A series of baffling murders among a group of imprisoned agents threatens the outcome of World War II in this chilling mystery from the New York Times bestselling author of Mr. Churchill’s Secretary. November, 1942. World War II is raging, and former spy Maggie Hope knows too much: what the British government is willing to do to keep its secrets, who is lying, who the double-crossers are. She knows exactly who is sending agents to their deaths. These are the reasons Maggie is isolated on a remote Scottish island, in a prison known as Killoch Castle. When one of her fellow inmates drops dead in the middle of his after-dinner drink—he’s only the first. As victims fall one by one, Maggie will have to call upon all her wits and skills to escape—not just certain death . . . but certain murder. For what’s the most important thing that Maggie Hope knows? She must survive. Praise for The Prisoner in the Castle “The colonel sums it up best on page ten: ‘If you take a pretty girl and teach her how to kill, it can cause problems.’ Not just problems—electrifying action and nonstop surprises. I loved this book!”—R. L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series “Another literary tour de force . . . From the book’s perfectly calibrated plot to its incisively etched characters, everything is handled with perfect finesse by the author.”—Poisoned Pen Newsletter “One pleasure of a mystery series is connecting with a character that changes and grows with each novel. . . . Maggie’s intelligence and loyalty to the war effort continue to evolve in [Susan Elia] MacNeal’s series. . . . Solid twists keep the plot of The Prisoner in the Castle churning until the surprise finale.”—Associated Press “A mystery . . . tailor-made for readers in the post-election, #MeToo era. . . . If you love a tricky puzzle that requires you to keep track of multiple alibis over time, this is your summer read.”—The Washington Post “Evocative.”—Publishers Weekly “MacNeal uses [Agatha] Christie’s And Then There Were None as a framework for a character-driven mystery/thriller that successfully emulates the original.”—Kirkus Reviews

Violaine, a devotee of books and learning, finds herself sold by her father to a mysterious nobleman to become his companion. Fearing herself at the mercy of a monster, Violaine instead succumbs to the seductive spell of her magical new home, and the love of a man she has never seen, who comes to her only in the darkness of night.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “entertaining [and] often-moving account” (The Wall Street Journal) of the remarkable POWs whose relentlessly creative attempts to escape a notorious Nazi prison embodied the spirit of resistance against fascism, from the author of The Spy and the Traitor “Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history.”—David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Prisoners of the Castle traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.

In this clever reworking of the classic folk song “Over in the Meadow,” readers meet villagers who spent their day spinning, cleaning, cooking, dancing, and more. The text counts up from one baby dragon to ten court jesters, and kids will enjoy counting along with each of the characters as they go about their daily work. At the end of the day, all the villagers look out their windows for a special surprise from their dragon neighbors. Readers will pore over illustrations filled with the same unexpected, warm humor of Boni Ashburn and Kelly Murphy’s first book, Hush, Little Dragon.

A series of baffling murders among a group of imprisoned agents threatens the outcome of World War II in this chilling mystery from the New York Times bestselling author of Mr. Churchill’s Secretary. November, 1942. World War II is raging, and former spy Maggie Hope knows too much: what the British government is willing to do to keep its secrets, who is lying, who the double-crossers are. She knows exactly who is sending agents to their deaths. These are the reasons Maggie is isolated on a remote Scottish island, in a prison known as Killoch Castle. When one of her fellow inmates drops dead in the middle of his after-dinner drink—he’s only the first. As victims fall one by one, Maggie will have to call upon all her wits and skills to escape—not just certain death . . . but certain murder. For what’s the most important thing that Maggie Hope knows? She must survive. Praise for The Prisoner in the Castle “The colonel sums it up best on page ten: ‘If you take a pretty girl and teach her how to kill, it can cause problems.’ Not just problems—electrifying action and nonstop surprises. I loved this book!”—R. L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps and Fear Street series “Another literary tour de force . . . From the book’s perfectly calibrated plot to its incisively etched characters, everything is handled with perfect finesse by the author.”—Poisoned Pen Newsletter “One pleasure of a mystery series is connecting with a character that changes and grows with each novel. . . . Maggie’s intelligence and loyalty to the war effort continue to evolve in [Susan Elia] MacNeal’s series. . . . Solid twists keep the plot of The Prisoner in the Castle churning until the surprise finale.”—Associated Press “A mystery . . . tailor-made for readers in the post-election, #MeToo era. . . . If you love a tricky puzzle that requires you to keep track of multiple alibis over time, this is your summer read.”—The Washington Post “Evocative.”—Publishers Weekly “MacNeal uses [Agatha] Christie’s And Then There Were None as a framework for a character-driven mystery/thriller that successfully emulates the original.”—Kirkus Reviews

In the tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song, this haunting, insightful, and surprisingly intimate portrait of Saddam Hussein provides “a brief, but powerful, meditation on the meaning of evil and power” (USA TODAY). The “captivating” (Military Times) The Prisoner in His Palace invites us to take a journey with twelve young American soldiers in the summer of 2006. Shortly after being deployed to Iraq, they learn their assignment: guarding Saddam Hussein in the months before his execution. Living alongside, and caring for, their “high value detainee and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions—about the judicial process, Saddam’s character, and the morality of modern war. Although the young soldiers’ increasingly intimate conversations with the once-feared dictator never lead them to doubt his responsibility for unspeakable crimes, the men do discover surprising new layers to his psyche that run counter to the media’s portrayal of him. Woven from firsthand accounts provided by many of the American guards, government officials, interrogators, scholars, spies, lawyers, family members, and victims, The Prisoner in His Palace shows two Saddams coexisting in one person: the defiant tyrant who uses torture and murder as tools, and a shrewd but contemplative prisoner who exhibits surprising affection, dignity, and courage in the face of looming death. In this thought-provoking narrative, Saddam, known as the “man without a conscience,” gets many of those around him to examine theirs. “A singular study exhibiting both military duty and human compassion” (Kirkus Reviews), The Prisoner in His Palace grants us “a behind-the-scenes look at history that’s nearly impossible to put down…a mesmerizing glimpse into the final moments of a brutal tyrant’s life” (BookPage).