STONE/ORPHEUS DECEPTION

"A testosterone-fueled thriller."—Publishers Weekly In his New York Times bestselling debut, The Echelon Vendetta, David Stone introduced covert operative Micah Dalton. Once, it was his job to take care of other agents’ mistakes. Coldly, cleanly—and permanently. Now, Micah is on the outs with his former employers, staying off the radar and hopefully out of firing range. When an attempt is made on his life in the rainy streets of Venice, he knows his best chance of survival is under the shadowy wings of the CIA. To prove his worth, he accepts their mission: an agent and old associate of Micah's has been taken in the China Sea, the only survivor of a brutal pirate attack. He's to find the man and find him fast. But Micah's mission is not about a man. It's about an elusive ship known only as The Mingo Dubai that is already under way, heading toward the West. And its cargo is death.

CIA agent Micah Dalton is a "cleaner." He takes care of other agents' mistakes. When a friend and mentor commits a grotesque suicide, Dalton's investigation leads him into the snare of a madman, into the arms of a beautiful, mysterious stranger-and into a conspiracy within his own agency. Dalton knows only one thing for certain-this job is going to get very messy.

For at least two and a half millennia, the figure of Orpheus has haunted humanity. Half-man, half-god, musician, magician, theologian, poet and lover, his story never leaves us. He may be myth, but his lyre still sounds, entrancing everything that hears it: animals, trees, water, stones, and men. In this extraordinary work Ann Wroe goes in search of Orpheus, from the forests where he walked and the mountains where he worshipped to the artefacts, texts and philosophies built up round him. She traces the man, and the power he represents, through the myriad versions of a fantastical life: his birth in Thrace, his studies in Egypt, his voyage with the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece, his love for Eurydice and journey to Hades, and his terrible death. We see him tantalising Cicero and Plato, and breathing new music into Gluck and Monteverdi; occupying the mind of Jung and the surreal dreams of Cocteau; scandalising the Fathers of the early Church, and filling Rilke with poems like a whirlwind. He emerges as not simply another mythical figure but the force of creation itself, singing the song of light out of darkness and life out of death.

In Vienna for a secret meeting, CIA cleaner Micah Dalton notices he is being followed. When he turns the tables and captures one of his watchers-mysterious operative Veronika Miklas-he is targetd by not only his enemies but his allies. He has inadvertently uncovered a secret that could shatter America's strategic global alliances. And Dalton will have to push himself to the very edge in a desperate attempt to save his honor and his life.

CIA "cleaner" Micah Dalton finds himself involved in a search for a traitor who is responsible for the death of Mildred Durant, an advisor to a NSA decryption team known as the Glass Cutters.

Hailed as a literary masterpiece, Robertson Davies' The Cornish Trilogy comes to a brilliant conclusion in The Lyre of Orpheus. Available as an eBook for the first time. There is an important decision to be made. The Cornish Foundation is thriving under the directorship of Arthur Cornish when Arthur and his beguiling wife, Maria Theotoky, decide to undertake a project worthy of Francis Cornish– connoisseur, collector, and notable eccentric–whose vast fortune endows the Foundation. The grumpy, grimy, extraordinarily talented music student Hulda Schnakenburg is commissioned to complete E.T.A. Hoffmann’s unfinished opera Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold; and the scholarly priest Simon Darcourt finds himself charged with writing the libretto. Complications both practical and emotional arise: the gypsy in Maria’s blood rises with a vengeance; Darcourt stoops to petty crime; and various others indulge in perjury, blackmail, and other unsavory pursuits. Hoffmann’s dictum, “the lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld,” seems to be all too true—especially when the long-hidden secrets of Francis Cornish himself are finally revealed. Baroque and deliciously funny, this third book in The Cornish Trilogy shows Robertson Davies at his very considerable best.