Melody Ellison is impressed by her sophisticated new friend, Leah Roth, but she wishes her cousin Val would stop being so standoffish to Leah! Melody meets Leah's grandfather, Dr. Roth, a botanist who escaped the Nazis and brought a rare and valuable Lady's Slipper orchid with him to America. When Melody's own grandfather becomes a suspect in a burglary, Melody turns to Val and Leah for help. Yet Leah seems to be hiding something, something to do...

"On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian...

In 2012, a New York auction catalogue boasted an unusual offering: "a superb Tyrannosaurus skeleton." In fact, Lot 49135 consisted of a nearly complete T. bataar, a close cousin to the most famous animal that ever lived. The fossils now on display in a Manhattan event space had been unearthed in Mongolia, more than 6,000 miles away. At eight-feet high and 24 feet long, the specimen was spectacular, and when the gavel sounded the winning bid was over...

The true adventures of David Fairchild, a turn-of-the-century food explorer who traveled the globe and introduced diverse crops like avocados, mangoes, seedless grapes—and thousands more—to the American plate.
“Fascinating.”—The New York Times Book Review • “Fast-paced adventure writing.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Richly descriptive.”—Kirkus...