"Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life--from...

Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776 is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned solders. And it is the story of the British commander, william Howe, and his highly discipline redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with valor too little known. But it is the American commander-in-chief...

Discovering a medieval book and a cache of letters, a motherless American girl becomes the latest in a series of historians, including her late father, who investigate the possible surviving legacy of Vlad the Impaler.

Forty-two-year-old Jessie is summoned home to Egret Island off the coast of South Carolina after her obsessively devout mother inexplicably cuts off her own finger, and finds herself oddly exhilarated to be free of her husband, and wildly attracted to Brother Thomas, a monk who has yet to take his final vows.

Charged with police brutality after a routine arrest goes wrong, lieutenant Lindsay Boxer waits for her trial in the town of Half Moon Bay, where she discovers a link between a string of murders and a case she worked on years earlier.

When fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold accompanies his individualistic grandmother on an expedition to find a humanoid Beast in the Amazon, he experiences ancient wonders and a supernatural world as he tries to avert disaster for the Indians.