The bestselling author of "The Boys Are Back in Town" returns with the first book in an exciting new trilogy, set in a land in which legends have become reality.

For centuries they lived amongst us. The frightful and wondrous, the angelic and bloodthirsty. Living in a reality just beyond the Veil, humanity’s myths and legends are caught in a struggle for their very survival—against hunters far more powerful than they are. Into this struggle has stepped a New England lawyer who once wanted to be an actor—a man who both longs for the mortal woman he was to marry and is desperate to rescue the sister who’s been taken hostage. Neither hero nor warrior, Oliver Bascombe now finds himself brandishing a magical sword, walking in the company of a woman who sometimes appears as a fox and a man made of pure ice, and dueling with albino giants and winged killers. For in the world of the Borderkind—and the realms that exist beyond it—Oliver is discovering just how vulnerable are humankind’s myths, the dire consequences of their extinction, and the reason he was chosen to save them.… From the Trade Paperback edition.

The fascinating story of how the fossils of dinosaurs, mammoths, and other extinct animals influenced some of the most spectacular creatures of classical mythology Griffins, Centaurs, Cyclopes, and Giants—these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact—in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans. As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground. Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology.

A thrilling spy mission, a moving Holocaust story, and a first-class work of narrative nonfiction. This Sydney Taylor Book Award- and YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award-winning story of Eichmann's capture is now a major motion picture starring Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley, Operation Finale! In 1945, at the end of World War II, Adolf Eichmann, the head of operations for the Nazis' Final Solution, walked into the mountains of Germany and vanished from view. Sixteen years later, an elite team of spies captured him at a bus stop in Argentina and smuggled him to Israel, resulting in one of the century's most important trials -- one that cemented the Holocaust in the public imagination. This is the thrilling and fascinating story of what happened between these two events. Illustrated with powerful photos throughout, impeccably researched, and told with powerful precision, THE NAZI HUNTERS is a can't-miss work of narrative nonfiction for middle-grade and YA readers.