Under The Black Cross

War of the DamnedIt is a time of conflict. The Ventrue Lord Jurgen and the Tzimisce Vladimir Rustovich battle for domain in Hungary, while their agents spar across Europe, using intrigue and bloodshed in equal measure. In the Holy Land, the Fifth Crusade arrives in Acre and with it come the vampiric lords' agents in pursuit of a fragment of the True Cross. Victory can come only at a terrible price.Blood of the InnocentUnder the Black Cross is a complete chronicle for Vampire: The Dark Ages RM. It follows Ventrue efforts to use the Teutonic Knights to establish domain in the Tzimisce territories of Hungary, sending agents as far afield as the Holy Land in pursuit of allies and advantage. It includes details on the court of Lord Jurgen of Clan Ventrue, on the Teutonic Knights and on Acre, a city long protected from the childer of Caine by a holy aura.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Penn Cage series comes a gripping World War II thriller that “vaporizes almost every cliché about the limits of the genre...[it’s] good enough to read twice”(Kirkus Reviews). It is January 1944—and as Allied troops prepare for D-Day, Nazi scientists develop a toxic nerve gas that will repel and wipe out any invasion force. To salvage the planned assault, two vastly different but equally determined men are sent to infiltrate the secret concentration camp where the poison gas is being perfected on human subjects. Their only objective: destroy all traces of the gas and the men who created it—no matter how many lives may be lost...including their own.

Decades after his death, the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black continue to be studied and discussed. This definitive study of Black’s origins and early influences has been 25 years in the making and offers fresh insights into the justice’s character, thought processes, and instincts. Black came out of hardscrabble Alabama hill country, and he never forgot his origins. He was further shaped in the early 20th-century politics of Birmingham, where he set up a law practice and began his political career, eventually rising to the U.S. Senate, from which he was selected by FDR for the high court. Black’s nomination was opposed partly on the grounds that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the book’s conclusions that is sure to be controversial is that in the context of Birmingham in the early 1920s, Black’s joining of the KKK was a progressive act. This startling assertion is supported by an examination of the conflict that was then raging in Birmingham between the Big Mule industrialists and the blue-collar labor unions. Black of course went on to become a staunch judicial advocate of free speech and civil rights, thus making him one of the figures most vilified by the KKK and other white supremacists in the 1950s and 1960s.