When they meet-when they feel something that happens across a crowded room-she is twenty-three, a teacher in a correctional institution, and he is seventeen, a troublesome inmate only days away from transfer to a maximum security facility. An impossible ember is nurtured in secure fantasy until one day it erupts in a flame that can neither be denied nor extinguished. It burns, and is suffered as love and longing reach unbearable heights. But bear it they must, in secret, against the state, against jealousy, against time, as one event after another broadens the chasm between them, trapping...

Six-thousand-year-old clay tablets left behind by the Sumerians tell us in cuneiform script that the planets Uranus and Neptune are "greenish-blue." How did they know? Our science could not confirm that until the Voyager II fly-by in the 1980s. The ignored question of the last century has to be: "Who told the Sumerians that Uranus and Neptune exist, and about their colors?" Again: "Who told them?" Take a breath to grasp the significance of that question? The same clay tablets also tell that Inanna, a fierce and beautiful goddess from antiquity, is not a fictional character. As Aphrodite to...

Some years ago: When Brian Reasoner allowed the beautiful Celine to move into his Coconut Grove penthouse, he didn't know she was the natural daughter he'd given for adoption as an infant. Celine knew. She also knew the power her beauty held over men; and she needed Brian. She didn't want her power trumped by the authority a natural father inherits. She had places to go. Recently: A U.S. Congresswoman designs a plan to bankrupt Mafia bookmakers by manipulating the odds on Jetsam, the colt heavily favored to win the Kentucky Derby. Its success will leave only one obstacle between her and the...