New Releases by Kage Baker

Poor Mendoza. She''s not thrilled about being sent to Renaissance England. It''s a cold, backward, unsafe country. Gray curtains of rain. The food crawling with bacteria. No flush toilets. She won''t get to see Shakespeare either. He hasn''t been born yet. The English hate the Spanish like smallpox, especially now with bulldog-faced Mary on the throne. But Mendoza is no longer a frightened little girl in the dungeons of the Inquisition; she''s a Company-trained botanist and has an assignment - to save Ilex tormentosum, a species of holly that will go extinct in a hundred years. She must save it for Dr. Z and the twenty-fourth century. Kage Baker, in her first novel, tells the story of a spunky young cyborg who, though an immortal operative, falls for Master Nicholas Harpole, a mortal with pale blue eyes, good legs, and a smooth, rich tenor that hangs on the air like a violin.

In the second novel of Mendoza''s adventures, the 16th century girl is saved from the Spanish Inquisition only to be transformed into a 24th century cyborg (a partly artificial person). The time is now the 1860s, and Mendoza, who has never recovered from losing her lover to martyrdom in the 1540s, is in California being a botanist and living with other immortals. Suddenly a man who is her lover''s exact double appears - an English spy intent on stealing California from the Americans while they are fighting their civil war.

A comedy in which a god visits a 17th century Indian village in California to get the inhabitants to relocate to another world, thereby saving them from destruction by the Spanish. The god, Sky Coyote, is in fact a surgically altered impostor, an agent of time-travelling, do-gooders from the 24th century who are dedicated to preserving the world''s civilizations. By the author of In the Garden of Iden.