In 1845, young researcher Eliot Saxby is paid to go on an Arctic expedition to find the remains of the by-now-extinct great auk, a large, flightless bird of mythical status, and is trapped on a hunting ship where the crew and passengers are not what they seem.

A skeletal hand is unearthed in the vault under the Pump Room in Bath, England, near the site where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Then a skull is excavated. The bones came from different corpses, and one is modern. Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond must solve a series of crimes including murder and forgery, requiring a knowledge of history, nineteenth-century art, literature . . . and human nature.

Half the world's population speaks a language that has evolved from a single, prehistoric mother tongue. First spoken in Stone Age times, on the steppes of central Eurasia 6,500 years ago, this mother tongue spread from the shores of the Black Sea across almost all of Europe and much of Asia. It is the genetic basis of everything we speak and write today -the DNA of language. Written in Stone combines detective work, mythology, ancient history, archaeology,...

Working as a reluctant double agent for Russia and the CIA in politically strained 1948 Berlin, John Russell is approached by a woman he saved during World War II who begs his help reclaiming her child from behind the Iron Curtain.