Murder on the Champ de Mars – Cara Black
Paris, February 1998: Aimée Leduc has her work cut out for her—running her detective agency and fighting off sleep-deprivation as she tries to be a good single mother to her new bébé. The last thing she has time for now, is to take on a personal investigation for a poor manouche (French Gypsy) boy. But he insists his dying mother has an important secret she needs to tell Aimée, something to do with Aimée’s father’s unsolved murder a decade ago. How can she say no?
The dying woman’s secret is even more dangerous than her son realized. When Aimée arrives at the hospital, the boy’s mother has disappeared. She was far too sick to leave on her own—she must have been abducted. What does she know that is so important it is worth killing for? And will Aimée be able to find her before it is too late and the medication keeping her alive runs out?
Set in the seventh arrondissement, the quartier of the Parisian elite, Murder on the Champ de Mars takes us from the highest seats of power in the Ministries and embassies through the city’s private gardens and the homes of France’s oldest aristocratic families. Aimée discovers more connections than she thought possible between the clandestine “Gypsy” world and the moneyed ancien régime, ultimately leading her to the truth behind her father’s death…After all, for Aimée, murder is never far from home.
After 85 long years, Fatimah Abdullah is dying, and she knows when her time will come. In fact, it should come just nine days from tonight, the 992nd nightly visit of Scheherazade, the beautiful and immortal storyteller from the epic The Arabian Nights.
An epic saga of love and war, Shadow of the Swords tells the story of the Crusades—from the Muslim perspective.
1631. The Empress of India Mumtaz Mahal has died. Yet, rather than anoint one of his several other wives to take her place as Empress of India, Mughal King Shah Jahan anoints his seventeen-year-old daughter Jahanara as the next Queen of India.
A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family’s summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper, and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu’s secret and gains not only physical strength but also profound spiritual insight. Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu’s generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu’s soul-mate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.