Cardinal Black

“Relentlessly paced . . . As usual, McCammon dazzles the reader with gritty historical detail, vivid local color, and a cast of memorable grotesques.” —Publishers Weekly The year is 1703. The woman Matthew Corbett loves is rapidly deteriorating. A drug forced on her by criminal mastermind Professor Fell has destroyed her sanity. And the one thing that could save her—a book of potions—was stolen during an assault on the English village where she has been living under another name, an attack directed by a deranged man known as Cardinal Black. Matthew is a professional problem solver employed by an agency in New York, but this case is personal. To save Berry Grigsby, Matthew will journey to London with one of Fell’s henchmen and attend an auction to which Black has summoned unsavory characters from near and far—all vying to possess the powerful volume. But before Matthew can obtain the book and heal Berry, he must survive Cardinal Black . . . The “most intense yet” in the unique series that began with Speaks the Nightbird, Cardinal Black is a brutal and brilliant historical thriller from this New York Times–bestselling and Bram Stoker Award–winning author (The Florida Times-Union). Praise for the Matthew Corbett Novels “Excellent . . . full of tension and suspense.” —Stephen King on Speaks the Nightbird “Told with matchless insight into the human soul . . . deeply satisfying.” —Sandra Brown on Speaks the Nightbird “The Corbett novels are rich, atmospheric stories, the kind of historical mystery that makes the reader feel as though he really has stepped back in time. Matthew is a very well designed character, very much a man of his time but also ahead of his time, as though he has stepped out of a modern-day crime lab into the early eighteenth century.” —Booklist

Tyree Daye’s Cardinal is a generous atlas that serves as a poetic “Green Book”— the travel-cum-survival guide for black motorists negotiating racist America in the mid-twentieth century. Interspersed with images of Daye’s family and upbringing, which have been deliberately blurred, it also serves as an imperfect family album. Cardinal traces the South’s burdened interiors and the interiors of a black male protagonist attempting to navigate his many departures and returns home —a place that could both lovingly rear him and coolly annihilate him. With the language of elegy and praise, intoning regional dialect and a deliberately disruptive cadence, Daye carries the voices of ancestors and blues poets, while stretching the established zones of the black American vernacular. In tones at once laden and magically transforming, he self-consciously plots his own Great Migration: “if you see me dancing a twos step/I’m sending a starless code/we’re escaping everywhere.” These are poems to be read aloud.

Book 3 in the John Cardinal series It’s spring in Algonquin Bay, and the blackflies are driving people a little mad. Detectives John Cardinal and Lise Delorme have a strange case on their hands: a young woman has wandered bug-bitten out of the Algonquin Bay bush with a gunshot wound to the head. Cardinal becomes obsessed with finding out who the woman is and who is trying to kill her. When the body of a local biker, Wombat Guthrie, is found in a cave, it seems the two cases are related—and the link appears to be a drug dealer and self-proclaimed shaman who calls himself Red Bear.

Laura Cardinal, an investigator with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, is called to a small town where the body of a teenage girl is found bearing all the signs of a serial sexual predator. The case reminds Laura of the murder of her schoolmate nearly two decades earlier. When another girl is taken, Laura races against the clock. Original.

This historical adventure filled with menace and mayhem by a New York Times–bestselling author “keep[s] the story twisting unpredictably. . . . [A] page-turner” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Matthew Corbett, professional problem solver, has left New York for Charles Town on an assignment from his agency—and vanished. As his friend Hudson Greathouse sets out to track him down, he has no idea that Matthew is across the sea in London’s notorious Newgate Prison, accused of murdering a Prussian count and targeted by a masked vigilante. Now Hudson, accompanied by Matthew’s beloved Berry Grigsby, must sail to England in hopes of saving him in time . . . Featuring Daniel Defoe as a fellow inmate at Newgate, this whirlwind tale of mystery and adventure comes from Robert McCammon, the multiple award-winning author of five previous novels featuring Matthew Corbett, as well as such classics as Swan Song and Boy’s Life. “Rousing . . . Matthew quickly becomes embroiled in mysteries involving fellow inmate Daniel Defoe; a gin-running street gang, the Black-Eyed Broodies; a kidnapped Italian opera singer; and a masked avenger.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Praise for the Matthew Corbett Novels “Matthew is a very well designed character, very much a man of his time but also ahead of his time, as though he has stepped out of a modern-day crime lab into the early eighteenth century.” —Booklist “This popular series takes us to a long forgotten time with characters who never fail to entertain.” —The Florida Times-Union

Seventeen-year-old Cardinal has escaped the virus that ravaged his town, leaving its victims alive but without their memories. He chooses to remain in the quarantined zone, caring for a group of orphaned kids in a mountain camp with the help of the former brutal school bully, now transformed by the virus into his best friend. But then a strong-willed and mysterious young woman appears, and the closed-off world Cardinal has created begins to crumble. A thrilling, fast-paced work of speculative fiction for teens, from a bestselling author, Black River Falls is an unforgettable story about survival, identity, and family.

Welcome to seventeenth-century Paris, where intrigue, duels, and spies are rife and Cardinal Richelieu’s men may be prevailed upon to risk life and limb in the name of France at a moment’s notice. And with war on the horizon, the defense of the nation has never been more pressing. Danger is rising from the south—an insidious plot that could end with a huge dragon-shaped shadow falling over France, a shadow cast by dragons quite unlike the pet dragonets that roam the cities like stray cats, or the tame wyverns men ride like horses, high over the Parisian rooftops. These dragons and their descendants are ancient, terrible, and powerful ... and their plans contain little room for the lives or freedom of men. Cardinal Richelieu has nowhere else to turn; Captain La Fargue and his elite group of men, the Cardinal’s Blades, must turn the tide. They must hold the deadly Black Claw cult at bay, root out traitors to the crown, rescue prisoners, and fulfill their mission for the Cardinal, for their country, but above all for themselves. It’s death or victory. And the victory has never been less certain.

When Detective Laura Cardinal, haunted by her own personal tragedy, investigates the brutal murder of two newlyweds in Arizona, she discovers that one victim has ties to an underground organization.

"Intelligent and highly nuanced… This book may bring tears to your eyes." -- San Francisco Chronicle Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter’s world overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls—while the actual world she’s inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it—from Thomas Jefferson’s celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism’s older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.

"The Red and the Black" is a reflective novel about the rise of poor, intellectually gifted people to High Society. Set in 19th century France it portrays the era after the exile of Napoleon to St. Helena. the influential, sharp epigrams in striking prose, leave reader almost as intrigued by the author's talent as the surprising twists that occur in the arduous love life.