David Lagercrantz's detective duo, Rekke and Vargas, returns in a new installment of the internationally best-selling series that began with Dark Music (“A classic mystery . . . One Holmes himself would have loved to solve” —The Independent). Dead women should not show up in photos fourteen years beyond the grave . . . But if anyone is likely to recognize Claire Lidman, it's her husband, Samuel. He brings the photo to Hans Rekke and Micaela Vargas. Their initial skepticism gives way to cautious belief—but where will this case lead them? Meanwhile, Rekke's daughter, Julia, has a new boyfriend she's determined to keep secret. When word gets out, Micaela's world collapses around her, and Rekke is forced to confront a nemesis from his youth. Plunging us back into the political upheaval and financial crisis of the 1990s, as the Iron Curtain is finally lifted, the second Rekke and Vargas investigation sees our heroes grapple with a fiendish case that affects them both in profoundly personal ways.

Although his career lasted barely ten years, Gyula Breyer (1893-1921) was a highly successful and imaginative chess player. He won the championship of his native country Hungary as a teenager and achieved remarkable results against the leading players of his day. But first and foremost, Breyer was a revolutionary in his chess thinking. He promoted the idea of dynamic chess and formulated many of the Hypermodern concepts, long before others started their investigations. After his death, however, he was omitted from most of the chess history books, or relegated to a one line reference. Today he is only known for the Breyer variation, an ever popular defence against the Ruy Lopez. Jimmy Adams has unlocked Breyer’s legacy from the archives and made it accessible to the chess world at large, with translations from Hungarian into English. This monumental book presents 242 of his games, annotated by Breyer himself and many others. It features a large number of articles, columns and fragments from newspapers, magazines and books, sparkling with chess and literary wit. The majority appear in English for the first time – and indeed in any language other than Hungarian. By piecing together this material in chronological order, Jimmy Adams has constructed a mesmerizing biography, covering Gyula Breyer’s intense, unconventional and ultimately tragic life. Also included is a collection of his chess problems, some of which are truly amazing.

The 21st edition of the award-winning annual compilation of the year's best science fiction stories.

The past through tomorrow are boldly imagined and reinvented in the twenty-five stories collected in this showcase anthology. Many of the field's finest practitioners are represented here, along with stories from promising newcomers, including: William Barton * Rob Chilson * Tony Daniel * Cory Doctorow * Jim Grimsley * Gwyneth Jones * Chris Lawson * Ian McDonald * Robert Reed * William Browning Spencer * Allen Steele * Michael Swanwick * Howard Waldrop * Cherry Wilder * Liz Williams A useful list of honorable mentions and Dozois's insightful summation of the year in sf round out this anthology, making it indispensable for anyone interested in SF today.

Two dozen tales of future shock and twisted history from an undisputed king of cyberpunk science fiction, including Nebula Award finalists “Sunken Garden” and “Dori Bangs.” Time magazine describes Bruce Sterling as “one of America’s best-known science fiction writers and perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today in any genre.” Sterling’s abilities are on full display in Ascendancies, a collection of speculative fiction from a world-class world-building futurist, alternate historian, and mad prophet operating at the peak of his extraordinary powers. Here are twenty-four stories that span the illustrious career of the author who, along with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, injected the word cyberpunk into the science fiction lexicon. These tales not only traverse galaxies and employ mind-boggling technologies, they also cut back across the centuries into a richly imagined past with style and a sharp satiric edge. Sterling’s unparalleled imagination and courageous originality carry the reader into the future universe of the warring Shapers and Mechanists, rival sects of exiled humanity with radically opposed views of human augmentation. Several stories feature the questionable adventures of the footloose con man Leggy Starlitz in a somewhat-skewed and still-dangerous post–Cold War world. Sterling explores the cyberpunk trope of technology gone wild and the resultant decline of civilization with appropriate gravity, while presenting parables of strangers stuck in very strange lands in a more whimsical vein. Whether chronicling an alien’s encounter with Crusaders in disputed Palestine, depicting the discovery of the key to immortality in a nineteenth-century Times Square magic shop, or portraying bicycles and bad guys in a near-future Tennessee, Sterling’s stories are smart, surprising, genre bending, bold, and outstanding, one and all.

A Vindication of the Redhead investigates red hair in literature, art, television, and film throughout Eastern and Western cultures. This study examines red hair as a signifier, perpetuated through stereotypes, myths, legends, and literary and visual representations. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier provide a history of attitudes held by hegemonic populations toward red-haired individuals, groups, and genders from antiquity to the present. Ayres and Maier explore such diverse topics as Judeo-Christian narratives of red hair, redheads in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, red hair and gender identity, famous literary redheads such as Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking, contemporary and Neo-Victorian representations of redheads from the Black Widow to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and more. This book illuminates the symbolic significance and related ideologies of red hair constructed in mythic, religious, literary, and visual cultural discourse.