Suspense

In the year 1348, a physician journeys to England on an impossible mission to save the royal family from the Black Death. In the year 2005, a scientist unearths a terror laying dormant in the soil for nearly 700 years. Their stories are linked by history and defined by circumstances. They are the plague tales.

In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective, penetrating the cunning labyrinth of the abbey and deciphering coded manuscripts for clues.

About to embark on a business trip to Algeria, Catherine Velis meets a mysterious man who offers her an enormous sum of money if she will find the pieces of an old chess service reputed to be in Algeria.

Over a period of forty years, chief magistrate Dee fights the malevolent empress Wu, who has killed her own children, exiled her most respected statesman, and reduced her husband to idiocy.

"It is the tale of two women. One is Dora -- large, voluptuous, and charismatic -- a prostitute to whom men are drawn for pleasure, women for friendship. Her strange death in an icy ravine affects everyone in the tiny village: her enormous, slow-minded son; an embittered midwife; the hunchbacked lord of the manor; his decaying mother; and an itin- erant portrait painter, whose arrival in the village unearths secrets and passions beyond anyone's expectations.

The other -- young, slight, and solitary -- is a dutiful chambermaid to the mistress of the manor until Dora's accident begins to distract her from her daily tasks. Her quest to uncover the truth about the prostitute's mysterious life and sudden death leads her to a terrible discovery, and the beginnings of a future."

"Searching for answers and trapped by a wall of polite, steeled silence, Saxon is forced to probe the heartwrenching memories of his youth--the shards of a past that neither time nor distance have buried. As a young Navy pilot operating from Japan during the Vietnam War, Saxon became passionately involved with a Japanese nightclub hostess named Lilli, an enchanting young woman with a dark, painful past. Their relationship created numerous enemies."

In a search for the world's most powerful and sacred object--the Ark of the Covenant--a world famous archaeologist uncovers a plot to fix the upcoming presidential election in America.