The latest in Cornwell's series about the master archer Thomas of Hookton takes him deep into the Hundred Years War to a monastery where he is sent by the king. Thomas is supposed to recover a diary filled with clues to the Holy Grail, but he becomes involved first with a bloodthirsty band of marauding Scotsmen and then the arch-sadist Dominican, Bernard deTaillebourg, who also wants the diary.

Someone will stop at nothing to get a leather case belonging to a certain Dr. Egan, who has invented an engine that runs on seawater. First, these unknown villains sink Egan's cruise ship, killing the doctor but failing to obtain the case. It falls into the hands of fellow passenger Kelly Egan--the doctor's beautiful daughter. She is rescued from the sinking ship by Cussler's series hero Dirk Pitt, who happened to be in the area aboard his research vessel. Now Pitt finds himself, once again, at the center of a complex, high-tech, international thriller.

In the years after World War II, a veteran and fisherman named Noah Locke settles in the town of Bowerton, and his entry into the local fishing contest sparks a tragedy.

"The Vampire Chronicles" continue. With the body of Lestat lying comatose nearby, 500-year-old Armand, first introduced in "Interview with the Vampire", tells the story of his life: his childhood in Istanbul, his enslavement, both sexual and vampiric, to the ancient vampire Marius, and his devotion to his non-vampire children.

An apparently dead woman turns out to be alive and kicking--or at least, alive and ready to grab hostages--in the fifth suspenseful installment in the Jane Rizzoli/Maura Isles series. Medical examiner Maura Isles is extremely startled when she observes faint signs of life in a battered young woman lying in the morgue, but that's nothing to her astonishment when the newly revived woman subsequently kills a security guard and takes a number of captives at the hospital, including Maura's friend and colleague Detective Jane Rizzoli, who's in the throes of labor.

Aubrey Wallace is a simpleminded man who leaves his family to go with Dotty Johnson, a half-crazed woman who kidnaps an 18-month-old girl and travels with her for the next five years before the couple tries to ransom her.

Lincoln Rhyme and his partner Amelia Sachs are up against their toughest case yet--a magician known as the Conjuror has been killing seemingly random New Yorkers every few hours. But why? And how will they stop him?

Delia Hopkins is living a placid enough life in New Hampshire with her little daughter, and is about to finally marry the child's father, Eric, a lawyer. Then, suddenly Delia's life bursts wide open: her adored father, Andrew, is arrested for kidnapping--a crime that goes back 28 years, to when Delia was four years old. It was Delia herself whom her father kidnapped, whisking her away from the drunken mother Delia thought had died years ago. This bizarre, long-held secret explains the odd fragments of memory Delia has been struggling to identify. With Eric is enlisted as Andrew's lawyer, and her old friend (who is in love with her) Fitz covering the case for the local paper, Delia finds herself at the center of a tangled web of events, including a reunion with her Mexican mother, now a recovered alcoholic and a revered healer. The story is told from several points of view as the many fascinating layers of the story are revealed.

VANITY FAIR, Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband; when he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. (The chapter entitled "How to Live on Nothing" is a classic.) Thackeray's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero," is understating the case; his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But VANITY FAIR has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction.

Using his fictional alter-ego, Jean Duluoz, Kerouac chronicles his life from Lowell, Massachusetts to Manhattan.