New York, January 1951. When columnist Dennis Collins returns to his hometown after covering the brutal Chosin Reservoir battle in Korea, he finds his newspaper closed down and New York on edge about a possible European war with the Russians. Collins is reluctantly drawn into an investigation of leaked American military secrets that focuses on the British diplomats Donald Maclean and Kim Philby (later exposed as members of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring). As his search for the truth takes him to Washington, Paris, and London, Collins enters a shadowy world of intrigue where moral...

New York, September 1949. When Dennis Collins arrives at Madison Square Garden for the Friday night fights, he is on top of the world. His career as the man-about-town columnist of the New York Sentinel is on the upswing; his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers are contending for the pennant; and a lover who had jilted him years ago has unexpectedly agreed to drinks and dinner at the Stork Club. Collins is sure that his luck has turned for the better. But at the Garden his closest childhood friend, Morris Rose, approaches him for help. Rose asks Collins to safeguard microfilmed documents that he says...

This new collection of ten short stories by Jefferson Flanders addresses love in all its forms. A country song stirs memories of an Indian Summer love affair. Red Sox baseball becomes the emotional connection between a son and his Alzheimer's-afflicted father. High school sweethearts meet by chance at Penn Central twenty years after their break-up. A psychic reading in San Francisco takes an unexpected turn. Lovers struggle with ghosts from a violent past. These evocative stories explore memory, desire, passion, and loss; they illuminate not only the stark realities of life, but also delve...

Revolutionary France, 1793. When Calvin Tarkington, a young Boston merchant-trader, arrives in Paris on July 4th, he finds a city in turmoil, riven by quarrels between revolutionary factions and threatened by advancing Coalition armies. Calvin's brother Alexander, the family firm's representative in France, has disappeared, suspected by a powerful Jacobin official of spying for the British. As Calvin seeks to clear his brother's name, his quest for the truth takes him from elegant townhouses to squalid gambling dens to the secret chambers of the Masonic Lodge of the Seven Sisters. Drawn into...

Northwest Territory, 1798. Merchant-trader Calvin Tarkington leaves behind his comfortable life in New York when he journeys to the frontier to assist an old friend who has fallen ill. Once across the Ohio River, he is drawn into the struggle between abolitionists and slaveholders. As a winter storm descends upon western Kentucky, Calvin and a group of fugitive slaves find themselves on the run, hunted by a band of ruthless slave catchers. The third installment in the Tarkingtons series, The Northwest Country delves into the history of the emerging crisis over slavery in the early American...