Something is preying upon the monks of Rion. Broeden is an ancient and dark wizard who seeks their holy relic, the Sword of the Watch, to bestow upon him the gift of immortality. When the mighty Rion guards find themselves powerless to stop him, their leaders hatch a desperate plan to embrace dark magic with catastrophic results. As the Watchers battle to control the forces they’ve unleashed, the world of Erathe is thrown into chaos. Now the only hope for humanity is the resurrection of a sword-bearer, Evliit. Visit SwordoftheWatch.com and join Facebook.com/sotwfan. The Sword of the Watch is told in three books: The Watchers’ War, The Rise of the Western Kingdom, and The Fall of Daoradh.

Something is preying upon the monks of Rion. Broeden is an ancient and dark wizard who seeks their holy relic, the Sword of the Watch, to bestow upon him the gift of immortality. When the mighty Rion Guard find themselves powerless to stop him, their leaders hatch a desperate plan to embrace dark magic with catastrophic results. As the Watchers battle to control the forces they've unleashed, the world of Erathe is thrown into chaos. Now the only hope for humanity is the resurrection of a sword bearer, Evliit. Visit SwordoftheWatch.com and join Facebook.com/sotwfan. The Sword of the Watch is told in three books: The Watchers' War, The Rise of the Western Kingdom, and The Fall of Daoradh.

Using exclusive access to key insiders, Shane Harris charts the rise of America's surveillance state over the past twenty-five years and highlights a dangerous paradox: Our government's strategy has made it harder to catch terrorists and easier to spy on the rest of us. Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, Reagan's National Security Advisor, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream-a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still captivates Washington. After the 2001 attacks, Poindexter returned to government with a controversial program, called Total Information Awareness, to detect the next attack. Today it is a secretly funded operation that can gather personal information on every American and millions of others worldwide. But Poindexter's dream has also become America's nightmare. Despite billions of dollars spent on this digital quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern future threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered this high-tech spycraft, Harris shows how it has shifted from the province of right- wing technocrats to a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on terror. Harris puts us behind the scenes and in front of the screens where twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties. We see an army major agonize as he carries out an order to delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before 9/11. We follow General Mike Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the law. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, we watch as it is covertly shifted to a "black op," which protects it from public scrutiny. When the next crisis comes, our government will inevitably crack down on civil liberties, but it will be no better able to identify new dangers. This is the outcome of a dream first hatched almost three decades ago, and The Watchers is an engrossing, unnerving wake-up call.

16-year-old Clare Michaels has always known the truth - that she is the daughter of a fallen angel. That truth has made her life hell. She has spent her entire life running from the children of the fallen. A secret, centuries-old war has divided her kind, and there are only two options if the others find her - join the fight or die. Clare's only ally in her running is her mother, Ellen. They have always hidden in large cities away where they could blend and disappear. So when Ellen decides to move Clare to the tiny town of King's Cross - Ellen's hometown - Clare is skeptical. But King's Cross ends up being more dangerous than even she could imagine.A dark creature is stalking the locals, Clare keeps hearing the thoughts of someone determined to kill her, and a boy in her class named Daniel seems absolutely determined to become her friend. Clare is not certain which of the three is worse.But it is through Daniel's help that Clare is able to understand her angelic heritage, save lives, and come to grips with her destiny as one of the Watchers.

In a Europe aflame with wars of religion and dynastic conflicts, Elizabeth I came to the throne of a realm encircled by menace. To the great Catholic powers of France and Spain, England was a heretic pariah state, a canker to be cut away for the health of the greater body of Christendom. Elizabeth's government, defending God's true Church of England and its leader, the queen, could stop at nothing to defend itself. Headed by the brilliant, enigmatic, and widely feared Sir Francis Walsingham, the Elizabethan state deployed every dark art: spies, double agents, cryptography, and torture. Delving deeply into sixteenth-century archives, Stephen Alford offers a groundbreaking, chillingly vivid depiction of Elizabethan espionage, literally recovering it from the shadows. In his company we follow Her Majesty's agents through the streets of London and Rome, and into the dank cells of the Tower. We see the world as they saw it-ever unsure who could be trusted or when the fatal knock on their own door might come. The Watchers is a riveting exploration of loyalty, faith, betrayal, and deception with the highest possible stakes, in a world poised between the Middle Ages and modernity.