In 1908 black fighter Jack Johnson won the heavyweight championship of the world but there was an immediate storm of protest. The book tells the whole story.

They claimed to be the mightiest men in the world. For twenty-five years, before the outbreak of the First World War, professional strongmen were the pop idols of their day. Performing apparently incredible feats of strength, they strutted across stages and topped the bills everywhere, earning thousands of pounds a week. Fans included royalty, heads of state, politicians and leading figures in the literary and artistic worlds, as well as hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women, all revelling in the antics of these larger-than-life characters. Seeking to outdo each other in death-defying deeds, the strongmen’s performances were thrilling and dangerous: lifting elephants, horses, pianos and their players; breaking chains with their biceps; supporting thirty men on a plank suspended on their shoulders. Some strongmen succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Eugen Sandow, a great self-publicist, was appointed physical culture adviser to King George V. His great rival, the...

Once again, Ben Kella has his hands full. A sergeant in the Solomon Islands Police Force, as well as an aofia, a hereditary spiritual peacekeeper of the Lau people, he’s called to investigate acts of sabotage that threaten the local operations of a powerful international logging company.Meanwhile, Sister Conchita, a young nun with a flair for detection, has been forced to assume command of a run-down mission in the lush Western District of the Solomon Islands. When an American tourist is murdered in the mission church, she and Kella join forces to uncover the links between these goings-on and a sudden upsurge of interest in John F. Kennedy, who was once a wartime U.S. naval officer in the area but now, in 1960, thousands of miles away, about to become the thirty-fifth American President. Set in one of the most beautiful areas of the South Pacific, One Blood is the second entry in an exciting new series.From the Hardcover edition.

Sister Conchita, the young nun with a flair for detection, is immersed in another Solomon Islands investigation when an islander who claims to be a reincarnation of Noah is drowned outside his ark. To make matters worse, Conchita suspects that the murderer might be a Japanese soldier, still prowling the jungle fifteen years after the end of World War II. Once again she enlists the aid of her friend Sergeant Ben Kella of the Solomon Islands Police Force. Together they try and track down the malevolent Killman, a professional assassin who is introducing a reign of terror to the beautiful but dangerous island of Malaita that they both love so much. This time their perilous quest takes them as far as the wild Polynesian island of Tikopia, the almost legendary tiny island of the four kingdoms.