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Wildly entertaining, Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother in vivid detail, evoking Dietrich the woman, her legendary career, and her world. Opening with Dietrich’s childhood in Berlin, we meet an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress, whose own mother equated the stage with a world of vagabonds and thieves.Dietrich would quickly rise to stardom on the Berlin stage in the 1920s with her sharp wit and bisexuality—wearing the top hat and tails that revolutionized our concept of beauty and femininity.  She would play vulgarity but not become in; startle the world but still maintain the aloofness of an aristocrat.As Riva herself remembers, “At age three, I knew quite definitely that I didn’t have a mother, I belonged to a queen.” Marlene Dietrich comes alive in these pages in all of her incarnations: as muse, artistic collaborator, bonafide movie star, box-office poison, lover, wife, and mother.Dietrich would stand up to the Nazis and galvanize American troops, eventually earning the Congressional Medal of Freedom.  There were her rich artistic relationships with Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, Morocco, Shanghai Express), Colette, Erich Maria Remarque, Noël Coward and Cole Porter, and her heady romances.  In her final years, she would make herself visibly invisible, devoting herself to the immortality of her legend.Maria Riva’s biography of her mother has the depth, range, and resonance of a novel and captures the conviction and passion of its remarkable subject.

In winter of 1912, Henri Matisse—forty-two, nearing mid-career, and yet to find lasting critical acceptance, public admiration, or financial security since exploding to the forefront of the avant-garde in 1905 with his iconoclastic Fauve paintings—was struggling. Once the vanguard leader, the Parisian avant-garde now considered him passé. His important early collectors, including Gertrude and Leo Stein, had stopped buying his work and were fully championing Picasso, and he had exhibited little in the last few years. In the face of Cubism that was now dominating the art scene, Matisse needed to get away from Paris in order to advance his distinctive artistic vision.Almost on a whim, he went to Tangier. Matisse had already been profoundly inspired by Islamic art, and was primed for his arrival in the Moroccan city where such art was integrated into everyday life. Despite the challenges of rain, insomnia, depression, and finding models, the sojourn was such a success he returned the following winter, which would lead to even greater artistic triumph.Matisse in Morocco tells the story of the artist's groundbreaking time in Tangier and how it altered Matisse’s development as a painter and indelibly marked his work for the next four decades. Through Koehler's research and travel, we experience Matisse's time in Tangier, the paintings and their subjects, his relationships with his wife Amélie and his two important collectiors, and then come to understand the impact Morocco—its light, colors, culture, and artistic traditions—had on his art. From Landscape Viewed From a Window, to Zorah on the Terrace, from Kasbah Gate to the dream-like tableau Moroccan Café, these works from Morocco are now recognized as some of the most significant and dazzling of Matisse’s illustrious career.

One quiet, snow-covered Sunday morning in Bruges, a prominent German business executive is found dead in the streets, apparently due to the side-effects of alcohol, but there is a something about the autopsy that does not add up for Van In. When he questions the businessman’s friend, a Dutchman, he too is found dead the next morning, burned to death in a house fire. When there is an explosion in the middle of a popular tourist area in downtown Bruges, Van In struggles to find the connection between the three incidents, but no one comes forward to claim responsibility for this terrorist attack. Just an anonymous letter to the police, threatening more bombings unless they cooperate with a series of greedy demands, which would undermine the entire city government. Aided by the spunky and beautiful assistant D. A. Hannelore Maartens, Van In finds himself enmeshed in the case of his career that threatens not just the lives of countless of innocent people, but the heart of the city he loves.

2025 Edgar Award finalist Oprah Daily ranked #1 of the “best true crime books of all time.” A riveting narrative that pieces together the life and murder of Black socialite Lita McClinton Sullivan—and the journey to bring her true killer to justice. The 1987 murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan sent shockwaves through the affluent Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, Georgia like few other crimes before it. The neighborhood, with its stately mansions and top-tier schools, was simply not the kind of place where women were gunned down in cold blood in broad daylight. How many socialites had enemies so dangerous they would be murdered by a hitman pretending to deliver roses on an early winter morning? Lita was an intelligent, accomplished, and stunning Black woman from a respected Atlanta family. Her interracial marriage to white millionaire Jim Sullivan, who hailed from working-class Boston, was a newsworthy occurrence in 1970s Georgia. For a while, the couple made the marriage work, but it wasn’t long before Jim’s roving eye and controlling nature put Lita on edge. When he bought a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida (without telling her), the façade of their life together began to crumble. Finally, after a decade of marriage, she loaded her belongings in a U-Haul and never looked back. But as the legal battle over the divorce raged and Jim’s financial outlook grew precarious, he had a chance encounter with a long-haul trucker, a smooth-talking ex-con who said he could he’d "take care" of Jim’s wife problem. . . . In A Devil Went Down to Georgia, award-winning writer Deb Miller Landau details the shocking events that followed Lita’s murder in 1987, including the surprising lack of evidence, racial bias in the justice system, and the international manhunt for Lita’s killer. Full of twists and turns, legal battles, and the McClinton family’s unrelenting dedication to justice, Landau's rigorous investigation is the first complete account of this tragic American crime.

From the moment radiation was discovered in the late nineteenth century, nuclear science has had a rich history of innovative scientific exploration and discovery, coupled with mistakes, accidents, and downright disasters. Mahaffey, a long-time advocate of continued nuclear research and nuclear energy, looks at each incident in turn and analyzes what happened and why, often discovering where scientists went wrong when analyzing past meltdowns.Every incident has lead to new facets in understanding about the mighty atom—and Mahaffey puts forth what the future should be for this final frontier of science that still holds so much promise.