Fatal Voyage

When a commercial airliner crashes in the North Carolina mountains, forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan joins the investigative agency DMORT. As bomb theories abound, Tempe finds disturbing evidence that raises dangerous questions--and gets her thrown off the case. Relentless for the truth, Tempe uncovers a conspiracy that threatens her career--and jeopardizes her life. (July)

“Iceberg right ahead!” yelled Frederick Fleet, a crewmember aboard the Titanic. The ship had only seconds to spare. Titanic’s officers steered the ship to the left as quickly as they could to avoid a head-on collision. But they weren’t fast enough. The right side of the ship struck the side of the ice mountain floating in the north Atlantic. The fate of the Titanic—and its 1,317 passengers and 885 crewmembers—had been sealed. Titanic’s Fatal Voyage tells the devastating story of how the gigantic and supposedly unsinkable ship was swallowed by the sea on its maiden voyage. Readers will learn about the ocean liner’s journey in vivid detail, as well as incredible tales of courage and survival. The fascinating content and large-format color images, maps, and fact boxes bring the Titanic’s tragic story to life. Titanic’s Fatal Voyage is part of Bearport’s Titanica series.

Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage takes us behind the paneled doors of the Titanic’s elegant private suites to present compelling, memorable portraits of her most notable passengers. The Titanic has often been called "An exquisite microcosm of the Edwardian era,” but until now, her story has not been presented as such. In Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage, historian Hugh Brewster seamlessly interweaves personal narratives of the lost liner’s most fascinating people with a haunting account of the fateful maiden crossing. Employing scrupulous research and featuring 100 rarely seen photographs, he accurately depicts the ship’s brief life and tragic denouement and presents compelling, memorable portraits of her most notable passengers: millionaires John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim; President Taft's closest aide, Major Archibald Butt; writer Helen Churchill Candee; the artist Frank Millet; movie actress Dorothy Gibson; the celebrated couturiere Lady Duff Gordon; aristocrat Noelle, the Countess of Rothes; and a host of other travelers. Through them, we gain insight into the arts, politics, culture, and sexual mores of a world both distant and near to our own. And with them, we gather on the Titanic’s sloping deck on that cold, starlit night and observe their all-too-human reactions as the disaster unfolds. More than ever, we ask ourselves, “What would we have done?”

Cook was the greatest explorer of his age and his voyages of discovery are the stuff of legend. During two long journeys, he circumnavigated the globe twice, charted the east coast of Australia, the whole of New Zealand and many islands in the Pacific. The Fatal Voyage is the story of Cook's final journey when he led his most dangerous and fabled expedition to search for the elusive Pacific entrance to the North West Passage. He set sail from England in July 1776 and along the way discovered the Hawaiian archipelago before mapping and charting the formidable north west coast of America, from Vancouver Island to the frozen northern coastline of Alaska. He sailed through the Bering Straits and although his ships reached the entrance to the North West Passage they were defeated by a sheer wall of ice blocking their way. Cook returned to Hawaii to rest, but a series of misjudgments between his men and the islanders sparked a violent clash in which Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay. Peter Aughton has here used letters, log records and the diaries of those involved in the voyage to tell an enthralling account of James Cook's last days at sea and reveal the extraordinary legacy he left behind.

A Hard-Nosed Investigation Into Hollywood's Most Enduring Mystery For thirty-five years, it has been a riddle which has gripped the world. Part love story, part tragedy, it has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster: a beautiful actress, a handsome leading man, a brooding sidekick . . . and a moment of sickening terror with the most horrific consequences. When Natalie Wood—one-time America’s sweethearts and star of West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause, and Miracle on 34th Street—was found washed up in her nightdress in the cold waters off Catalina Island, California, on Thanksgiving weekend 1981, it initially looked like a freak accident. She had been holidaying with husband Robert Wagner and film co-star Christopher Walken on board Wagner’s yacht The Splendour when somehow, in the dead of night, she lost her footing and fell into the water. The coroner’s initial verdict: accidental drowning. The coroner was wrong. For the first time, the real story of Natalie’s final moments can be told—and it’s every bit as monstrous as anything Hollywood scriptwriters could dream up. Forbidden affairs, twisted lies, sex, betrayal, murder, pay-offs, and a cover-up that continues to this day. Internationally renowned journalist Dylan Howard has spent six years investigating Natalie’s fateful final hours—and the immediate aftermath. After sifting through hundreds of pages of testimony, coroners reports, police statements and private journals, as well as amassing dozens of exclusive new interviews and witnesses, he’s ready to reveal the shocking truth about the death of Hollywood’s golden girl . . . and finally demand justice for Natalie Wood.

The English explorer Henry Hudson devoted his life to the search for a water route through America, becoming the first European to navigate the Hudson River in the process. In Fatal Journey, acclaimed historian and biographer Peter C. Mancall narrates Hudson's final expedition. In the winter of 1610, after navigating dangerous fields of icebergs near the northern tip of Labrador, Hudson's small ship became trapped in winter ice. Provisions grew scarce and tensions mounted amongst the crew. Within months, the men mutinied, forcing Hudson, his teenage son, and seven other men into a skiff, which they left floating in the Hudson Bay. A story of exploration, desperation, and icebound tragedy, Fatal Journey vividly chronicles the undoing of the great explorer, not by an angry ocean, but at the hands of his own men.

“This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous. My husband is planning ‘an accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry.” —Letter written by Princess Diana, late 1996 It is a moment that remains frozen in history. When the Mercedes carrying Diana, Princess of Wales, spun fatally out of control in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris in August 1997, the world was shocked by what appeared to be a terrible accident. But two decades later, the circumstances surrounding what really happened that night—and, crucially, why it happened—remain mired in suspicion, controversy, and misinformation. Until now. Dylan Howard has re-examined all of the evidence surrounding Diana’s death—official documents, eyewitness testimony and Diana’s own private journals—as well as amassing dozens of new interviews with investigators, witnesses, and those closest to the princess to ask one very simple question: Was the death of Princess Diana a tragedy…or treason? Diana: Case Solved has uncovered in unprecedented detail just how much of a threat Diana became to the establishment. In these pages you will learn of the covert diaries and recordings she made, logging the Windsors’ most intimate secrets and hidden scandals as a desperate kind of insurance policy. You will learn how the royals were not the only powerful enemies she made, as her ground-breaking campaigns against AIDS and landmines drew admiration from the public, but also enmity from powerful establishment figures including international arms dealers, the British and American governments, and the MI6 and the CIA. And, in a dramatic return to the Parisian streets where she met her fate, the two questions that have plagued investigators for over twenty years will finally be answered: Why was Diana being driven in a car previously written off as a death trap? And who was really behind the wheel of the mysterious white Fiat at the scene of the crash?

Whilst sailing between Hawaii and Tahiti in January 1824, the captain and officers of the Nantucket whaling ship, the Globe, were attacked with whaling gear, shot and dumped overboard under the audacious direction of 21 year old Samuel Comstock, whose dream was to found his own tropical kingdom. This eventually led to his own violent death at the hands of his co-mutineers. Only a few members of the Globe's crew survived- two men who were rescued after years on a Pacific atoll, bizarrely spared after their fellows had been slaughtered by the native inhabitants, and a handful more who retook the ship and carried news of the mutiny to the US Navy. Escaping with the ship was George Comstock, Samuel's younger brother and a horrified eyewitness to his brother's murderous deeds. George's remarkable firsthand account, written upon his return to Nantucket, has never been published in full. This book presents portions of this account for the first time.