Narrator "Patrick" is seventeen, and has left his private prep school. His Auntie Mame takes him with her on an extended tour of Europe, which becomes a round-the-world tour before his enrollment in college. They have adventures in Paris, London, Biarritz, Venice, Austria, Russia, Lebanon, and the high seas, meeting and dealing with British nobles, con men, embarrassing relatives, Nazis, and gunrunners before they arrive home again. Much of the action is a slyly satirical commentary on such things as the practice of "presenting at Court," fashionable political activism, the naivete of some Americans abroad, and the ways in which small communities of expatriates often end up behaving. The main story is encased in a "frame" narrative, in which Patrick, now grown and married, tries to placate his wife with highly edited tales from his travels with his aunt. This takes up where the original novel, Auntie Mame, left off, with Patrick''s son Michael going off to India with Mame promising to have him home by Labor Day. Two years have passed, with no word beyond a few random post cards. Each chapter begins with Patrick''s reassuring, off-hand comments about his journeys with Mame, and then continues with him narrating what really happened.

Around The World With Auntie Mame

Nancy Drew is called to New York by her Aunt Eloise to solve a missing-person case. The granddaughter of her elderly Chinese author neighbor, Mr. Soong, has been kidnapped. The search is on, first by disguising Nancy''s friend George Fayne as the missing Chi Che, and then pursuing a lead at Chi Che''s place of employment, a book store, where Nancy encounters its suspicious owner. Nancy decides to visit the store again but as she goes along the sidewalk, Nancy is knocked-out by a falling vase which hits her on the head. While Nancy is unconscious, Bess and George take up the mystery and a red haired man is quickly arrested. A series of clues lead the girls to Hong Kong, where Nancy''s boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, joins the action. Nancy foolishly follows "Chi Che" on board a plane, and is herself kidnapped. Ingenious Nancy uses her lipstick to signal for help on the plane windows. After her rescue, she follows more clues to an international smuggling ring, and, utilizing a disguised George once again, forces the thieves out of hiding and has the chance to finally locate the missing girl.

The Mystery of the Fire Dragon

The book opens with Permian''s regular-season ending game against their arch-rival, the Midland Lee Rebels, then flashes back to the teams trials and tribulations throughout the season. Interspersed with the football team''s saga is the history of Odessa and West Texas. The role of Permian football in the town is examined. The Panther booster club is one of the largest social groups in the city. Many school children look up to the players and hope to play for the team one day. Many high school girls hope to become Permian cheerleaders, but the competition is fierce. Others become "Pepettes" who are assigned to one football player. Peppettes bring their assigned player gifts every Friday, are in charge of pep rallies, and personally decorate the exterior of the homes of their assigned player. In the 5A playoff semifinals, Permian meets Dallas Carter, a predominately black team. Carter''s system is even more corrupt than Permian''s, and in a hard fought game in the rain, the Panthers are defeated. Carter goes on to win the state championship, but faces severe penalties the next year for their grade tampering, giving the state championship to Judson High School. The book ends with Coach Gaines erasing names of the graduating seniors from his board and replacing them with names of the juniors who will replace them next season. Permian goes undefeated the next year, with future NFL player Stoney Case as quarterback, and becomes the 1989 Texas State football champions.

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

The novel is told from the first person, the first sentence being, “My name is Erin Law.” The author then introduces the other characters, and indeed, tells the entire story, through her. Erin lives at Whitegates, a home for "damaged children". Erin''s father was a foreign sailor who left her mother after a brief affair. Years later, Errin was grief-stricken when her mother died. Many of the other children at Whitegates. Whitegates is run by a well-meaning but flawed woman named Maureen. Erin and January Carr and some other children frequently reject her superficial, half-hearted attempts at therapy. January Carr is Erin’s “running-away-friend”, and the two often escape from comfortable but suppressive Whitegates to live out of dumpsters in the city. One day, January decides to build a raft and float away down the river. Before leaving, Wilson Cairns tries to show Erin that the clay figures he is constantly molding actually come to life. Erin and January leave with their raft, but Mouse Gullane and his pet mouse Squeak insist on coming with them, Mouse tries to bribe them with money and small plastic toys he has dug out of the ground (one day Mouse hopes to uncover something really important buried in the earth). The others eventually allow him to come, even though they worry for the younger child’s safety. And indeed, they all almost die, as the raft is hurled along the fast-moving, polluted river and carried into the Black Middens, where they are all nearly engulfed by the mud. However, a strange young girl named Heaven Eyes rescues them. She cries, “Is you my sister? Is these mine brothers?” An old man whom Heaven Eyes refers to as Grampa tells her that they are not and that they should be dug back into the Middens. But she insists on bringing Erin, January, Mouse and Squeak into their home; a huge old stone building decorated with stone statues of angels. It is very close to the river. The building contains an old printing press, as well as boxes of corned beef, raisins, and chocolates. Grampa is still distrustful of the new children. Grampa is constantly writing in a book in which he records every thing he sees in and around the middens. Heaven Eyes shows them around the building, and Erin gets lost in a deep cellar, where she becomes spiritually lost and her despair over the death of her mother overcomes her. Heaven Eyes rescues her once more, stating that she must be careful as there are holes where one can slip into another place, a place of darkness. Grampa becomes more tolerant of Erin and her friends and allows them to help him dig in the Middens, which Mouse particularly enjoys. January, whoever, is very distrustful of Grampa and thinks they should leave. He begins to snoop around, despite Grampa’s warning, “No shenanigans”, and discovers evidence that Heaven Eyes was a child aboard a ship with her family. He suspects Grampa of kidnap and murder. When they find a body in the Black Middens, January feels vindicated, to the point that he threatens to leave the others behind and escape on his own if they refuse to come. Grampa becomes enraged and dangerous when he discovers January has been snooping. Heaven Eyes claims the body is a “saint”. That night, Errin and January dig up the body and discover that it is the mummified body of a dock-side worker that has lain in the mud for many, many years. They bring the body (or the”Saint”), back to land, and Heaven Eyes makes a bed for him. Grampa’s affection for all of them strengthens, and then, to their grief (especially Heaven Eyes’), he dies. “Lovely as lovely,” he says when Heaven Eyes tells him that Erin and her friends are her brothers and sisters. Then he becomes “Dead as dead,” according to Heaven Eyes. Then the mummified body of the Saint comes to life and guides Grampa’s spirit over the Black Middens and down into sparkling waters. When construction vehicles come to tear down the old building, and erect modern businesses in its place, Errin and her friends manage to rescue many of the treasures, including Grampa’s huge book. Then they take Heaven Eyes, whom they now call Anna May, back to Whitegates, where the extraordinary child is able to heal Maureen’s “damaged” soul. Maureen is able to finally become a true mother to the abandoned and orphaned children of Whitegates. Miraculously, January’s mother appears to take him home, and she is just as he imagined her. At Whitegates, Wison Cairns’ clay figures really do come to life. Erin and her friends vow to solve the mysteries of bygone decades recorded in Grampa’s book, and to continue his work. Errin explains that this story has no end and is part of all the other stories of the world.

Heaven Eyes

The book is highly critical of Richard Fuld, Henry Paulson, and the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, a 1999 act of Congress signed by former United States President Bill Clinton that repealed portions of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933. The book contains an account of how McDonald, after attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst, selling pork chops, and self-teaching himself the material required to pass the General Securities Representative Exam, went on to develop the website ConvertBond.com, which was later purchased by Morgan Stanley. The author''s stated expertise, in the convertible bond market, was what allowed him to create the website ConvertBond.com during the dot-com bubble, and successfully sell it to Morgan Stanley before the Internet bubble burst. It was while he was working at Morgan Stanley that McDonald was offered a job as vice-president at Lehman Brothers. The book characterizes Richard Fuld as being out of touch, smug, and a ruthless CEO with a short temper and a penchant for rage. The book sarcastically refers to Fuld as "his majesty," "god-like," and a "spiritual leader." McDonald believes that the United States government should have saved Lehman Brothers, and that Dick Fuld falsely believed that the United States government would save the company after having a meeting with Henry Paulson in the spring of 2008, which led him to engage in unnecessarily risky behavior and reject an offer of $18 per share from the Korea Development Bank as late as August 2008.

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense

The eighth novel in the Kinsey Millhone series opens in the midst of troubling times for California Fidelity, the insurance company Kinsey does occasional freelance work for in return for office space. First, a recent employee and friend of Kinsey''s, Parnell Perkins, is shot and killed - and the police investigation seems curiously lacking in results. Second, in the wake of poor profit figures, company troubleshooter Gordon Titus (or ''tight-ass'' as he is immediately nicknamed) arrives to shake things up. The informal arrangement with Kinsey seems high on his list of targets. In the new mood of nervous efficiency prevalent at CFI pending Titus''s arrival, Kinsey is passed the claim file of Bibianna Diaz to investigate for possible fraud. Kinsey assumes a false identity as Hannah Moore in an attempt to befriend Bibianna, who by co-incidence is in a relationship with a former schoolmate and associate from police academy days of Kinsey''s, Jimmy Tate, recently relieved of police duties on the grounds of corruption. Bibianna has problems too, it seems: her former boyfriend Raymond Montanaldo, of whom she is - rightly as it turns out - terrified, is the jealous type, and is hunting her down. Kinsey realises that a CFI colleague has inadvertently given away information on Bibianna to Raymond''s gang, and things come to a head while she is out drinking with Bibianna and Tate. Raymond''s brother Chago and his girlfriend Dawna accost Bibianna, and in the fracas which ensues Tate shoots and kills Chago. Bibianna is taken into custody with Kinsey deliberately sticking to her in order to cement their relationship. Kinsey''s enforced overnight stay in the police ''tank'' is interrupted by Lieutenant Dolan, who has a job offer for her: Raymond is the head of a huge insurance fraud gang and the police want Kinsey to use her new position as Bibianna''s confidante to get the evidence they need; there seems to be a leak somewhere in the police department and they need someone unconnected they can trust to bring Raymond to justice. Kinsey withdraws her initial gut refusal when Dolan tells her Raymond killed Parnell, but they have been stalling the murder investigation in order not to jeopodise the longstanding fraud case. Kinsey agrees to help out of a sense of duty to Parnell, but the police plan to have Kinsey wired for her own protection goes awry and she is left to fend for herself. Thus begins a dangerous and stifling few days for Kinsey, undercover and up to her neck in an a criminal ring headed by a deluded killer. Raymond effectively keeps both Kinsey and Bibianna under house arrest in Los Angeles, with the aid of his second in command, Luis. Raymond can''t accept Bibianna''s rejection of him and is determined to force her into marriage. The snag in the plan, which Bibianna doesn''t dare confess, is that she has actually just married Tate. Tensions run high, while Kinsey learns much about the car insurance fraud business, keeps her eyes open, and eventually establishes the leak is a clerk at the County Sheriff''s office, whose father is a crooked doctor heavily involved in Raymond''s ring. Matters come to a head when Bibianna escapes, and is pursued almost to her death by one of Raymond''s henchmen. Visiting her in hospital, the doctor inadvertently lets slip to Raymond that Bibianna''s next of kin is her husband, Jimmy Tate. Enraged, Raymond shoots Jimmy. Kinsey sets off in hot pursuit and received unexpected help from Luis, who turns out to be an undercover LAPD cop. Kinsey makes it back to Santa Teresa in the nick of time for her friend Vera Lipton''s wedding. Both Bibianna and Tate survive, but despite her success in wrapping up the insurance fraud claim, Gordon Titus fires Kinsey from CFI.

"H" Is for Homicide

The play''s protagonist, Theodorus Witgood, has mortgaged his estates to his uncle Pecunius Lucre, a covetous London merchant. Witgood is in love with Joyce, the daughter of another London merchant, Walkadine Hoard. Lucre and Hoard are rivals; Hoard resents Lucre because Lucre has shown himself to be an even more ruthless swindler than Hoard is himself. Witgood persuades a former mistress to masquerade as a rich country widow and his new fiancée. Lucre, delighted at the prospect of a rich match for his nephew, provides him with £50 and a vague promise to make Witgood his heir. Similarly and for the same reason, Witgood''s creditors stop dunning him and offer him more credit. Conversely, rival suitors for the "rich widow" arise, including Walkadine Hoard. Witgood advises his past mistress to accept Hoard''s proposal and so fix herself for life. She allows herself to be spirited away by Hoard, with Lucre in hot pursuit. The "widow" agrees with Lucre to resist Hoard if Lucre restores Witgood''s estates, and Lucre reluctantly agrees. But Witgood''s creditors, angry over his apparent loss of a rich match, have him arrested; Witgood, however, claiming a pre-contract with the "widow," cons Hoard into paying his debts. Witgood marries Joyce in secret; at the banquet celebrating Hoard''s marriage, it is revealed that Hoard''s new rich wife is Witgood''s poor ex-mistress. But the courtesan kneels to her new husband and promises to be a good wife, and Witgood joins her in repentance and rejection of his former sensual and spendthrift ways.

A Trick to Catch the Old One

The narrative begins with a young advertising man, Aubrey Gilbert, stopping by a bookstore named "The Haunted Bookshop" in the hopes of finding a new client. Gilbert meets the proprietor, Roger Mifflin. Gilbert does not succeed in selling advertising copy, but is intrigued by Mifflin and his conviction concerning the value books and booksellers have to the world. Additionally, Gilbert is intrigued by the fact that his firm''s biggest client, Mr. Chapman, is a friend of Mifflin and has asked Mifflin to undertake the education of his daughter, Titania Chapman, by hiring her on as an assistant. Gilbert returns to the book store, meets Titania, and falls in love with her. Meanwhile mysterious things begin happening: a copy of Thomas Carlyle''s Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell disappears and reappears, Gilbert is attacked as he travels home, and a pharmacist neighbor of Mifflin is observed skulking in the alley behind the bookstore at night speaking to someone in German, an assistant chef at the Octagon Hotel has posted an ad in the New York Times promising a reward for a lost copy of Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Gilbert starts to sense that something nefarious is afoot and suspects that the gregarious Mifflin is involved in a plot to kidnap Titania, and he assigns himself the job of protecting her. Meanwhile, Mifflin begins to train Titania in the booksellers'' trade. His focus is so centered on books and their content that he fails to note the unusual things that are occurring. Gilbert takes a room across from the bookstore in order to keep eye on things, and believes his suspicions confirmed when he sees the pharmacist let himself into the bookshop with his own key late at night. Gilbert breaks into the bookshop in an effort to find evidence to prove his suspicions, but only manages to frighten and anger Titania. Gilbert learns that Mifflin is to take a day trip to Philadelphia, and follows him in the belief that the trip is a part of the "kidnapping" plot. In Philadelphia Gilbert confronts Mifflin with his suspicions, telling him of all the things that have occurred. The two realize that a third party had lured Mifflin away from the shop. They call the bookshop and learn that the pharmacist has left a suitcase of books there for someone else to pick up. Mifflin tells Titania to hold onto the case until he returns. Mifflin and Gilbert return to the bookshop and find it locked. Inside, the pharmacist and an associate of his have tied up Mrs. Mifflin and are menacing Titania with a gun. A fight ensues, part of the bookstore is destroyed by a bomb, and the pharmacist escapes. The only casualties of the bomb are the pharmacist''s partner and Mifflin''s dog, Bock. Mifflin even affects to be pleased as the blast knocked down books he''d forgotten he had. In the final chapter of the book Gilbert and Mifflin learn what the true plot was: The pharmacist was a German spy who had been using the bookshop as a drop-off point. He was a specialist in making bombs, and had hidden a bomb in one of President Woodrow Wilson''s favorite books. The pharmacist''s co-conspirator was the assistant chef at the Octagon Hotel. He was to be part the crew on the ship Wilson was to travel on to peace talks in Europe, and was to plant the bomb in Wilson''s cabin in an assassination plot. The pharmacist was captured by police, and killed himself.

The Haunted Bookshop

The story focuses upon the experiences of Jon Cavala, a poet on the religiously fundamentalist planet of Pluse. He is beheaded for the crime of rape although this is subsequently revealed to be simply consensual sexual intercourse outside of marriage that the authorities have deemed ''rape''. This being a future civilisation, beheading does not kill Cavala. Instead his ''brain'' or, it is hinted, his mind state is placed inside a computer-like device called an ''Ordinator.'' He sees and hears via robotic prostheses but cannot smell or taste. After his decapitation he is released into a world that regards the headless as the lowest of the low. A headed volunteer charity worker named Siuzan Delage helps Cavala adjust to his new state. She agrees to accompany him on a trek across a desert to a town more accepting of the headless. Cavala and Delage are joined on this trek by two other headless, Mark Pol and Gymnaste. Gymnaste is a timid soul but Mark Pol is immediately annoying and arrogant from the point of view of Cavala. Arriving at their destination, Delage disappears and the three headless are immediately arrested and questioned, as there is evidence that Delage has been raped. All three vehemently deny this, though Cavala suspects Mark Pol of raping Delage. Through a fight and the obvious hatred of the police inspector, Cavala finds himself enlisted in the army. Before he leaves the police station he is told that it is likely Delage herself will be beheaded as she will not name the perpetrator of her rape and thus will be convicted of ''rape'' (this being consensual sex outside of marriage). The army possess devices that trigger extreme pain in the headless through their ordinator and Cavala and his contemporaries soon learn discipline. They are sent to a world named Black Athena and go into combat in the Sugar War. Many months later, returning to Pluse from Black Athena, Cavala finds a menial job and searches for Delage to atone for her beheading. He succeeds in tracking her down (she is indeed headless) and they fall in love. They plan to move to a nearby town with many more headless living there. The night before they are due to move, Cavala runs into Mark Pol, who he has long suspected of raping Delage (Delage is still unforthcoming regarding this event). Cavala threatens to kill Mark Pol, who re-iterates that Cavala cannot trust himself as he is a ''rapist'' and it is probably Cavala himself who raped Delage. Cavala leaves Mark Pol, thinking that indeed it might be possible. However, he runs into Delage and she has her head. It transpires that his betrothed headless Delage has been pretending to be the real Delage but has genuinely fallen in love with him anyway. After another run-in with the Police Inspector, Cavala and the headless Delage run away to a remote location and, it is hinted, start planning a headless uprising against the uncaring society that has decapitated them.

Land of the Headless

Hart''s Hope begins by describing the state of Burland: ruled by tyrannical king Nasilee, damaged young princess Asineth, and bloody martial law. While all four gods dislike Nasilee, only the god named God takes action, by raising up the young Count of Traffing, Palicrovol, to overthrow the King. He is assisted by Zymas, Nasilee''s former right-hand man and general. Palicrovol kills the king and, to cement his new rule, marries and publicly consummates with the twelve-year-old Asineth. He then sends her away with his ally Sleeve, an albino wizard. He then sends for the Flower Princess, whose nearly unpronounceable name (Enziquelvinisensee Evelvenin) is rarely used and whose hand he secured during his bid for power; she is the most beautiful woman in the world, because she will never lie. These events are described by the narrator of the story, who is addressing Palicrovol directly and begging him to "no longer seek the death of the boy Orem"; despite the use of the pronoun I, the narrator''s identity is withheld from the reader. Unknown to Palicrovol, Asineth has conceived, and bears the child for a ten-month term&mdash;noted with consternation by a local priestess of the Sister. Sleeve, who being a man knows nothing about the customs of the Sisters, begins to research this phenomenon; unbeknowest to him, Asineth is duplicating his reading and, being a woman, understands a great deal more of it. She employs the most terrible sacrifice possible: her own daughter. Made immensely powerful by this hateful decision, she overthrows the gods and the city of Hart''s Hope, setting Palicrovol in place as a humiliated (and continually tormented) puppet ruler. She steals the Flower Princess''s face and body and keeps Sleeve, Zymas and the Flower Princess as her personal pets in altered forms, along with her collection of enslaved gods&mdash;the Hart a pile of bones beneath the castle, the god named God a blind slave scrubbing floors, and the Sweet Sisters sundered and sold out as whores. She renames herself Queen Beauty and rules with omnipotent power from the capital city, while all her toys&mdash;Palicrovol, Sleeve, Zymas and the Princess&mdash;are kept immortal for three hundred years. But the gods still have some power, and they arrange for Palicrovol to father a bastard son with specific magical properties who will destroy Queen Beauty&mdash;a son named Orem, whose great power is that he is a "Sink", a person in whose presence magic has no power. He is also innocent and good, and is able to win over his mother''s husband (though his mother prefers that he play outside, since she can''t execute any of her household spells when he''s nearby). Of course, since none of the strengthening spells make him any more muscular, he cannot join the military, and is instead passed on to the clergy. From there he travels to Inwit, where he spends a short time on the street before coming under the tutelage of the wizard Gallowglass, who teaches him to control his power. Shortly after a falling-out with Gallowglass, however, he is taken prisoner by the Queen''s forces; but instead of executing him, she takes him to husband and, once again, conceives a child during the consummation. Orem, now the "Little King" and exposed to the Queen''s pets, begins his life as royal consort of Queen Beauty. He uses his power as a Sink to protect Palicrovol, who takes heart from this apparent weakening of the queen''s power and begins to march on Inwit. He also discovers (by overhearing the Queen''s Companions) that Queen Beauty has a plan to kill somebody to sustain her power; Orem assumes it is him, though he is warned by his friends not to begin to love the child he sired on the queen&mdash;a boy, named Youth, whom Orem nonetheless begins to father. Finally, when Youth is a year old, Queen Beauty launches her plan: to kill him as she did her first, unnamed daughter, as a sacrifice to enhance her power. Sleeve explains to Orem that this is in line with the plans laid by the Hart, Sisters and God: if Orem manages to hijack the ritual, Beauty will not only drink her own vitality from her son''s blood, but Orem''s Sink-ness, and destroy herself. Orem, grieving over his beloved son, does so, and Palicrovol enters the city triumphant and unopposed. In the end, the narrator, revealed to be the restored Enziquelvinisensee, tells her husband in a letter she is writing for him that he must make the choice: will he kill young Orem for usurping, however briefly, his place on the throne? Or will he decide that enough blood has been shed needlessly for the city and his rule? The Princess''s letter doesn''t tell the reader, who must rely on their understanding of the characters to decide the ending.

Hart''s Hope

Kelley Winslow is a teenage actress who lives in New York. When the lead actress in their production of Shakespeare''s A Midsummer Night''s Dream gets injured, Kelley goes from understudy to star in an instant. In her first rehearsal, she forgets a few lines, ending in her going to the Central Park to practice. Meanwhile, Sonny Flannery, a Janus guard protecting the mortal realm, is hunting the Fae that passed through The Gate, the only way through the Otherworld and ours. He sees her as a Firework and is merely curious in what she really is. He starts to follow her and in the end she becomes furious that he won''t stop bugging her and she yells at him. During her ranting, however, Sonny is hurtled across the rad by her fist and sees her with light encircling her. He notices it is great power. When she is done she walks off, and another of the Janus guard appear. Sonny asks him if her saw the bright light and he replies uncomfortably "Might have...". Just when she thinks things couldn''t get any worse, they do. Having lived all her life hidden in the mortal realm, she is unknown to the fact that she is actually a Faerie princess, stolen from the Faerie realm as an infant. When Sonny discovers her true identity,an interlinking chain of events threaten to destroy both the realms, mortal as well as Faerie.

Wondrous Strange

Paleontologist Richard Leyster has reached the pinnacle of his profession: a position with the Smithsonian Museum plus a groundbreaking dinosaur fossil site he can research, publish on, and learn from for years to come. There is nothing that could lure him away - until a disturbingly secretive stranger named Harry Griffin enters Leyster''s office with an ice cooler and a job offer. In the cooler is the head of a freshly killed stegosaurus. Griffin has been entrusted with an extraordinary gift; an impossible technology on loan to humanity for an undisclosed purpose from beings known to a select few as the Unchanging. The only stipulation being is not to alter recorded history. If the taboo is broken, the contract becomes null and void. Time travel has become a reality millions of years before it rationally could be. With it, Richard Leyster and his colleagues make their most cherished fantasies come true. They study dinosaurs up close, in their own time and environment. Also, individual lives have the freedom to turn back on themselves. People meet, shake hands, and converse with their younger or older versions at various crossroads in time. One wrong word, a single misguided act, could be disastrous to the project and to the world. Griffin''s job is to make sure everything that is supposed to happen does happen, no matter who is destined to be hurt... or die. And then there''s Dr. Gertrude Salley - passionate, fearless, and brutally ambitious - a genius rebel in the tight community of "bone men" and women. Alternately, both Leyster''s and Griffin''s chief rival, trusted colleague, despised nemesis, and inscrutable lover at various junctures throughout time, Salley is relentlessly driven to tamper with the working mechanisms of natural law, audaciously trespassing in forbidden areas, pushing paradox to the edge no matter what the consequences may be. And, when they concern the largest, most savage creatures that ever lived, the consequences become terrifying indeed, resulting in a team of "bone men" becoming stranded for two years in the Mesozoic Era. Apart from failed attempts to rescue the team from the past, slowly, something begins to happen. The temporal mechanics are altered in such a way that two time streams emerge. The first focuses on the struggling team in the Mesozoic''s Maastrichtian Age, some 65 millions years ago. In the far future, in what will be known as the Telezoic Era, a younger version of Gertrude Salley meets an older version of herself - the one who was responsible for the split in the timeline - now happily living in the center of the new supercontinent of Ultima Pangea. There, they also finally meet the mysterious benefactors known as the Unchanging, who are actually an evolved avian species that inherited the Earth upon the extinction of the human race. Preparing to beg the Unchanging not to shut down the whole enterprise of time travel and the sciences based upon it, Gertrude also discovers their apparent fascination with humanity and that their gift of time travel was simply a means to study the human race in their own right. She also realizes the difficulty in the ability of the incomprehensible far-future species to forgive, for incomprehensible reasons, the creation of a deeply dangerous timeline anomaly back in the 21st century. However, interestingly, the team trapped in the Maastrichtian Age makes a remarkable discovery. One of the team members arrives at a genuinely unique explanation for the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. They had already determined that predator dinosaurs farm and ranch their prey, singing infrasound commands that lead their ultimate prey to green pastures. One of the team speculated that dinosaur migration might be similarly controlled by the song of the Earth, the song of tectonic plates shifting in the crust of the planet. And the possibility of the Chicxulub meteor having been so great as to detune the song of the Earth for a decade or a century, deafening the dinosaurs so they could not migrate, causing them to starve. In the end, the Unchanging decide to retroactively remove the time travel science from human hands, thereby rendering all of the events up to that point irrelevant. But, out of the ashes of this paradox, its tangles and attenuations mercifully forgotten, a love of the world is retained - a deep unselfish love of learning the world and all its creatures.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Around The World With Auntie Mame

No Author Listed

The Mystery of the Fire Dragon

By Carolyn Keene

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

By H. G. Bissinger

Heaven Eyes

By David Almond

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense

By Patrick Robinson

"H" Is for Homicide

By Sue Grafton

A Trick to Catch the Old One

By Thomas Middleton

The Haunted Bookshop

By Christopher Morley

Land of the Headless

By Adam Roberts

Hart's Hope

By Orson Scott Card

Wondrous Strange

No Author Listed

Bones of the Earth

By Michael Swanwick