In 1905, ten-year-old Billy is taken from an orphanage to live with an aunt and an uncle of whose existence he was previously unaware. He enjoys his first taste of family life until his work in a coal mine and his involvement with a union bring trouble. He then joins a circus in hopes of finding his father.

Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two World Wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding--sometimes cruelly - succeeding generations to the place that made them.

It is 1902, and a bright, inexperienced young man named Isaac Bell, only two years out of his apprenticeship at the Van Dorn Detective Agency, has an urgent message for his boss. Hired to hunt for radical unionist saboteurs in the coal mines, he is witness to a terrible accident that makes him think that something else is going on, that provocateurs are at work and bigger stakes are in play. Little does he know just how big they are. Given exactly

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When Isaac Bell attempts to decipher the forbidding deaths of nine men, he encounters a secret so powerful it could dictate the fate of the world in this riveting thriller by the number one New York Times best-selling author. A century apart, NUMA Director Dirk Pitt and detective Isaac Bell team up to unlock the truth about the most famous maritime disaster of all time. In the present day, Pitt makes a daring rescue from inside an antiquated submersible...

Detective Isaac Bell's investigation into an attempted assassination brings him to the construction site of the Panama Canal--and straight into a nest of vipers--in the latest adventure in the #1 New York Times-bestselling series from Clive Cussler. Detective Isaac Bell's wife has said that he is always in the wrong place at the right time. This is certainly the case when Bell thwarts the assassination of a U.S. Senator shortly after meeting the...

Pellar is an orphan taken in by Masterharper Zist. Though born mute, Pellar is a gifted tracker, and when Zist sets off to take over as harper for Natalon's coal-mining camp, Pellar-along with his fire-lizard, Chitter-joins him on a secret mission of his own: to find out if reported thefts of coal are the work of the Shunned, criminals condemned to a life of wandering and hardship. Halla is one of the children of the Shunned. Though innocent of their...