The Mad Mask

The second installment in acclaimed author Barry Lyga's Archvillain series! Things haven't been going well for Kyle since Mighty Mike became the new town hero. He's pretty sure he could fix this disaster if he could expose Mike's secret (he's an alien), but to do that Kyle would have to admit he is the Azure Avenger-the unintentional town archvillain. One night a new masked hero, aptly named the Mad Mask, arrives, boasting to the Azure Avenger of an off-the-charts IQ and superior superpowers. Yet the Mad Mask has come seeking intellectual assistance in building Ultitron (the robot of all robots). In exchange he offers to allow the Azure Avenger use of the awesome Ultitron to rid the world, or at least Bouring, of Mighty Mike. Forging alliances isn't usually Kyle's style, but it seems he has no choice. While Kyle agrees to help, he also has another plan: finding out who the Mad Mask is and how he got his powers. Because the last thing the Azure Avenger needs is another mindless archvillain hanging around town!

The creator of the Forgotten Realms leads readers through a rollicking fantasy adventure and murder mystery set in the city of Waterdeep Revealed in death to have been Masked Lords, three more citizens had been murdered over the preceding day and night: the Sembian wine-seller and collector Oszbur Malankar; the half-elf sorceress and artisan Dathanscza Meiril; and the moneylender, landlord, and investor Ammasker Gwelt. All of Waterdeep now knew someone was killing the Lords of Waterdeep, one by one. Yet that was about where truth ended and speculation—however plausible—began. The broadsheets were full of wild conjecture. Who's behind this? The ousted Lord Neverember? The Zhentarim, the Cult of the Dragon or some other Outland Power? The Xanathar? Some cabal of guilds or nobles planning a coup? The rumors would rage on, whether the Open Lord Laeral Silverhand did something or not. That was the trouble with rumors; once loosed, they roamed free like snarling, untamed beasts, with no simple way of stopping them. And all rumors aside, Waterdeep has become . . . a City of Murderers. Death Masks is loosely connected to the Elminster series and Sage of Shadowdale series.

You don't have to be an eccentric obsessive to be a scientist, but it helps... In The Mad Science Book, Reto Schneider tells the extraordinary tales of 100 of the more unusual experiments conducted across seven centuries of science. From the attempts of the 14th-century Dominican monk Theodoric von Freiberg to discover the cause of the rainbow, to the efforts of the 20th-century psychologist Harry Harlow to be the perfect mother to a family of reluctant rhesus monkeys, these are stories that are often bizarre, sometimes mind-boggling - occasionally stomach-churning - but always diverting, informative and enlightening.Among the myriad delights on display in this cabinet of scientific curiosities are the renowned doctor from Padua who sat in a pair of scales for 30 years, recording the minutest changes in his weight; the sheep, the duck and the rooster who became the world's first air passengers; the disgusting Dr Stubbins Ffirth, who swallowed other people's vomit in an attempt to prove that yellow fever cannot be transmitted from one person to another; the hapless soldier Alexis St Martin, left with a hole in his stomach after an accident with a musket; and the ever-optimistic Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, who injected himself with essence of guinea pigs' testicles as an anti-ageing remedy. There is trivia here in abundance, but also quirky, but genuinely influential, science, notably Merrill Flood's and Melvin Dresher's experiments with choices of outcomes, which have been widely influential as game theory.A fizzing cocktail of fascinating science and rich entertainment, The Mad Science Book tells the extraordinary stories of some truly, madly, geeky people. It should be top of every self-respecting science buff's Christmas 2008 wishlist.