In 1852 Ohio, twelve-year-old Owen steals aboard a floating circus called the River Palace, with nothing more in mind than catching a little of the show. But then a free black man named Solomon offers to take him on as an assistant animal keeper, and Owen discovers a family among the ragtag members of the circus-including a young elephant named Little Bet. A brush with yellowfever in New Orleans and a devastating storm threaten the boat and its crew. But it's the menace of slave catchers that poses the greatest danger of all, and that will put Owen's loyalty to Solomon and Little Bet to the test. This is a memorable tale of prejudice, race, and the relationships that transcend them. Inspired by the riverboat circuses of the nineteenth century, it also brings little known historical facts to life. TRACIE VAUGHN ZIMMER has worked as a special education teacher and reading specialist. She is also the creator of more than 80 teacher's guides for numerous publishers and has published poetry books as well as the novel Reaching for Sun. Tracie lives outside Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband and two children. www.tracievaughnzimmer.com PRAISE FOR REACHING FOR SUN: "Like taking slow bites from a piece of homemade lemon pie-sharp sweet and honest." -Linda Sue Park, Newbery Medal winner "Josie's strength shines as she handles sadness and loss as well as recovery and progress."-Kirkus Reviews, starred review

May 1565. Suleiman the Magnificent, emperor of the Ottomans, has declared a jihad against the Knights of Saint John the Baptist. The largest armada of all time approaches the Knights€™ Christian stronghold on the island of Malta. The Turks know the Knights as the €œThe Hounds of Hell.€ The Knights call themselves €œThe Religion.€ In Messina, Sicily, a French countess, Carla la Penautier, seeks a passage to Malta in a quest to find the son taken from her at his birth twelve years ago. The only man with the expertise and daring to help her is a Rabelaisian soldier of fortune, arms dealer, former janissary, and strapping Saxon adventurer by the name of Mattias Tannhauser. He agrees to accompany the lady to Malta, where, amidst the most spectacular siege in military history, they must try to find the boy - whose name they do not know and whose face they have never seen€“and pluck him from the jaws of Holy War.

A World War II Ace Seeks Peace -Only to Find a New WarWhen he resettled in Asturia two years after World War II, former fighter pilot David Bridgeman believed that he had found peace-until the day when he flew out to a remote mountain airport to investigate the unexplained crash of a fellow pilot. There, he makes a terrifying discovery that leads to others-and finally to a plot masterminded by a fugitive secret police officer to seize power at gunpoint. Bridgeman quickly finds himself facing a new war, racing against time to train a squadron of new pilots who do not completely accept him, as the plot to crush Asturia's nascent democracy marches toward execution . . .

Police work is fun, and unorthodox, in the 1950s and '60s. The booking of a dead man; making a prisoner pay for his taxi ride to jail; and the disappearance of a corpse are all part of a day's work. In The Copper Indian, the reader has an inside look at the skimming of drugs and money, and learns how bounty driven narcs make arrests based on intuition and profiling. This novel combines the suspense, humor, and action encountered by an idealistic and frustrated Native American, Jim Utze, when he joins the NYPD, one of the most storied cultures of society in the mid-twentieth century. Jim longs for the days of the Wild West when good people helped the weak and oppressed. The Lone Ranger radio show that he listened to in the 1930s as a youth provides the heroes he wants to emulate. All too often, however, a police situation arises where it appears that the end can justify the means. When the erosion of his integrity becomes too prevalent, Detective Utze questions his continuing acceptance of the system. Even his girlfriend Ruth, an Israeli mystery woman, becomes an enigma, especially when Jim suspects she may have played a part in the use of his personal weapon in an assassination. The author has almost forty years' involvement in law enforcement, with active experience at the municipal, state and federal levels, advancing to Chief in the first two and FBI Special Agent Supervisor in the latter. In academia, Dr. Morgan rose to the levels of tenured Associate Professor of Police Management and Chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Director of the Police Science Division at the University of Georgia. His doctorate in theology exemplifies the diversity of his background.