From a three-time Edgar Award–winning author: Local rituals and a lost painting draw a New York businessman into intrigue on a remote Pacific island. Ben Smith, a market researcher from New York City, has arrived on Santo Stefano, an island two hundred miles off the coast of Peru. At the behest of his company’s seafood division, he’s gauging the potential profitability of the island’s abundance of rock lobsters. Encouraging a little tin-pot country to draw foreign investment should be a breeze—a beautiful one, too, berthed, as he is, in such an exotic locale. But Ben’s interests are soon divided between the seductive Infanta Elissa, daughter of the island’s powerful guano king, and another American tourist who has come in search of a reportedly lost and invaluable Panama portrait painted by French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin. And something sinister is taking over Santo Stefano. The locals call it festa brava, a ritualistic hanging ceremony, dating back centuries, in which competitors test their courage against the gallows. Whether you survive or not, it’s said to be the ultimate experience. As an undercurrent of violence and unease rises closer to the surface, Ben wonders what else awaits him on the island, how it will change him, and how far he’ll be expected to go on a journey of adventure, self-exploration, and absolute fear. From a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, The Panama Portrait is “a [spellbinding], sophisticated, barbaric, and hypnotic” thriller (Kirkus Reviews).

This title by Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a series of portraits of anti-government protestors and mourners made in a makeshift photographic studio in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), Kiev.

This classic from William Friar about the Panama Canal has been completely updated and revised in time for the opening of the expanded locks. This engaging collection of contemporary and archival photographs is illuminated by Friar’s lively and informative text. Though the dream began as early as 1513 when Vasco Nuñez de Balboa first crossed the isthmus and saw the Pacific Ocean, it was not until 1914 that the Panama Canal became a reality. The French had started excavation for the Canal in 1869, but the work was beset by earthquakes and landslides; disease—malaria, yellow fever, cholera, beriberi, smallpox, and typhoid fever; and wild animals—from pumas and jaguars to a whole menagerie of poisonous snakes. By 1889, the money ran out and the whole enterprise collapsed in a cloud of scandal and bankruptcy that drove the French government from power. Some fifteen years later, on November 12, 1904, after much debate and political maneuvering, the first Americans arrived, and the work began again. The Canal opened less than ten years later, on August 15, 1914. For sixty-five years, the United States operated the Canal, but 1979 saw the start of a twenty-year transition. On December 31, 1999, control and day-to-day operations were turned fully over to the Republic of Panama. In the past fifteen years, the following changes have taken place in the Canal: widening the Gaillard Cut so two PANAMAX ships can pass each other; deepening the navigational channel in Gatun Lake to increase the capacity of the water reservoir; adding a new vessel traffic-management system that uses satellite Global Positioning System technology; the construction of two new sets of single-lane, three-step locks—one set at the Atlantic entrance and one at the Pacific; and adding two new navigational channels to connect the new locks to existing channels. In words and in photographs—both historical and contemporary—Portrait of the Panama Canal traces the story of the Canal from its beginnings as just a dream to its present reality as one of the wonders of the world.

This tale of an unprecedented technological advance unfolds in a compelling narrative of risks, hardships, disasters, and triumph. More than 160 historic photographs depict exotic settings, workers' housing, dredging operations, much more.