1944. The USS Intrepid set sail on its first combat voyage, only to be struck by a Japanese torpedo plane, jamming its rudder at a forty-five-degree angle. It could only sail in circles amid treacherous waters. The task force abandoned ship as it tried to make the 3,300-mile voyage to Pearl Harbor. For a day, the captain was able to slalom, alternating use of the ship’s engines, but the seas became too perilous. Until one resilient crewman came up with the ingenious idea of rigging a twenty-eight-inch-high sail on the second deck to steer the ship home safe.

Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?

In June 1944, German and American forces converged on an insignificant bridge a few miles inland from the invasion beaches. If taken by the Nazis, the bridge might have gone down in history as the reason the Allies failed on D-Day. The narrow road over it was each side’s conduit to victory. Continued Nazi control over the bridge near an old manoir known as La Fière—one of only two bridges in the region capable of supporting tanks and other heavy armor—would allow the Germans to reinforce their defenses at Utah Beach, one of the five landing areas chosen for Operation Overlord.

Told with a thrilling pace, New York Times bestselling author and historian Scott Ellsworth has written the most compelling new book about the Civil War in years. Focusing on the last, desperate months of the war, when the outcome was far from certain, Midnight on the Potomac is a story of titanic battles, political upheaval, and the long-forgotten Confederate terror war against the loyal citizens of the North.

In the tradition of Hampton Sides and Simon Winchester comes a vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archeological scholar Mike Pitts—a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island’s collapse.