Shari Therneau

A plague of murder has overrun Krondor, the glorious center of the kingdom of Midkemia. Prince Arutha - newly returned from battle with the Morehdel chieftain Delekhan and the renegade magician Makala - is concerned about the rash of unexplained assassinations in his capital city. And so he dispatches his most trusted agent, Squire James - formerly the thief known as Jimmy the Hand - to discover the source of the deadly epidemic.

The Crimea, the Boer War, the Somme, Tobruk, Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs: these are just some of the milestones in a century of military incompetence, of costly mishaps and tragic blunders. Are these simple accidents—as the "bloody fool" theory has it—or are they inevitable? The psychologist Norman F. Dixon argues that there is a pattern to inept generalship, and locates this pattern within the very act of creating armies in the first place, which in his view produces a levelling down of human capability that encourages the mediocre and limits the gifted.

From age 15 to 40, David Hackworth devoted himself to the US Army and fast became a living legend. In 1971, however, he appeared on television to decry the doomed war effort in Vietnam. With About Face, he has written what many Vietnam veterans have called the most important book of their generation.

The second book in master fantasist Raymond E. Feist’s New York Times best-selling classic epic fantasy adventure of war, magic, betrayal, and heroism, Rise of a Merchant Prince chronicles the further exploits of the young protagonists of Shadow of a Dark Queen in the aftermath of the initial confrontation with the fearsome reptilian Sauur and the invading armies of the dreaded Emerald Queen.