At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to the Sykes-Picot agreement, one of the most reviled treaties of modern times. A century later, Christopher Sykes’ lively biography of his grandfather reassesses his life and work, and the political instability and violence in the Middle East attributed to it. The Sykes–Picot agreement was drawn by the eponymous British and French diplomats in 1916 to determine the divide of the collapsing empire in the event of an allied victory in World War I. Excluding Arab involvement, it negated their earlier guarantee of independence made by the British – and controversy has raged around it ever since. But who was Mark Sykes? A century on, Christopher Simon Sykes reveals new facets of a misremembered diplomatic giant. Using previously undisclosed family letters and cartoons by his grandfather, he delivers a comprehensive and humbling account of the man behind one of the most impactful policies in the Middle East.

Cats are now the most popular pets, and it is not surprising that they have overtaken dogs in the popularity stakes. They are small, relatively silent, economical to keep, exercise themselves, easy to feed, and are ideal companions for a wide range of people, from the elderly to those who are out at work all day.Whether you want an ordinary moggie or an expensive pedigree cat, the principles of ownership and looking after them are the same. As an increasing number of owners live in big cities and small, high-rise apartment blocks, house cats are becoming more widespread. Although they may not be allowed outside like their free-roaming, predatory cousins, they share a common ancestry and owning a cat of any description is like having a relatively wild creature living with you in your home. Domestication is anathema to many cats who prefer to think that they are independent animals, under the control of nobody but themselves.

Danger is never far off… When forensic psychologist Claire Britten started working with lawyer Nick Markwood on his South Shores project, she had no idea it would endanger her life—and the life of her daughter. But when the little girl goes missing from her South Florida home and Nick insists his long time nemesis is to blame, Claire frantically follows the trail to the Cayman Islands, desperate to save her daughter before it's too late. Nick always knew the man who staged his father's "suicide" was out to get him, but kidnapping the child of someone he cares about is despicable. Finding the billionaire criminal is one thing—meeting his demands in order to save Claire's daughter is quite another. What he wants threatens their professional and personal interests beyond imagination…but what choice do they have when a child's life is on the line?

I dangle my legs over the edge of the cliff, tapping my heels against the smooth dirt that crumbles down the side of the continent. I don't fear falling. The world below looks unreal and distant, like it's only been painted on. Falling is something I can't even imagine. As heir to a kingdom of floating continents, Kali has spent her life bound by limits: by her duties as a member of the royal family, by a forced betrothal to the son of a nobleman and by the edge of the only world she's ever known – a small island hovering above a monster-ridden earth, long since uninhabited by humans. When Kali falls off the edge of her kingdom and miraculously survives, she is shocked to discover there are still humans on the earth. Determined to get home, Kali entrusts a rugged monster-hunter named Griffin to guide her across a world overrun by chimera, storm dragons, basilisks and other terrifying creatures. But the more time she spends on earth, the more dark truths she begins to uncover about her home in the sky, and the more resolute she is to start living for herself.

There is a plot, Harry Potter. A plot to make most terrible things happen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this year.' Harry Potter's summer has included the worst birthday ever, doomy warnings from a house-elf called Dobby, and rescue from the Dursleys by his friend Ron Weasley in a magical flying car! Back at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for his second year, Harry hears strange whispers echo through empty corridors - and then the attacks start. Students are found as though turned to stone... Dobby's sinister predictions seem to be coming true.

Improve the speed of your code and optimize the performance of your apps About This Book ? Understand the common performance pitfalls and improve your application’s performance ? Get to grips with multi-threaded and asynchronous programming in C# ? Develop highly performant applications on .NET Core using microservice architecture Who This Book Is For This book is for .NET developers looking at improving the speed of their code or simply wanting to take their skills to the next level. Basic C# knowledge is assumed. What You Will Learn ? Measure application performance using BenchmarkDotNet ? Explore the techniques to write multithreaded applications ? Leverage TPL and PLinq libraries to perform asynchronous operations ? Get familiar with data structures to write optimized code ? Understand design techniques to increase your application’s performance ? Learn about memory management techniques in .NET Core ? Develop a containerized application based on microservices architecture ? Learn tools and techniques to monitor application performance In Detail While writing an application, performance is paramount. Performance tuning for realworld applications often involves activities geared toward fnding bottlenecks; however, this cannot solve the dreaded problem of slower code. If you want to improve the speed of your code and optimize an application's performance, then this book is for you. C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0 High Performance begins with an introduction to the new features of what?explaining how they help in improving an application's performance. Learn to identify the bottlenecks in writing programs and highlight common performance pitfalls, and learn strategies to detect and resolve these issues early. You will explore multithreading and asynchronous programming with .NET Core and learn the importance and effcient use of data structures. This is followed with memory management techniques and design guidelines to increase an application’s performance. Gradually, the book will show you the importance of microservices architecture for building highly performant applications and implementing resiliency and security in .NET Core. After reading this book, you will learn how to structure and build scalable, optimized, and robust applications in C#7 and .NET. Style and approach This book will be a step by step easy to follow guide with focused examples to increase performance of applications and provide optimization techniques.

Leverage the power of Python and its de facto GUI framework to build highly interactive interfaces About This Book ? The fundamentals of Python and GUI programming with Tkinter. ? Create multiple cross-platform projects by integrating a host of third-party libraries and tools. ? Build beautiful and highly-interactive user interfaces that target multiple devices. Who This Book Is For This book is for beginners to GUI programming who haven’t used Tkinter yet and are eager to start building great-looking and user-friendly GUIs. Prior knowledge of Python programming is expected. What You Will Learn ? Create a scrollable frame via theCanvas widget ? Use the pack geometry manager andFrame widget to control layout ? Learn to choose a data structurefor a game ? Group Tkinter widgets, such asbuttons, canvases, and labels ? Create a highly customizablePython editor ? Design and lay out a chat window In Detail Tkinter is a modular, cross-platform application development toolkit for Python. When developing GUI-rich applications, the most important choices are which programming language(s) and which GUI framework to use. Python and Tkinter prove to be a great combination. This book will get you familiar with Tkinter by having you create fun and interactive projects. These projects have varying degrees of complexity. We'll start with a simple project, where you'll learn the fundamentals of GUI programming and the basics of working with a Tkinter application. After getting the basics right, we'll move on to creating a project of slightly increased complexity, such as a highly customizable Python editor. In the next project, we'll crank up the complexity level to create an instant messaging app. Toward the end, we'll discuss various ways of packaging our applications so that they can be shared and installed on other machines without the user having to learn how to install and run Python programs. Style and approach Step by Step guide with real world examples

Enhance your software deployment workflow using containers About This Book ? Get up-and-running with basic to advanced concepts of Docker ? Get acquainted with concepts such as Docker containers, Docker images, orchestrators and so on. ? Practical test-based approach to learning a prominent containerization tool Who This Book Is For This book is targeted at system administrators, operations engineers, DevOps engineers, and developers or stakeholders who are interested in getting started with Docker from scratch. No prior experience with Docker Containers is required. What You Will Learn ? Containerize your traditional or microservice-based application ? Share or ship your application as an immutable container image ? Build a Docker swarm and a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud ? Run a highly distributed application using Docker Swarm or Kubernetes ? Update or rollback a distributed application with zero downtime ? Secure your applications via encapsulation, networks, and secrets ? Know your options when deploying your containerized app into the cloud In Detail Docker containers have revolutionized the software supply chain in small and big enterprises. Never before has a new technology so rapidly penetrated the top 500 enterprises worldwide. Companies that embrace containers and containerize their traditional mission-critical applications have reported savings of at least 50% in total maintenance cost and a reduction of 90% (or more) of the time required to deploy new versions of those applications. Furthermore they are benefitting from increased security just by using containers as opposed to running applications outside containers. This book starts from scratch, introducing you to Docker fundamentals and setting up an environment to work with it. Then we delve into concepts such as Docker containers, Docker images, Docker Compose, and so on. We will also cover the concepts of deployment, orchestration, networking, and security. Furthermore, we explain Docker functionalities on public clouds such as AWS. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience working with Docker containers and orchestrators such as SwarmKit and Kubernetes. Style and approach The simple end-to-end guide will help you learn everything about how to containerize, ship, and run both a traditional application and a modern microservice-based application on-premise or in the cloud.

Explore GIS processing and learn to work with various tools and libraries in Python. About This Book ? Analyze and process geospatial data using Python libraries such as; Anaconda, GeoPandas ? Leverage new ArcGIS API to process geospatial data for the cloud. ? Explore various Python geospatial web and machine learning frameworks. Who This Book Is For The audience for this book includes students, developers, and geospatial professionals who need a reference book that covers GIS data management, analysis, and automation techniques with code libraries built in Python 3. What You Will Learn ? Manage code libraries and abstract geospatial analysis techniques using Python 3. ? Explore popular code libraries that perform specific tasks for geospatial analysis. ? Utilize code libraries for data conversion, data management, web maps, and REST API creation. ? Learn techniques related to processing geospatial data in the cloud. ? Leverage features of Python 3 with geospatial databases such as PostGIS, SQL Server, and SpatiaLite. In Detail Python comes with a host of open source libraries and tools that help you work on professional geoprocessing tasks without investing in expensive tools. This book will introduce Python developers, both new and experienced, to a variety of new code libraries that have been developed to perform geospatial analysis, statistical analysis, and data management. This book will use examples and code snippets that will help explain how Python 3 differs from Python 2, and how these new code libraries can be used to solve age-old problems in geospatial analysis. You will begin by understanding what geoprocessing is and explore the tools and libraries that Python 3 offers. You will then learn to use Python code libraries to read and write geospatial data. You will then learn to perform geospatial queries within databases and learn PyQGIS to automate analysis within the QGIS mapping suite. Moving forward, you will explore the newly released ArcGIS API for Python and ArcGIS Online to perform geospatial analysis and create ArcGIS Online web maps. Further, you will deep dive into Python Geospatial web frameworks and learn to create a geospatial REST API. Style and approach The book takes a practical, example-driven approach to teach you GIS analysis and automation techniques with Python 3.

Practical, hands-on solutions in Python to overcome any problem in Machine Learning About This Book ? Master the advanced concepts, methodologies, and use cases of machine learning ? Build ML applications for analytics, NLP and computer vision domains ? Solve the most common problems in building machine learning models Who This Book Is For This book is for the intermediate users such as machine learning engineers, data engineers, data scientists, and more, who want to solve simple to complex machine learning problems in their day-to-day work and build powerful and efficient machine learning models. A basic understanding of the machine learning concepts and some experience with Python programming is all you need to get started with this book. What You Will Learn ? Select the right algorithm to derive the best solution in ML domains ? Perform predictive analysis effciently using ML algorithms ? Predict stock prices using the stock index value ? Perform customer analytics for an e-commerce platform ? Build recommendation engines for various domains ? Build NLP applications for the health domain ? Build language generation applications using different NLP techniques ? Build computer vision applications such as facial emotion recognition In Detail Machine learning (ML) helps you find hidden insights from your data without the need for explicit programming. This book is your key to solving any kind of ML problem you might come across in your job. You’ll encounter a set of simple to complex problems while building ML models, and you'll not only resolve these problems, but you’ll also learn how to build projects based on each problem, with a practical approach and easy-to-follow examples. The book includes a wide range of applications: from analytics and NLP, to computer vision domains. Some of the applications you will be working on include stock price prediction, a recommendation engine, building a chat-bot, a facial expression recognition system, and many more. The problem examples we cover include identifying the right algorithm for your dataset and use cases, creating and labeling datasets, getting enough clean data to carry out processing, identifying outliers, overftting datasets, hyperparameter tuning, and more. Here, you'll also learn to make more timely and accurate predictions. In addition, you'll deal with more advanced use cases, such as building a gaming bot, building an extractive summarization tool for medical documents, and you'll also tackle the problems faced while building an ML model. By the end of this book, you'll be able to fine-tune your models as per your needs to deliver maximum productivity. Style and approach This book is a step-by-step guide on how to develop machine learning applications for various domains. Each chapter of this book contains the practical guide on how to build specific machine learning applications from its base-line approach to the best possible approach. Basic necessary concepts, conman mistakes for every approach and optimization techniques are discussed for each application.

Get certified as an Azure architect by acing the 70-535 Architecting Microsoft Solutions (70-535) exam using this comprehensive guide with full coverage of the exam objectives About This Book ? Learn to successfully design and architect powerful solutions on the Azure Cloud platform ? Enhance your skills with mock tests and practice questions ? A detailed certification guide that will help you ace the 70-535 exam with confidence Who This Book Is For This book is for architects and experienced developers, who are gearing up for the 70-535 exam. Technical architects interested in learning more about designing Cloud solutions will also find this book useful. What You Will Learn ? Use Azure Virtual Machines to design effective VM deployments ? Implement architecture styles, like serverless computing and microservices ? Secure your data using different security features and design effective security strategies ? Design Azure storage solutions using various storage features ? Create identity management solutions for your applications and resources ? Architect state-of-the-art solutions using Artificial Intelligence, IoT, and Azure Media Services ? Use different automation solutions that are incorporated in the Azure platform In Detail Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions: Exam Guide 70-535 will get Azure architects and developers up-to-date with the latest updates on Azure from an architecture and design perspective. The book includes all the topics that are still relevant from the previous 70-534 exam, and is updated with latest topics covered, including Artificial Intelligence, IoT, and architecture styles. This exam guide is divided into six parts, where the first part will give you a good understanding of how to design a compute infrastructure. It also dives into designing networking and data implementations. You will learn about designing solutions for Platform Service and operations. Next, you will be able to secure your resources and data, as well as design a mechanism for governance and policies. You will also understand the objective of designing solutions for Platform Services, by covering Artificial Intelligence, IoT, media services, and messaging solution concepts. Finally, you will cover the designing for operations objective. This objective covers application and platform monitoring, as well as designing alerting strategies and operations automation strategies. By the end of the book, you'll have met all of the exam objectives, and will have all the information you need to ace the 70-535 exam. You will also have become an expert in designing solutions on Microsoft Azure. Style and approach This book offers clear and crisp explanations of the exam objectives that will help you with all the information needed to pass the 70-535 exam. The detail oriented approach will make you an expert on designing solutions on Microsoft Azure.

Unleash the power of the Raspberry Pi 3 board to create interesting IoT projects About This Book ? Learn how to interface various sensors and actuators with the Raspberry Pi 3 and send this data to the cloud. ? Explore the possibilities offered by the IoT by using the Raspberry Pi to upload measurements to Google Docs. ? A practical guide that will help you create a Raspberry Pi robot using IoT modules. Who This Book Is For If you're a developer or electronics engineer and are curious about the Internet of Things, then this is the book for you. With only a rudimentary understanding of electronics, the Raspberry Pi, or similar credit-card sized computers, and some programming experience, you will be taught to develop state-of-the-art solutions for the Internet of Things in an instant. What You Will Learn ? Understand the concept of IoT and get familiar with the features of Raspberry Pi ? Learn to integrate sensors and actuators with the Raspberry Pi ? Communicate with cloud and Raspberry using communication protocols such as HTTP and MQTT ? Build DIY projects using Raspberry Pi, JavaScript/node.js and cloud (AWS) ? Explore the best practices to ensure the security of your connected devices In Detail This book is designed to introduce you to IoT and Raspberry Pi 3. It will help you create interesting projects, such as setting up a weather station and measuring temperature and humidity using sensors; it will also show you how to send sensor data to cloud for visualization in real-time. Then we shift our focus to leveraging IoT for accomplishing complex tasks, such as facial recognition using the Raspberry Pi camera module, AWS Rekognition, and the AWS S3 service. Furthermore, you will master security aspects by building a security surveillance system to protect your premises from intruders using Raspberry Pi, a camera, motion sensors, and AWS Cloud. We'll also create a real-world project by building a Wi-Fi – controlled robot car with Raspberry Pi using a motor driver circuit, DC motor, and a web application. This book is a must-have as it provides a practical overview of IoT’s existing architectures, communication protocols, and security threats at the software and hardware levels—security being the most important aspect of IoT. Style and approach Internet of Things with the Raspberry Pi 3 contains the tools needed to design, sense the environment, communicate over the Internet, and visualize the results.

This book teaches you everything you need to know to create stunning Vaadin applications for all your web development needs. Deep dive into advanced Vaadin concepts while creating your very own sample Vaadin application. About This Book ? A one-stop book to enhance your working knowledge with Vaadin. ? Explore and implement the architecture of Vaadin applications. ? Delve into advanced topics such as data binding, authentication and authorization to improvise your application’s performance. Who This Book Is For If you area Software developer with previous experience with Vaadin and would like to gain more comprehensive and advanced skills in Vaadin web development, then this book is for you. What You Will Learn ? Modularize your Vaadin applications with Maven ? Create high quality custom components ? Implement robust and secure authentication and authorization mechanisms ? Connect to SQL databases efficiently ? Design robust CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) views ? Generate stunning reports ? Improve resource consumption by using lazy loading In Detail Vaadin is an open-source Java framework used to build modern user interfaces. Vaadin 8 simplifies application development and improves user experience. The book begins with an overview of the architecture of Vaadin applications and the way you can organize your code in modules.Then it moves to the more advanced topics about advanced topics such as internationalization, authentication, authorization, and database connectivity. The book also teaches you how to implement CRUD views, how to generate printable reports, and how to manage data with lazy loading. By the end of this book you will be able to architect, implement, and deploy stunning Vaadin applications, and have the knowledge to master web development with Vaadin. Style and approach This book follows a hands-on approach and takes the readers through practical examples of how to create and deploy Vaadin applications. This book teaches the readers about the Vaadin architecture. It then moves on to the more advanced topics about advanced topics such as internationalization, authentication, authorization, and database connectivity. This step by step guide equips the readers with all they need to know to use Vaadin for web development.

A solution-based guide to put your deep learning models into production with the power of Apache Spark Key Features * Discover practical recipes for distributed deep learning with Apache Spark * Learn to use libraries such as Keras and TensorFlow * Solve problems in order to train your deep learning models on Apache Spark Book Description With deep learning gaining rapid mainstream adoption in modern-day industries, organizations are looking for ways to unite popular big data tools with highly efficient deep learning libraries. As a result, this will help deep learning models train with higher efficiency and speed. With the help of the Apache Spark Deep Learning Cookbook, you’ll work through specific recipes to generate outcomes for deep learning algorithms, without getting bogged down in theory. From setting up Apache Spark for deep learning to implementing types of neural net, this book tackles both common and not so common problems to perform deep learning on a distributed environment. In addition to this, you’ll get access to deep learning code within Spark that can be reused to answer similar problems or tweaked to answer slightly different problems. You will also learn how to stream and cluster your data with Spark. Once you have got to grips with the basics, you’ll explore how to implement and deploy deep learning models, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) in Spark, using popular libraries such as TensorFlow and Keras. By the end of the book, you'll have the expertise to train and deploy efficient deep learning models on Apache Spark. What you will learn * Set up a fully functional Spark environment * Understand practical machine learning and deep learning concepts * Apply built-in machine learning libraries within Spark * Explore libraries that are compatible with TensorFlow and Keras * Explore NLP models such as Word2vec and TF-IDF on Spark * Organize dataframes for deep learning evaluation * Apply testing and training modeling to ensure accuracy * Access readily available code that may be reusable Who this book is for If you’re looking for a practical and highly useful resource for implementing efficiently distributed deep learning models with Apache Spark, then the Apache Spark Deep Learning Cookbook is for you. Knowledge of the core machine learning concepts and a basic understanding of the Apache Spark framework is required to get the best out of this book. Additionally, some programming knowledge in Python is a plus.

This book gets you started and gives you knowledge about AWS Fargate in order to successfully incorporate it in your ECS container application. Key Features *Gives you a quick walk-through over the Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) *Provides an in depth knowledge of the components that Amazon Fargate has to offer. *Learn the practical aspects of Docker application development with a managed service Book Description Amazon Fargate is new launch type for the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). ECS is an AWS service for Docker container orchestration. Docker is the de facto containerization framework and has revolutionized packaging and deployment of software. The introduction of Fargate has made the ECS platform serverless. The book takes you through how Amazon Fargate runs ECS services composed of tasks and Docker containers and exposes the containers to the user. Fargate has simplified the ECS platform. We will learn how Fargate creates an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for each task and how auto scaling can be enabled for ECS tasks. You will also learn about using an IAM policy to download Docker images and send logs to CloudWatch. Finally, by the end of this book, you will have learned about how to use ECS CLI to create an ECS cluster and deploy tasks with Docker Compose. What you will learn *Running Docker containers with a managed service *Use Amazon ECS in Fargate launch mode *Configure CloudWatch Logging with Fargate *Use an IAM Role with Fargate *Understand how ECS CLI is used with Fargate *Learn how to use an Application Load Balancer with Fargate *Learn about Auto Scaling with Fargate Who this book is for This book is for Docker users and developers who want to learn about the Fargate platform. Typical job roles for which the book is suitable are DevOps Architect, Docker Engineer, and AWS Cloud Engineer. Prior knowledge of AWS and ECS is helpful but not mandatory.

Understand the Ethereum platform to build distributed applications that are secured and decentralized using blockchain technology Key Features *Build your own decentralized applications using real-world blockchain examples *Implement Ethereum for building smart contracts and cryptocurrency applications with easy-to-follow projects *Enhance your application security with blockchain Book Description Ethereum enables the development of efficient, smart contracts that contain code. These smart contracts can interact with other smart contracts to make decisions, store data, and send Ether to others.Ethereum Projects for Beginners provides you with a clear introduction to creating cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and decentralized applications. As you make your way through the book, you’ll get to grips with detailed step-by-step processes to build advanced Ethereum projects. Each project will teach you enough about Ethereum to be productive right away. You will learn how tokenization works, think in a decentralized way, and build blockchain-based distributed computing systems. Towards the end of the book, you will develop interesting Ethereum projects such as creating wallets and secure data sharing.By the end of this book, you will be able to tackle blockchain challenges by implementing end-to-end projects using the full power of the Ethereum blockchain. What you will learn *Develop your ideas fast and efficiently using the Ethereum blockchain *Make writing and deploying smart contracts easy and manageable *Work with private data in blockchain applications *Handle large files in blockchain applications *Ensure your decentralized applications are safe *Explore how Ethereum development frameworks work *Create your own cryptocurrency or token on the Ethereum blockchain *Make sure your cryptocurrency is ERC20-compliant to launch an ICO Who this book is for This book is for individuals who want to build decentralized applications using blockchain technology and the power of Ethereum from scratch. Some prior knowledge of JavaScript is required, since most examples use a web frontend.

Enhance your skills in expert module development, deployment, security, DevOps, and cloud Key Features *A step-by-step guide to get you started with PowerShell Core 6.0 *Harness the capabilities of PowerShell Core 6.0 to perform simple to complex administration tasks *Learn core administrative concepts such as scripting, pipelines, and DSC Book Description Beginning with an overview of the different versions of PowerShell, Learn PowerShell Core 6.0 introduces you to VSCode and then dives into helping you understand the basic techniques in PowerShell scripting. You will cover advanced coding techniques, learn how to write reusable code as well as store and load data with PowerShell. This book will help you understand PowerShell security and Just Enough Administration, enabling you to create your own PowerShell repository. The last set of chapters will guide you in setting up, configuring, and working with Release Pipelines in VSCode and VSTS, and help you understand PowerShell DSC. In addition to this, you will learn how to use PowerShell with Windows, Azure, Microsoft Online Services, SCCM, and SQL Server. The final chapter will provide you with some use cases and pro tips. By the end of this book, you will be able to create professional reusable code using security insight and knowledge of working with PowerShell Core 6.0 and its most important capabilities. What you will learn *Get to grips with Powershell Core 6.0 *Explore basic and advanced PowerShell scripting techniques *Get to grips with Windows PowerShell Security *Work with centralization and DevOps with PowerShell *Implement PowerShell in your organization through real-life examples *Learn to create GUIs and use DSC in production Who this book is for If you are a Windows administrator or a DevOps user who wants to leverage PowerShell to automate simple to complex tasks, then this book is for you. Whether you know nothing about PowerShell or just enough to get by, this guide will give you what you need to go to take your scripting to the next level. You’ll also find this book useful if you’re a PowerShell expert looking to expand your knowledge in areas such as PowerShell Security and DevOps.

J.K. Rowling's screenwriting debut is captured in this ebook edition of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them screenplay. When Magizoologist Newt Scamander arrives in New York, he intends his stay to be just a brief stopover. However, when his magical case is misplaced and some of Newt's fantastic beasts escape, it spells trouble for everyone... Inspired by the original Hogwart’s textbook by Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original screenplay marks the screenwriting debut of J.K. Rowling, author of the beloved and internationally bestselling Harry Potter books. A feat of imagination and featuring a cast of remarkable characters and magical creatures, this is epic adventure-packed storytelling at its very best. Whether an existing fan or new to the wizarding world, this is a perfect addition for any film lover or reader’s bookshelf. The film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them received its theatrical release on 18th November 2016.

LONELY MEN IN HARD LUCK, ALASKA, LOOKING FOR WOMEN. OUR TOWN MIGHT BE COLD, BUT OUR HEARTS ARE WARM! Location: north of the Arctic Circle. Population: 150 (mostly men!) But the three O'Halloran brothers, who run a bush-plane charter service called Midnight Sons, are heading a campaign to bring women to town. Falling for Him Christian, the youngest O'Halloran brother, has a problem, and her name is Mariah Douglas. The Midnight Sons secretary is always losing his messages, misplacing his files and generally creating chaos. Despite that, he can't get her out of his mind… Ending in Marriage The clashes between pilot Duke Porter and Seattle attorney Tracy Santiago are legendary. Duke's a tough, rugged individualist who delights in expressing outrageous opinions, particularly when Tracy's around. But she gives as good as she gets…and not just when they're arguing! Includes a special extra novella! Midnight Sons and Daughters Scott O'Halloran and Chrissie Harris are all grown up now. After years away from Alaska, Scott's back in town, and everybody's wondering if he's here to stay. Especially Chrissie, the girl he left behind…

Fall for these two beloved stories about life, love and second chances. Love by Degree by Debbie Macomber When Ellen Cunningham decides to go back to school as a mature student, she knows that money is going to be tight. She also knows she's lucky to find inexpensive lodging in a house near the campus, but she didn't count on having to live with three college-aged boys–or deal with the bad-tempered landlord, Reed Morgan. Reed has no patience for college-boy antics, but the chemistry between him and Ellen might warm him up to his new tenants… The Rain Sparrow by Linda Goodnight Renowned yet private, thriller writer Hayden Winters lives a life colored by lies. As he is deeply ashamed of his past, his hunger for an honest relationship and dreams of starting a family remain unsatisfied, and he can trust no one with his secrets—until he meets Carrie Riley. When they discover a vulnerable young boy hiding at the inn where Hayden is staying, the two are compelled to help him, and soon they're drawn into a centuries-old mystery that will either bring them closer together—or tear them apart.

Sometimes fate brings you together…only to tear you apart Growing up in the foster system, Quinn O'Meara made a point of never getting involved. But when she discovers a crying baby amid a fiery crime scene, she knows she has no choice. Suddenly in way over her head, Quinn turns to the police, unintentionally positioning herself in the crosshairs of a deadly human-trafficking ring. The last time homicide detective Nick Saldano saw Quinn, she was still the young girl he'd shared a foster home with. The girl who'd loved and cared for him when no one else had. Now here she was, gorgeously all grown-up—and in terrible danger. Unwilling to lose her again, Nick insists on keeping Quinn close, especially when the bond they once shared heatedly slides into desire. Quinn finally has someone worth holding on to, but what kind of future can they have when she might not live to see tomorrow?