Delivering the fast-paced adventure and wit of the other William Dietrich books, The Barbary Pirates is Ethan Gage at his winningest, most hilarious, and most death-defying. Ethan Gage is back in Paris, hoping to persuade Napoleon Bonaparte to sell the Louisiana Territory he explored in The Dakota Cipher to the United States. But when three famous scientists enlist Ethan to show them the bawdy wonders of the Palais Royale, he soon finds himself sucked into his most exciting, heart-wrenching, and funniest adventure yet. Rumors of an ancient weapon on a volcanic Greek island pit Ethan and his scientist companions in a desperate race with the Barbary pirates – and with his Egyptian Rite nemesis Aurora Somerset – to rediscover and control the mirror of Archimedes, which legend says set Roman galleys afire in the Siege of Syracuse. In 1802, this death ray could tip the balance of power in the Mediterranean, and Ethan must stop the pirates from using it against the American, English and French fleets. Ethan must not only thwart the pirates, he must also rescue his former lover Astiza and save the two-year-old son he didn’t know he had. His new family finds themselves in a fight to the death with Aurora, a pirate king, a wily captain, and Omar the Dungeon Master. Seattle author William Dietrich grew up near Puget Sound in the shadow of Mount Rainier, and like so many writers of the Pacific Northwest, it is geography, a sense of place, and the natural and human environment that flows through his writing. The influence of dramatic landscapes on people infects not only his non-fiction but his novels, set in Antarctica, the Australian Outback, the barbarian fringes of the Roman Empire, the sands of the Middle East, or frontier America. The Pulitzer-winning journalist’s non-fiction has been widely used in university classes and his fiction has been sold into twenty-eight languages.