A cruise ship officer from Hong Kong disappears during a port stop in Holyhead on the North Wales coast and a missing person investigation turns up no leads. On the same cruise, an international police operation to break an art smuggling ring loses track of three valuable Russian paintings thought to be on board. Four months later the younger sister of the missing sailor becomes a student at Bangor University, nearby. The Metropolitan Police Art Crime Unit wants to know why she is in the UK and whether it has any bearing on their case. Constable Catrin Sayer is looking for promotion and a new role away from drug squad work in Brixton. Coincidence and her Welsh background lead her to go undercover and assist the investigation. She is twenty-four at the time; keen, ambitious, trying to balance her work as a police officer with her interests as an artist, a ceramic decorator.

Times are tough in 1938 during the Great Depression when eighteen-year- old Leslie Charles hears that the navy shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, is hiring college students. A talented musician endowed with exceptional math skills, Leslie believes hes a good candidate for work now that he has one year of college under his belt at Mars Hill College in Marsh County, Virginia. Leaving his parents, siblings, and the rest of his family behind in Asheville, North Carolina, Leslie becomes a welders helper at the yard, and soon the lure of the navy snags him. He becomes an enlisted man, endures basic training, and begins his journey both as a sailor and as a man. A novel of military fiction, China Sailor narrates the story of Leslies coming-of- age, including his life as a sailor, his experiences in China during its civil war and its war with Japan, and his personal relationships with women. It provides a glimpse into this exciting time in history leading up to the start of World War II.

This volume comprises six interlocking novels which chart the wild lives of star-crossed lovers Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune. The bizarre and varied characters of the stories inhabit a surreal world where paradoxes abound.

On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Barry Gifford's international bestseller, Wild at Heart, as well as the anniversary of the Palme d'Or–winning film adaptation by director David Lynch, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels presents all of the novels and novellas that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, "the Romeo and Juliet of the South": Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango (also made into a feature film), Sailor’s Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo’s Kiss, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, and The Imagination of the Heart.

Richard Bell Davies was one of the most important characters in the history of naval aviation. Despite a traditional naval education - he was among the last cadets to be trained under sail - he was quick to grasp the potential of aircraft, and backed his vision by privately learning to fly. This allowed him to join the Naval Air Wing in 1913 and he enjoyed a very active, but hair-raising career during the Great War, including winning the VC for a daring rescue of a fellow pilot while under heavy fire. Because of his unique breadth of experience he was transferred to experimental work, where he played a major part in crucial developments like arrestor gear, deck barriers and the 'island' superstructure that define the modern aircraft carrier. As the first man to regularly land and take off from such ships, he did much to prove the value of shipboard aviation. After the war, in an Admiralty post, he continued to promote the flying interests of the Navy, and the book provides a first-hand chronicle of the struggles with the Air Ministry over policy and control. Although he retired in 1941, he accepted a lower rank to command one of the newly invented escort carriers, so his service ended as it had begun, at the cutting edge of naval aviation. This wonderfully active, and hugely significant career is related with a charm, modesty and humour which make the book enthralling and memorable.

As Japan’s pre–Pearl Harbor ambassador to the United States, Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo (1877–1964) played a significant role in a tense and turbulent period in Japanese–U.S. relations. Scholars tend to view his actions and missteps as ambassador as representing the failure of diplomacy to avert the outbreak of hostilities between the two paramount Pacific powers.This extensively researched biography casts new light on the life and career of this important figure. Connecting his experiences as a naval officer to his service as foreign minister and ambassador, and later as “father” of Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Forces and proponent of the U.S.–Japanese alliance, this study reassesses Nomura’s contributions as a hard-nosed realist whose grasp of the underlying realities of Japanese–U.S. relations went largely unappreciated by the Japanese political and military establishment.

Release The Butterfly is a fast-paced, geo-political, science-based, military thriller drawn from real life in a piece of literary work author Richard Rose has dubbed 'Science Faction.' In his debut novel, the veteran journalist channels H.G Wells and Tom Clancy to tell the story that appears ripped from the headlines. America has just elected its first woman president, independent candidate Lydia Cortez-Simpson. The daughter of a conservative Texas cattleman and his 'illegal' mexican domestic, Cortez-Simpson's vicious political campaign toughens her for the fight of her life against an out-of-control military dictator who has seized control of China and launched a pre-emptive invasion of Taiwan. 'General X' is a misguided, philosophically minded 'patriot' determined to restore China's past glory. Ruthless to the core, General X 'demonstrates' China's nuclear prowess in horrifying fashion and President Cortez-Simpson quickly finds herself in an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation. Worse yet, General X has schemed with the disillusioned chief scientist of the Geneva Institute to obtain a fearsome new weapon borne from the world's most powerful particle collider. President Cortez-Simpson turns to Parker James, a spy who can beat you with both his fists and his brains. In a race against time, James teams up with brilliant Taiwanese-American scientist, Doctor Lillian Tong, to thwart Doctor Z's plans to place this planet-killing weapon in General X's hands. In the end, nature itself provides a surprising, decisive twist as the reader is taken on a journey into cutting-edge science and military hardware. Dark matter energy is discovered even as time itself is 'unraveled' in a world where DNA satellite trackers can find terrorists anywhere in the world by just their DNA, essentially ending the war on terror but only beginning the possibilities for humankind to discover new ways to destroy life as we know it.