"The family was stunned," Butterfield said, "when not more than a few months after she'd left home for England, Gloria wrote to announce she'd fallen in love with a rich man's son."I felt my eyebrows shimmy up my forehead. Nic Knuckles knew what it was like to fall in love with someone with more money, greater status, and a father who called her Princess. It was amazing at first, then six months later, when her daddy lost his job, went broke, and asked you to pay his gambling debt,...

New York City private eye Nic Knuckles gets the call all private investigators live for: a mysterious client with money to burn who needs answers and needs them now. The job is simple. Fly to Kleinstadt, Indiana, and determine whether fifteen years ago, teenage murder victim Mindy Bauerman got justice, or if her classmate, Timmy Hanlon, had been wrongly convicted and wasting away in prison.Nic's analytic skills lack the rigor of a Sherlock Holmes, as memories of past romantic failu...

Incompetent surgeons, corrupt royal colleges, nepotism and quackery. The medical establishment - a small coterie of self-serving doctors - went unchallenged.Until 1823, when a young surgeon, son of a farmer, who'd survived being at sea, mastered bare-knuckle fighting, and escaped assassination, did what no doctor had dared.Risking ruin, Thomas Wakley established The Lancet, an uncompromising radical journal which scandalized the establishment and initiated modern health car...