The Barnes Noble ReviewIn the second installment of Alex Archer's Rogue Angel saga, which features protagonist Annja Creed (spiritual descendant Joan of Arc and her fated successor as "champion of the good"), the intrepid archeologist sets off to find Solomon's Jar, an invaluable biblical artifa...
When archaeologist Annja Creed is hired to find the lost city of Promise in Brazil, she is more than intrigued. Legends abound of a magical place where slaves were rumored to have discovered the secret to eternal youth and life. But strangers are not welcome in Promise.Annja soon learns that the ...
By the time she stepped out of the wardroom and onto the upper gun deck, she discovered that the sun had all but set. The smell of cooked meat wafted up over the side of the ship, causing Annja’s stomach to grumble; her body had already grown tired of rehydrated rations, i...
César Soto paused on the one he deemed most likely to be the double-crossing thief who was looting artifacts from the Puerto Real site. Had the suspect also murdered the guitarist? Soto wasn’t betting the farm on that one. He had his suspicions. Hell, he had a very clear i...
That wasn’t a lot of time to begin with and she’d wasted several hours of it getting the boat back to dock. Annja was feeling the pressure as she got inside the rental car and pulled out of the marina. She recited the third clue again to herself as she drove. “‘Take the rifle to the place of Lee’...
An outdoor bazaar was adjacent to the airport and he took advantage of the general noise and confusion to mask his passage as he threaded his way into its depths. If anyone was following him, he was certain to lose them in the maze of stalls and shouting merchants. When he...
That was the good news. The bad news was they were large. Very large. In fact, to Annja’s perception, they could have barely fit inside the cave at all, let alone come through the narrow opening. This puzzled her. If they hadn’t entered that way, then where had they come from? She and Tuk had bee...
It was actually three maps in one, all of them intertwined to the point it took real effort to sort through them. She made sketches of them in her journal to keep from getting confused. Not more than an hour from where she’d had her epiphany, she recognized the section of ...
Not the kind of office Annja expected of a working policeman. She’d seen cop’s offices before. None of them were this pristine.She wondered if maybe Richelieu was gay or lived with his mother. Or perhaps he was a control freak. A personality trait like that was a real relationship killer.Not that...
She answered without checking the caller ID—which she regretted as soon as Doug Morrell’s voice rattled across the phone lines. “Annja! Good afternoon!” It wasn’t good. And—she glanced at the bedside table—the LED clock flashed 1:00 p.m. She had slept past noon? And why did her head ache? She’d o...
The three of them piled in—Vladimir behind the wheel, Annja riding shotgun and Gianni sitting between the two seats on a plastic milk crate shanghaied into service as a makeshift chair. The engine fired up with a cough and a bang that did nothing to reassure either of the two passengers that it c...
She knew the police would be fanning out, looking for both the perpetrators and for any survivors, and right now she couldn’t afford to be detained as either. Once she was several hundred yards away from the camp, she stopped and took a moment to think about her next move. The staging area was ou...
the man said. Vietnamese or Laotian, Annja placed him in his early forties. He had a cruel look about him, with fleshy pock-marked cheeks, as if he’d suffered a disease in earlier years. He had intense, unblinking eyes that were hard like river stones. “No,” she said. “I do not wonder. You tortur...
The storm clouds had vanished along with the choppy seas and driving rain. Annja sat up and ran over the previous night’s events in her mind. With Roux running around, she’d have to make sure that Spier didn’t notice. The last thing she wanted was those two worlds colliding in a way that would fo...
On the edges of her awareness, Annja heard his lumbering shuffle into the room while she was busy climbing the slide. In the dim light, she caught the massive hulk of a man. But she was already twenty feet up and had no intention of stopping. Instead of paying him any atte...
She’d spent far too many of the past twenty-four hours hunched over the handlebars of the bike, in a car and—as luxurious as it was—Roux’s jet. Her muscles were cramped, her joints stiff. Still, considering she’d just fallen thirty feet from the runners of a helicopter and landed on her back, she...
An ambulance boat had arrived and whisked Scout away. Two hours later, Scout’s stomach had been pumped and the nurse had reassured Annja it had not been food poisoning, but perhaps instead the tea. Stale tea? Or perhaps tea that one suspected was dandelion root but instead...
The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade.The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The comm...
It was getting more expensive by the moment, not that he didn’t have the money to cover it. He’d invested well through the centuries and was more than comfortable. But in a handful of days he’d shelled out thousands on what was probably a wild goose chase to find Annja Creed. &n...
That wasn’t a good sign; it meant she’d considered not even taking his call. She only did that when she was annoyed with him, and her annoyance would make the news he’d called to deliver that much more dangerous. He was going to have to be careful. When she finally answere...
Annja jumped, releasing the sword, amazed that she wasn’t dead. She glanced down at herself—didn’t see any red stain blossoming across her shirt, didn’t feel any pain—then looked back up at the gunman. She was just in time to watch him crumple to the ground, a bullet having pierced his back and f...
At the stern of the boat, they saw Sheila holding a gun on Dave, who looked like he wanted to rip her head off. “Stay the hell back!” she shouted. Sheila clutched another crew member Annja didn’t recognize. The young man looked as though he might faint at any second. He didn’t struggle and stayed...
The old man knew her too well. He knew that by saying don’t go out she was going to go out. Annja wasn’t the kind of woman you could tell what to do. He’d known she was going to dive head-on into the investigation the moment she’d called simply because there was something strange going on. It did...
The IV drip in her arm continued to administer the antibiotics to combat the poison from the knife blade. And she slept a lot. By the time evening rolled around, Annja felt as though she was through the worst of it. Frank had gone back to Hyderabad. Annja still wasn’t convinced that the danger wa...
She waited for the mortuary assistant to draw back the sheet to reveal her father’s face. It was harder than she’d ever imagined it would be. She reached out to take Geraint’s hand. “Is this your father?” the policewoman aske...
Unhappy with himself at being caught so easily, Garin turned to face the man in the booth behind him. It was the third man on the search team, the one Garin had lost track of, and the man currently held a pistol pressed to the base of Garin’s skull. The way he sat blocked the view of the gun from...
Annja worked it around so she could lift it with her hands, but before she’d taken half a dozen steps the heat from the wick was burning her skin. She gritted her teeth against the pain, only just managing to lower it to the ground without dropping it in the process. That would have been a disast...
The rest of the mercenaries advanced with MacKenzie. They followed the incline of the hill and stayed behind boulders and scrub grass as much as they could. The proximity of the campfires would dull the Bedouin warriors’ night vision, as well. All small things, but they we...
Annja switched off the miniflashlight as she closed the door softly and locked it behind her. The barrier was too flimsy to put up much resistance, but maybe the men looking for them would hurry on by. On the other side of the door, police sirens screamed and the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter ...
She was just in time to see Tantor crash to the ground with earthshaking force, blood leaking from a bullet hole just above his right eye and staining his hide red. She rushed to the elephant’s side, oblivious to the fact that she had dropped her backpack somewhere along t...
She wasn’t broken by it, though, just hurt and upset with herself. She pushed the hood up, whirled, kicked out and connected with Archard to send him reeling. She called for her sword. “Thief!” she spat. “Worse than a thief!” He kept himself from fa...
She landed hard and rolled, hoping that the distance was enough to give pause to the men following at her heels like hounds on a scent. She protected the elephant in her cupped right hand and rolled on her left shoulder, coming dangerously close to the two-story drop. The fall wouldn’t have kille...