An Artful Assassin In Amsterdam

David Mitre finds himself the focus of attention for an assassin while helping FBI Special Agent Delia Delacorte in her latest case in Amsterdam. “It takes a thief to catch a thief . . .” The last thing fugitive crime writer David Mitre expects as he’s cruising along an Amsterdam canal is to be the focus of a bizarre murder attempt . . . But why is he being targeted? He hasn’t even done anything wrong. Recently. After the would-be assassin tries again, David is rescued by Delia Delacorte, the FBI Special Agent he locked horns with in Cyprus. In return, Delia wants his help to prevent the theft of a priceless painting from the Rijksmuseum. Meanwhile David is also attempting to find a friend’s missing daughter, allay the suspicions of the local police and evade the assassin, all the while devising a plan to stop the theft. His plan: he’ll steal the painting himself . . .

David Mitre has a very unusual set of skills, skills he has acquired over a long criminal career. Skills that make him an irritant for people like the FBI. Hiding among the ex-pat community of the Greek islands, his cover is blown when he is witness to a stabbing on a Cyprus beach. The FBI want answers and David is given an ultimatum; solve the murder or face imprisonment for his own crimes. Coerced into playing detective, David unwittingly uncovers a criminal enterprise far worse than anything he could have imagined.

From 1803 to 1807, Charles Brockden Brown served as editor and chief contributor to the Literary Magazine, and American Register, a popular Philadelphia miscellany. His position allowed him to observe and comment upon life in the United States and transatlantic world during the nineteenth century's first decade. This book considers how Brown's Literary Magazine contributed to the development of cultural cohesiveness and political stability in the young United States. It explores the intellectual and cultural setting in which this Philadelphia miscellany was published, the political writing that appears in what Brown claimed was a politically neutral venue, and the social and cultural criticism that attempts to guide the development of the American character. During his twenty years as an author, he participated in disseminating texts of cultural and literary worth. Brown's essays and reviews assisted in the establishment of reading habits in America and influenced the public reception of the early American press.

Calls for a "consilient" or "vertically integrated" approach to the study of human mind and culture have, for the most part, been received by scholars in the humanities with either indifference or hostility. One reason for this is that consilience has often been framed as bringing the study of humanistic issues into line with the study of non-human phenomena, rather than as something to which humanists and scientists contribute equally. The other major reason that consilience has yet to catch on in the humanities is a dearth of compelling examples of the benefits of adopting a consilient approach. Creating Consilience is the product of a workshop that brought together internationally-renowned scholars from a variety of fields to address both of these issues. It includes representative pieces from workshop speakers and participants that examine how adopting such a consilient stance -- informed by cognitive science and grounded in evolutionary theory -- would concretely impact specific topics in the humanities, examining each topic in a manner that not only cuts across the humanities-natural science divide, but also across individual humanistic disciplines. By taking seriously the fact that science-humanities integration is a two-way exchange, this volume takes a new approach to bridging the cultures of science and the humanities. The editors and contributors formulate how to develop a new shared framework of consilience beyond mere interdisciplinarity, in a way that both sides can accept.