John Bedford Lloyd

The Caribbean, 1665. Pirate captain Charles Hunter, with backing from a powerful ally, assembles a crew of ruffians to take the Spanish galleon, "El Trinidad," guarded by the bloodthirsty Cazalla, a favorite commander of the Spanish king himself.

MIT scientist and federal agent John Kenner embarks on a critical search to find and stop the head of a mainstream environmentalist group whose rage over losing an important source of funding leads him to devise a series of weather disasters and instill fear in the public over global warming.

The struggle to perform well is universal: each of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the line with every decision. Author Gawande explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable. Gawande's stories take us to battlefield...

"At 85 years old, Alejandro 'Sandy' Stern, a brilliant defense lawyer with his health failing but spirit intact, is on the brink of retirement. But when his old friend Dr. Kiril Pafko, a former Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, is faced with charges of insider trading, fraud, and murder, his entire life's work is put in jeopardy, and Stern decides to take on one last trial. In a case that will provide the defining coda to both men's accomplished lives,...

In this landmark autobiography, five years in the making, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, elected to the Senate in 1962 tells his extraordinary personal story--of his legendary family, politics, and fifty years at the center of national events. He discusses his distinguished career, his relationships with his brothers John and Robert Kennedy, and the tragedies that have befallen his family over the many years.

Just two years out of law school, Nick Rey is on the career fast track at a hot Miami law firm when he is suddenly plunged headfirst into a dangerous bid to save his father. Matthew Rey has been kidnapped while on business in Columbia's exotic port city of Cartagena. The ransom demand of three million dollars is far more than the Rey family can ever hope to raise. Fortunately, Matthew had purchased an insurance policy to protect against just such...

Three men are found dead in the locked second floor office of a Honolulu building, with no sign of struggle except for the ultra-fine, razor-sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot, nearly invisible to the human eye. In the lush forests of Oahu, groundbreaking technology has ushered in a revolutionary era of biological prospecting. Trillions of microorganisms, tens of thousands of bacteria species, are being...

Reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist now being used in medicine, aviation, the armed services, homeland security, investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.

Former trauma surgeon Dr. Nick Garrity, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing a suicide bombing in Afghanistan and currently offering medical assistance to the homeless in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, helps nurse Jillian Coates investigate the suspicious suicide of her sister, and, together, they discover links between the woman's death, a CIA cover-up, a professional assassin, and Nick himself.

John Sedgwick recounts the decade-long fight between General William J. Palmer, the Civil War hero leading the "little family" of his Rio Grande, coming down from Denver, hoping to showcase the majesty of the Rockies, and William Barstow Strong, the hard-nosed manager of the corporate-minded Santa Fe, venturing west from Kansas. What begins as an accidental rivalry when the two lines cross in Colorado soon evolves into an all-out battle as each man...