing hidden inside. Byomkesh took the figurine home but he was disheartened that his major line of enquiry had been busted. Almost casually, he put his initials on the bottom of the figurine. The next day''s search seemed to be friutless as well. When he came home though while staring at the figurine, he noticed that the initials were gone and he immediately came to the conclusion that the figurine had been exchanged while he was away. So he had the diamond in his possession for an entire day without being aware of it! He returned to Sir Roy''s house and used a sleight-of-hand to replace the figurine with his initials with the one it had been replaced by at his home. He returned the figurine to Tridibendra and when they broke the figurine, they found the diamond inside.

Seemanto-heera

During World War II, at a secret Nazi submarine base, containers crafted entirely from looted wartime gold were hidden away. The treasure was not the solid-gold chests, but the cargo they carried - an artifact so lethal that whoever possessed "Pandora''s Boxes" held the power to unleash hell upon earth.... In the unforgiving wastes of Greenland, geologist Philip Mercer uncovers a long - abandoned U.S. Army base buried under the ice - and a long-dead body still hot with radiation. Before Mercer and his colleague, the seductive Dr. Anika Klein, can investigate further, a flash fire engulfs the base, and they are ordered to evacuate. But their plane is forced to land when a bomb is discovered on board, and they must seek shelter from the murderous weather in a hidden ice cavern. That''s where they learn the startling truth. A powerful German corporation has launched an operation to destroy evidence of its Nazi past. But one of the corporate mercenaries knows what''s inside the Pandora boxes, and he plans to hold the entire world hostage - unless Mercer can find a way to stop him....

Pandora''s Curse

Amber and Ashes is set in Krynn shortly after the death of Takhisis at the end of the War of Souls. Magic is back, and so are the gods. But the gods are vying for supremacy, and the war has caused widespread misery, uprooting entire nations and changing the balance of power on Ansalon. The mysterious warrior-woman Mina, brooding on her failure and the loss of her goddess, makes a pact with evil in a seductive guise. As a strange vampiric cult spreads throughout the fragile world, unlikely heroes—a wayward monk and a kender who can communicate with the dead—join forces to try to uproot the cause of the growing evil. It begins with Chemosh talking to himself in an abandoned temple about his plans to rule the pantheon and obtaining living servants as opposed to the dead. Shortly after, Mina and Galdar are seen. Mina is grieving the death of Takhisis and is about to kill herself when Chemosh intervenes and makes her his lover. It is then that the plot to create the Beloved of Chemosh begins.

Amber and Ashes

The novel has just over 100 pages and consists of two parts. Part 1, titled "Natural death", describes the monotone and empty life of Patrice Mersault with his boring office job and a meaningless relationship with his girlfriend. Mersault gets to know the rich invalid Roland Zagreus (Zagreus is a character of Greek mythology) who shows Mersault a way out: "Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time." Mersault decides to kill Zagreus in order to create his happiness with the rich man''s money. Part 2, titled "Conscious death", follows Mersault''s subsequent trip to Europe. Traveling by train from city to city, he is unable to find peace and decides to return to Algiers, to live in a house high above the sea with three young female friends. Everybody here has only one goal: the pursuit of happiness. Yet Mersault needs solitude. He marries a pleasant woman he does not love, buys a house in a village by the sea, and moves in alone. "At this hour of night, his life seemed so remote to him, he was so solitary and indifferent to everything and to himself as well, that Mersault felt he had at last attained what he was seeking, that the peace which filled him now was born of that patient self-abandonment he had pursued and achieved with the help of this warm world so willing to deny him without anger." Severely ill, he dies a happy death: "And stone among the stones, he returned in the joy of his heart to the truth of the motionless worlds."

A Happy Death

The book follows the life of Simonides from the point of view of his older self. As a boy, silent and lacking confidence due to his extreme ugliness, he is brought up with strict discipline by his father, Leoprepes. He finds comfort in the love of his handsome older brother Theasides, and in music. When a travelling singer, Kleobis, visits Keos to perform at a wedding, Simonides begs to be taken on as an apprentice. This, Kleobis does, and they leave together on their travels. Under Kleobis'' tutelage Simonides becomes a talented composer and performer, but remains physically ugly. This proves a severe disadvantage when, after the fall of Kleobis'' native city of Ephesos to the Persians, Kleobis and Simonides attempt to find a patron at the court of Polycrates of Samos. Polycrates is a conoisseur of beauty, in boys as much as in music or art, and Simonides'' appearance is not a recommendation. Kleobis and Simonides find themselves out of fashion at court, and scrabbling for work. Simonides travels back to Keos to enter a music contest, leaving Kleobis behind in Samos nursing a slight illness. He wins the contest, but discovers, on returning, that Kleobis has died. Simonides now finds a patron in Pisistratos, the tyrant of Athens. He becomes a successful musician in that city, and after Pisistratos'' death, his sons Hippias and Hipparchos continue the family''s patronage. Through Hipparchos, Simonides is introduced to the hetaira Lyra, whose lover he becomes. Hipparchos himself is sexually oriented to boys, not women, and Simonides witnesses his eventual downfall, when Hipparchos uses his political power to punish the family of a young boy who rejects his advances, and the boy and his lover retaliate by murdering him. Here Renault draws on the tale of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, also known as the Tyrannicides (τυραννοκτόνους), whose attack against the Peisistratid tyranny made them the iconic personages of the Athenian democracy.

The Praise Singer

The scattered planets are held together by the Eron Company, holder—at least apparently—of the secret of faster-than-light travel through the Tubes. The leaders of Eron are gathered on ancient Earth to dedicate a new Tube. Though aging General Manager Garth Kohlnar is nearing death from natural causes, the adventurer Horn has been hired by parties unknown to assassinate him. Making his way through the desert, past a gauntlet of guards and security forces, Horn encounters Wu, an aging Chinese vendor, and his curious shape-changing companion Lil, neither of whom seem capable of surviving the dangers and harsh conditions of the desert. Yet they are every bit his equal in reaching the celebration, descending from hiding to mingle with the wealthy, entertaining the idle while Lil steals and consumes their diamonds. Horn completes his mission, and in the desperate struggle to escape the ensuing manhunt, he encounters Wendre Kohlnar, the beautiful daughter and now possibly the heir-apparent of the dead man. Escaping through a transdimensional Tube in a space suit, Horn finds himself on the planet Eron, a world consumed by the Eron Company. Here he encounters a corrupt and effeminate aristocracy, a brewing power struggle over the succession, a covert revolution, a secret subway known only to the Directors—and Wu and Lil, at every turn displaying more mysterious knowledge and capability. The mystery of who actually knows the secret of the Tubes becomes increasingly important in the quest to become General Manager. Horn attends a meeting of the Directors in disguise, with Wu playing the role of Director Matal (the real one having been murdered by an agent of the ambitious Duchane, Director of Security). Horn and Wu rescue Wendre and escape while the other Directors are locked in a presumably fatal struggle. They make their way to the North Polar Cap and attempt to turn off the Tubes, finding that mere possession of pure Golden Blood is not, in fact, the secret of deactivating them. Troops and revolutionaries clash incoherently at the polar cap, and Horn is eventually captured and sent to the prison planet of Vantee. Forging an alliance with the outlaws there, he takes advantage of the political conflict in the home world to capture the prison, apparently rescuing in the process Peter Sair, the Liberator, the leader of the failed revolt against Eron wherein Horn learned his skills. Returning with Sair to the chaos of Eron, Horn is able to capture the critical polar cap Tube station and thus take control of the planet, which he hands over to Wendre, and she in turn to Sair. As Horn and Wendre Kohlnar interview the imprisoned Duchane, Horn is tricked into shooting the prisoner just before he can reveal a key secret: the nature of Wu. Wu, in turn, falls victim to the temptation to explain his curious place in history to Horn, his intended victim, but Horn is rescued by Wendre and Wu is apparently (finally) shot dead. Wendre and Horn plan to marry and move to the rural Cluster, far from her Eronian home. Is Wu the puppet master controlling all, or merely an immortal opportunist? Is freedom an illusion or a necessity, or both? The answers are recorded in a manuscript in Chinese that no one but Wu can read.

Star Bridge

Blu''s Hanging is a novel which introduces the very distressed life of the Ogata family. After suffering through the death of their mother, Eleanor, Ivah, Blu, and Maisie struggle to deal with life and the issues that ensue as a result of their loss. Their father, Poppy, struggles to parent them, barely making ends meet and not knowing how to care for his children after losing his wife. Ivah is left to fulfill the maternal role to her two younger siblings and is held to unrealistic expectations by her father. Even though Eleanor has died, her presence among the family remains. This has both positive and negative effects on the family. The Ogata''s struggle to move on, specifically Poppy, who cannot come to grips with her death. He constantly speaks of Eleanor, with frequent references to Moon River. He becomes hardened and cold to his children as he struggles to grieve. The children are also deeply affected by Eleanor''s seemingly constant presence within the family. As they still look to her for guidance and support in dealing with their issues, they are able to rely on her when in pain yet battle with being able to move on. Because of the fractured state their family is in, their wounded unit is easily torn apart by outer societal influences. Due to the lack of parenting, each child struggles to cope in unique ways. They are treated harshly by Poppy and are neglected of any true care or concern. As he is depressed himself, he turns to drugs bringing the family to a more desperate state, economically and emotionally. Certain events begin to unfold and proper judgment on behalf of the children is not used. They find themselves teetering with very dangerous situations to which Eleanor would''ve never approved of. As a result, Uncle Paulo, a neighbor of the family, rapes Blu, weakening the already fragile state of the Ogatas. Poppy, left feeling beside himself, blames Ivah for her abandonment of her younger siblings as she attempted to cross her first stepping stone to independence (i.e. going away to school). As the children have no real support system, and they are constantly combated with troublesome circumstances including racial angst and violence, they are left to feel like orphans as their place in society seems to diminish even further. Ultimately; Ivah, Blu and Maisie, who are still very attached to the presence of Eleanor, are able somewhat move on through the letting go of their dog, Ka-san. Poppy, still unable to cope with the loss of his wife, leaves as well. Although the children are conclusively alone, it seems as a small glimmer of hope in allowing them to reform as individuals.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

The Enchantress: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

By Michael Scott

From Russia with Love

By Ian Fleming

The Panic of 1819

No Author Listed

1945

By William R. Forstchen

The Basic Eight

By Daniel Handler

Seemanto-heera

By Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay

Pandora's Curse

By Jack Du Brul

Amber and Ashes

By Margaret Weis

A Happy Death

By Albert Camus

The Praise Singer

By Mary Renault

Star Bridge

By Jack Williamson

Blu's Hanging

By Lois-Ann Yamanaka