Araminta Jewell is one of the beauties of her day. Even her marriage to the staid and ugly Sir Martin Culthorpe has not discouraged her hordes of admirers. It is during her first sitting for a portrait painted by the fashionable French artist Jean-Paul Villemot that the architect Christopher Redmayne meets the lovely Lady Culthorpe, although he has heard much about her through his brother Henry, one of her most ardent pursuers. Before the portrait can be finished and revealed, however, Sir Martin is murdered. Joining forces with his good friend, the puritan constable Jonathan Bale, Christopher embarks on a quest to discover the killer's real identity. In his latest Restoration mystery, Edward Marston, the master of historical detail, reveals the dark and often debauched depths of seventeenth-century London society.

Painting prolifically for nearly three decades, artist Christopher St. Leger has created a luminescent body of work that exhibits an artist's evolving mastery of light and mood. The resulting collection is a journey through places that somehow exist in both familiarity and ambiguity.Warm watercolor and oil vignettes that extract wonder from the mundane; that summon majesty from the ordinary. Beautiful moments that reveal the tension in the ostensibly serene; that miraculously invoke the ephemeral to stand still. St. Leger's work also displays an artist's thoughtful command of craft and persistent preoccupation with dimension and place. Each image is a study of technical dimensions - the measurable extent of how something is defined in relation to physical space, but also existential dimensions - the unspoken depth of the moment at hand. And each image is a philosophical survey of place - a personal voyage through the everyday places that exist around us, but also a deeply personal journey seeking to understand his own place in the world. More so, by surveying St. Leger's entirety of work, we come to understand how joyful and essential he has deemed the act of painting. We discover a self-taught artist deeply loyal to his creative calling and stringently dedicated to practicing his craft. Highlighted in the following pages is the result of that dedication. A collection that not only reveals St. Leger's impressive creative and technical evolutions, but also his subtle internal evolutions that resonate deeply with those who engage with his work.

Maximalism and Visual Delight is the first book to explore the contributions of witty contemporary genre painter Jeanne Leighton-Lundberg Clarke and her meaningful role in the development of Maximalism.

In this journal, the author describes his year-long walking adventures at the Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area, a rare prairie remnant just seven miles northwest of Baltimore, Maryland. In his quest to make this wild place his "natural home" throughout the course of four distinct seasons, Wennerstrom examines and contemplates rocks and minerals, plants, animals, prairies, floodplains, woodlands, lakes, ponds, pastures, mines and mills, Indian artifacts, as well as local legends and folklore.