The only daughter of a European banking dynasty, Raphaella had always been sheltered from the world. Married to a much older American, she was kept in the privacy of great luxury, tended to by servants, watched over by bodyguards. She was the beautiful dark-eyed woman the young lawyer from San Francisco, Alexander Hale, saw sitting alone one misty evening. Before he could approach her, she rushed away into the garden. She was the "perfect stranger" he couldn't forget. When they met again their lives would change forever.

Joseph Roth has been described as ?one of the greatest writers in German of this century? ("The Times"). With tragic foresight, "Right and Left," first published in 1929, evokes the nightlife, corruption, political unrest, and economic tyranny of Berlin in the twenties, the same territory covered trenchantly in Roth's reportage, recently published as "What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33." After serving in World War I, Paul Bernheim returns to Berlin to find himself heir to his recently deceased father's banking empire. Increasingly beset by skyrocketing inflation, and dismayed by his brother's infatuation with the brownshirts, Bernheim turns to an outsider for help?a profiteering Russian ?migr? whose advice proves alternately advantageous and disastrous. Too late to change his fate, he realizes he has been decieved by a master in the craft of manipulation.

"The Laundry Files' 'fast-paced blend of espionage thrills, mundane office comedy and Lovecraftian horror' (SFX) continues as Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross assigns a day trader to a permanent position on the night shift ... After stumbling upon the algorithm that turned him and his fellow merchant bankers into vampires, Alex Schwartz was drafted by The Laundry, Britain's secret counter-occult agency that's humanity's first line of defense against the forces of darkness. Dependent on his new employers for his continued existence--as Alex has no stomach for predatory bloodsucking--he has little choice but to accept his new role as an operative-in-training. Dispatched to Leeds, Alex's first assignment is to help assess the costs of renovating a 1950s Cold War bunker into The Laundry's new headquarters. Unfortunately, Leeds is Alex's hometown, and the thought of breaking the news to his parents that he's left banking for civil service, while hiding his undead condition, is causing more anxiety than learning how to live as a vampire secret agent preparing to confront multiple apocalypses. Alex's only saving grace is Cassie Brewer, a drama student appearing in the local Goth Festival who is inexplicably attracted to him despite his awkward personality and massive amounts of sunblock. But Cassie has secrets of her own--secrets that make Alex's night life behaviors seem positively normal ..."-