Prometheus Books

It's autumn on the Sonoma Coast, and Claudia Simcoe is sure that the gourmet harvest dinner being held at her artisan marketplace will wipe away any memories of the unpleasantness last summer. But then the newly installed video surveillance system shows local lawyer Clark Gowan removing something from a hidden compartment in the marketplace walls... and Claudia's visit to his office the next day reveals that he's dead, shot with one of his own vintage guns.

Pepper Reece, owner of the Spice Shop in Seattle's Pike Place Market, adores Christmas, and though she skips the Victorian costumes that go with this year's Dickensian theme, she's thrilled to celebrate the past and present in such a magical place.

Bern, the medieval capital of Switzerland. Known for its neat cobblestoned streets, charming thirteenth-century clocktower -- and vandalism, riots and murders? A street party in Bern morphs into a fierce riot one hot summer night when many hours and canisters of teargas later, a young man is found beaten to death with a policeman's club. That same Sunday, twenty miles away, an elderly organic farmer turns up on his land in the village of Haldiz, dead and drenched with pesticide. Bernese police detective Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli, her younger colleague, are thrown together by the merging of the two murder cases. Despite her boss's new allegations, Giuliana isn't convinced, especially when Renzo uncovers some new pertinent information. Is anything really as it seems, or will some new evidence expose an elaborate scam in Haldiz?

Kim Hays' second novel serves us a suspicious drowning, ugly secrets, and unresolved romantic tension . . .

What is man's true nature? How did capitalism gain such a foothold on Western society? What is alienation and how does it threaten to undermine the proletariat? This book addresses these questions. It offers Karl Marx's theory of human nature and an analysis of emerging capitalism's degenerative impact on man's sense of self and his potential.

Paris, 1890. When Sherlock Holmes finds himself chasing an art dealer through the streets of Paris, he's certain he's smoked out one of the principals of a cunning forgery ring responsible for the theft of some of the Louvre's greatest masterpieces.