FROM TRUE-CRIME LEGEND ANN RULE comes this riveting story of a young woman whose life ended too soon-and a determined mother's eleven-year crusade to clear her daughter's name.

It was nine days before Christmas 1998, and thirty-two-year-old Ronda Reynolds was getting ready to travel from Seattle to Spokane to visit her mother and brother and grandmother before the holidays. Ronda's second marriage was dissolving after less than a year, her career as a pioneering female Washington State Trooper had ended, but she was optimistic about starting over again. "I'm actually looking forward to getting on with my life," she told her mother earlier the night before. "I just need a few days with you guys." Barb Thompson, Ronda's mother, who had met her daughter's second husband only once before, was just happy that Ronda was coming home.

At 6:20 that morning, Ron Reynolds called 911 and told the dispatcher his wife was dead. She had committed suicide, he said, although he hadn't heard the gunshot and he didn't know if she had a pulse. EMTs arrived, detectives arrived, the coroner's deputy arrived, and a postmortem was conducted. Lewis County Coroner Terry Wilson, who neither visited the death scene nor attended the autopsy, declared the manner of Ronda's death as "undetermined." Over the next eleven years, Coroner Wilson would change that manner of death from "undetermined" to "suicide," back to "undetermined"-and then back to "suicide" again.

But Barb Thompson never for one moment believed her daughter committed suicide. Neither did Detective Jerry Berry or ballistics expert Marty Hayes or attorney Royce Ferguson or dozens of Ronda's friends. For eleven grueling years, through the ups and downs of the legal system and its endless delays, these people and others helped Barb Thompson fight to strike that painful word from her daughter's death certificate.

On November 9, 2009, a precedent-setting hearing was held to determine whether Coroner Wilson's office had been derelict in its duty in investigating the death of Ronda Reynolds. Veteran true-crime writer Ann Rule was present at that hearing, hoping to unbraid the tangled strands of conflicting statements and mishandled evidence and present all sides of this haunting case and to determine, perhaps, what happened to Ronda Reynolds, in the chill still of that tragic December night.

A magnificent work of history, biography and adventure.

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expedtions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly died of disease at the Front, one was hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.

In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: "The price of life is death." Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but "a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day." As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.

For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

On September 21, 2010, Hurricane Igor ripped through the eastern part of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the devastation left in its wake was far beyond what anybody had expected or anticipated. These are the stunning photographs that documented the "storm of the century," showing the shocking destruction that Igor left behind.

The Story of the Unsinkable Titanic revisits the golden age of ocean-going travel, when White Star's newest liner seemed to have pushed back the boundaries of technological achievement. Using contemporaneous accounts and facsimile reports from the archives of Associated Newspapers, it describes the tragic unfolding of events that led to 1,500 souls being lost in the icy waters of the Atlantic; events which served as a grim reminder that for all man's ingenuity, he as not master of all he surveyed.

23 cm x 30 cm 128 page hardcover.

Every day we open our newspapers, turn on the television and radio or log on to the internet and we are assailed with tales of malefeasance and misdemeanour. Some are instantly forgettable while others remain in the memory due to their sheer horrific, gruesome, memorable crimes ever committed. It features serial killers, cannibals, rapists, robbers, burglars, muggers, forgers, pirates, gangsters, cop killers, kidnappers and plain old murderers. It show's man's (and woman's) inhumanity to man, his ingenuity when it comes to thinking up ever more devious crimes and also his stupidity when he gets caught.
19 cm x 23 cm 544 page softcover.

On 10th April, 1912, the RMS Titanic set sail on her fateful voyage from Southhampton to New York. Among those on board were 13 newly-wed couples - some simply enjoying the trip of a lifetime, others crossing to America with dreams of starting a new life together.
Titanic Love Stories tells the tales of thesehoneymooners. Featuring haunting portraits of all the sweethearts, these true stories of love, tragedy, heroism and hope are more remarkable than any work of romantic fiction. The love stories include:
-Multi-millionarie John Jacob Astor and his much younger wife Madeline, who had eloped to Europe to escape teh gossip-mongers back home in America. Only Madeline and their unborn child would make it home.
-Daniel Marvin, son of a pioneering movie-maker, who seemed to have a bright future working among the Hollywood greats. The groom helped his young bride, Mary, into the lifeboat, but sacrificed himself.
-Edward and Ethel Beane, who had saved for six long years before marrying and embarking on a new life in America, only to lose everything when the ship went down.

16 cm x 24 cm 192 page hardcover.

Ripped from the headlines, the horrific and astonishing true story of the double life of Russell Williams, who was at once a respected figure in the Canadian military and a ruthless sado-sexual serial criminal and murderer.

In the annals of psycho-killers, Colonel Russell Williams may well be unique. A decorated air force colonel, Williams was, for years, living a double life as a sado-sexual home invader, burglar, pedophile and, ultimately, murderer. A model officer and elite pilot, he was trusted with flying international dignitaries including Queen Elizabeth, as well as commanding Canada''s most important military airbase. Yet his dark and violent secret life included breaking into 82 homes of girls and women; thefts of vast amounts of lingerie (which he dressed in); two bizarre sexual assaults that left an uncomprehending Ontario village on a knife''s-edge; and eventually, two rape-murders. When police raided Williams''s home - a home he shared with his wife, a respected professional in her own right who was apparently completely unaware of her husband''s unconscionable double life - they found hundreds of pairs of women''s underwear, meticulously organized and catalogued. In this book, veteran Globe and Mail crime reporter Tim Appleby chronicles a true story that could have been lifted from the darkest pages of pulp fiction, one that offers fascinating - and troubling - insights on human psychopathology.


From the Hardcover edition.

In this "artful, informative, and delightful (book)" ("New York Review of Books"), Diamond offers a convincing explanation of the way the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Photos.

The bestselling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven delivers a stunning, eloquent account of a remarkable young man's haunting journey.

Like the men whose epic stories Jon Krakauer has told in his previous bestsellers, Pat Tillman was an irrepressible individualist and iconoclast. In May 2002, Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan.

Though obvious to most of the two dozen soldiers on the scene that a ranger in Tillman's own platoon had fired the fatal shots, the Army aggressively maneuvered to keep this information from Tillman's wife, other family members, and the American public for five weeks following his death. During this time, President Bush repeatedly invoked Tillman's name to promote his administration's foreign policy. Long after Tillman's nationally televised memorial service, the Army grudgingly notified his closest relatives that he had "probably" been killed by friendly fire while it continued to dissemble about the details of his death and who was responsible.

In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer draws on Tillman's journals and letters, interviews with his wife and friends, conversations with the soldiers who served alongside him, and extensive research on the ground in Afghanistan to render an intricate mosaic of this driven, complex, and uncommonly compelling figure as well as the definitive account of the events and actions that led to his death. Before he enlisted in the army, Tillman was familiar to sports aficionados as an undersized, overachieving Arizona Cardinals safety whose virtuosity in the defensive backfield was spellbinding. With his shoulder-length hair, outspoken views, and boundless intellectual curiosity, Tillman was considered a maverick. America was fascinated when he traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a buzz cut. Sent first to Iraq-a war he would openly declare was "illegal as hell" -and eventually to Afghanistan, Tillman was driven by complicated, emotionally charged, sometimes contradictory notions of duty, honor, justice, patriotism, and masculine pride, and he was determined to serve his entire three-year commitment. But on April 22, 2004, his life would end in a barrage of bullets fired by his fellow soldiers.

Krakauer chronicles Tillman's riveting, tragic odyssey in engrossing detail highlighting his remarkable character and personality while closely examining the murky, heartbreaking circumstances of his death. Infused with the power and authenticity readers have come to expect from Krakauer's storytelling, Where Men Win Glory exposes shattering truths about men and war. 

Erik Larson-author of #1 bestseller IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS-intertwines the true tale of the 1893 World''s Fair and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.

A lavishly illustrated history of the lives and reigns of the kings and queens of England - from the House of Wessex to the House of Windsor.
Lively accounts of the lives and reigns of 59 English monarchs from Alfred the Great to Elizabeth II.
Detailed timelines, key biographical facts, feature boxes, and quotations for each monarch.
Generously illustrate with 135 full-colour images.
Includes complete family trees for each royal house, and an index of names and events.
A beatufiully illustrated royal keepsake and an informative and reliable work of popular history.

20 cm x 26 cm 256 page hardcover.