This is the only critical edition of this perennially popular story. Sally Shuttleworth's introduction finds, beneath the idyllic evocation of rural bliss and a tale of love and high adventure, a startling sub-text which rigidly defends Victorian values, and portrays a manly' hero constantly having to prove his masculinity to himself. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature...

One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college...

"When Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore dies, she's not only North Carolina's richest woman, she's also its most notorious. The victim of a famous kidnapping as a child and a widow four times over, Ruby ruled the tiny town of Tavistock from Ashby House, her family's estate high in the Blue Ridge mountains. In the aftermath of her death, that estate--along with a nine-figure fortune and the complicated legacy of being a McTavish--pass...

Every year on March 26th, Verity Peterson visits Ogunquit Beach, where she puts a handwritten message into a bottle and launches it into the waves. It's a ritual of remembrance for the daughter she hasn't seen in sixteen years--not since her baby's father, Alan, took two-month-old Gemma and disappeared. Verity keeps searching and hoping, sustained by the thought that someday she might get to be a mother to her own child. And finally, one phone call...

"Reeve LeClaire is a college student, dammit, not Daryl Wayne Flint's victim. Not anymore-not when Reeve is finally recovering a life of her own after four years of captivity. Flint is safely locked up in Olshaker Psychiatric Hospital, where he belongs. He is walking the grounds of the forensic unit, performing his strange but apparently harmless rituals. It seems that he is still suffering the effects of the head injury he suffered in the car crash...

"A dragon will kill her creator to protect her family. Dr. Eva Paz wants only a peaceful life on Roatan for herself and her dolphins, continuing their research in dolphin communication and educating children on the importance of caring for the reef. But when the Navy reactivates Taffy and Finn for exercises in Pearl Harbor, that all changes. For she finds Julian is there as well, and he is armed with yet another genetically modified creature. This...

"When money goes missing from the family foundation she runs, Bo Hamilton rides into the Crazy Mountains to figure things out. But a killer hiding among the sawtooth ridges takes her captive and rescue will come from the one man she least expects"--

"A psychological thriller about trauma, power, and survival, which follows a young woman who has been captured and confined by a serial killer--who is a father, widower, former Marine, and lineman for the local electric company--as he hides the true nature of his double life from his daughter, neighbors, and the local bartender who could be his next victim, unless his captive manages to stop him"-- Aidan Thomas is a hard-working family man in the...

Charlotte Graham is at the center of the most famous kidnapping in Chicago history. A task force of FBI and local cops found her two abductors, killed them, rescued her, but it took four very long years. The fact she was found less than three miles from her home, and had been there the entire time, haunts them. She's changed her identity, found a profession she loves, and rebuilt her life. She's never said a word -- to the cops, to her doctors, to...

Emma Ruskin, disillusioned with life and love, takes a position as governess to ten-year-old Poppy Ackroyd at a large country home. Despite the Ackroyd family's contempt for her, she soon begins to develop a rapport with Gavin, their effortlessly superior eldest son. Then disaster strikes when Emma and Poppy are snatched and imprisoned by kidnappers. Emma knows they'll be killed if the ransom money isn't forthcoming, unless Gavin can get to them first....