If someone had asked Sherlock Holmes later in the year, there is little doubt that he would have said his life began that spring day in 1871 when he met Violet Rushdale upon the moors and ended in the winter some months distant. His mother would have disputed the former claim, and many, both friend and foe, would come to deny the latter. Yet what happened that year nearly cost him his life and his sanity, and strongly influenced the man he was to become.It is well known that the toughest steel that makes the sharpest swords must be plunged into the fire, then beaten and reshaped. So it is as well with the best and wisest of men.

In 1893, Otto "Big Red" Amlingmeyer and his brother Gustav, "Old Red" find themselves in a situation that they never expected. They have a bit of money and time to do something other than scramble. It's enough to confound even that most unconfoundable of men, their mutual inspiration, Sherlock Holmes. So Old Red decides that it's time for the for the two of them to head off to the Texas hill country, to San Marcos, and deal with the greatest tragedy of Old Red's life. Five years ago, when Old Red was a cowpoke in San Marcos, he had a sweetheart—a fallen woman at the local house of ill repute. They had made plans but before they made their big move, his fiancée was murdered and the case swept under the rug by the local authorities. Now, Old Red is determined to find out what really happened and to finally find a measure of justice for his beloved. But Big Red and Old Red find themselves facing a wall of silence and in some of the worst situations of their lives: ensnared in a riot at the local cathouse, on the wrong end of a lynching party and perhaps worst of all—having to do the one thing you never want to do in the state of Texas: steal horses.

Ceramic Engineering and Science Proceedings Volume 34, Issue 8 - Advanced Processing and Manufacturing Technologies for Structural and Multifunctional Materials VII A collection of 20 papers from The American Ceramic Society's 37th International Conference on Advanced Ceramics and Composites, held in Daytona Beach, Florida, January 27-February 1, 2013. This issue includes papers presented in the 7th International Symposium on Advanced Processing and Manufacturing Technologies for Structural and Multifunctional Materials and Systems (Symposium 8).

For many years Acoustic Microscopy has been the definitive book on the subject. A key development since it was first published has been the development of ultrasonic force microscopy. The 2nd edition has a major new chapter on this technique and its applications.