Chinese Pirates

South China coast, 1801. Sold as a child to a floating brothel, twenty-six-year-old Yang has finally bought her freedom, only to be kidnapped by a brutal pirate gang and forced to marry their leader. Dragged through stormy seas and lawless bandit havens, Yang must stay scrappy to survive. She embeds herself in the dark business of piracy, carving out her role against the resistance of powerful pirate leaders and Cheung Po Tsai, her husband's flamboyant male concubine.

A former US Navy intelligence officer, David Locke Hall was a federal prosecutor when a bizarre-sounding website, CRACK99, came to his attention. It looked like Craigslist on acid, but what it sold was anything but amateurish: thousands of high-tech software products used largely by the military, and for mere pennies on the dollar. Want to purchase satellite tracking software? No problem. Aerospace and aviation simulations? No problem. Communications systems designs? No problem.

In the grand sweep of Chinese history, the woman warrior is both ever-present and curiously obscured. She appears in poems and operas, in dynastic chronicles and martial folklore, yet she is rarely centered in the official narratives of empire. She is often remembered not by name, but by role: the filial daughter, the loyal wife, the grieving mother, the rebel widow. And yet, she endures. From the legendary Hua Mulan to the pirate queen Ching Shih, from the drum-beating general Liang Hongyu to the revolutionary matron Mother Lü, Chinese history is threaded with women who took up arms—not...

Camilla, Lucille and Vanessa are three indivisible friends: every summer they gather in Sandy Point to spend the three months of summer together, and they are a real bundle of mischief. But this year, one of them has found out an old forgotten map that talks about a hidden treasure: the fabulous treasure of Piratess Morgana...