NCW Libraries

John Kucich is Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction; Repression in Victorian Fiction; and Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens. He is also the coeditor of Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. British imperialism's favorite literary narrative might seem to be conquest. But real British conquests also generated a surprising...

Beauty, charm, wealthy admirers: Mina Masters enjoys every luxury but freedom. To save herself from an unwanted marriage, she turns her wiles on a darkly handsome stranger. But Mina's wouldbe hero is playing his own deceptive game. A British spy, Phin Granville has no interest in emotional entanglements...until the night Mina saves his life by gambling her own.

"1855: Virginia Reeve is summoned by an eccentric Brit with a compelling offer. Lady Jane Franklin wants her to lead a dozen women into the Arctic in search of the ships of her husband's lost expedition, and she's willing to pay handsomely. All four search attempts Lady Franklin has sponsored have failed. She has decided only a radical new approach can succeed: let women make the decisions. Lady Franklin will disavow all knowledge of the expedition...

1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia in the guise of a language teacher. In reality, top secret intelligence agency BOX 88 has ordered Kite to extract a chemical weapons scientist before his groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands. Kite's mission soon goes wrong, and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail. 2020: Now the director of BOX 88 operations in the UK, Kite discovers he has...

"1995: In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, 24-year-old spy Lachlan Kite and his girlfriend Martha Raine are sent to Senegal on the trail of a hunted war criminal. The mission threatens to spiral out of control, forcing Kite to make choices which will have devastating consequences not only for his career at top-secret intelligence agency Box 88, but also for his relationship with Martha. 2023: Eric Appiah, an old friend from Kite's days at school...

"Lachlan Kite is a member of BOX 88, an elite transatlantic black ops outfit so covert that not even MI6 and the CIA are certain of its existence--but even the best spy can't anticipate every potential threat in a world where dangerous actors lurk around every corner. At the funeral of his childhood best friend, Lachlan falls into a trap that drops him into the hands of a potentially deadly interrogation, with his pregnant wife, also abducted, being...

"Autumn 1917: As a generation of Europe's young men perish on the Eastern and Western fronts, British spy Jack McColl is assigned a sabotage mission deep in the heart of Central Asia, where German influence is strong and where he'll be in completely unfamiliar territory. Despite his uncanny ear for foreign languages, there is much he doesn't know about the cities he's to infiltrate, or the people he's to meet there. As he quickly realizes, the mission...

"The war of 1812 continues, and Jack Aubrey sets course for Cape Horn on a mission after his own heart: intercepting a powerful American frigate outward bound to play havoc with the British whaling trade. Stephen Maturin has fish of his own to fry in the world of secret intelligence. Disaster in various guises awaits them in the Great South Sea and in the far reaches of the Pacific: typhoons, castaways, shipwrecks, murder, and criminal insanity"--...

In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage, and great courage as she relates what she must to survive while keeping secret all that she can.