An experienced thief, Wynthrope Ryland is no stranger to beautiful women—or to relieving them of their most valued possessions. But this life of crime is not one he chose for himself, and just when he thinks he has put that world behind him, he is forced to return, to protect the career and family of his brother, North.

Moira Tyndale, a stately viscountess, is his target for this final assignment. But he cannot get close to her without feeling some powerful connection between them. At first he pushes the attraction aside, but as she gives him more and more trust and understanding, Wyn realises he cannot ignore their passion. He knows he must protect her secrets and her past, but he cannot protect her from himself. How can he choose between his heart's desire and his brother's safety?

A year before Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire, Saberhagen published The Dracula Tape (1975), in which he dreamed up a sympathetic vampire of his own, launching a horror subgenre. Now Saberhagen's Vlad Dracula returns for his ninth novel (after A Matter of Taste, etc.), still driven by a sense of honor and still explaining himself to humans; here, to two whose survival depends on their believing his supernatural origins and history. Thrills and chills are provided by Vlad's malevolent brother, Radu. The narrative flickers between two eras: Revolutionary France, where Vlad and his gypsy-vampire companion, Constantia, try to save Phillip Radcliffe, an illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, from Radu and the guillotine, and modern America, where they kidnap Radcliffe's identically named descendant and his wife in order to save them from the still-vengeful Radu. There's plenty of crisp historical detail, including appearances by Napoleon and the Marquis de Sade. The series' ironic contrast between Vlad's innocence and the bloodlust of humans continues, with Vlad's aristocratic narrative voice (which alternates with third-person passages) continuing to impress. To be sure, the pace is languorous at times, but when you're spending quality time with someone who has centuries on his undead hands, what's the hurry?

For nearly four centuries, our understanding of human development has been controlled by the debate between nativism and empiricism. Nowhere has the contrast between these apparent alternatives been sharper than in the study of language acquisition. However, as more is learned about the details of language learning, it is found that neither nativism nor empiricism provides guidance about the ways in which complexity arises from the interaction of simpler developmental forces. For example, the child's first guesses about word meanings arise from the interplay between parental guidance, the child's perceptual preferences, and neuronal support for information storage and retrieval. As soon as the shape of the child's lexicon emerges from these more basic forces, an exploration of "emergentism" as a new alternative to nativism and empiricism is ready to begin.

Marit Julien investigates the relation between morphology and syntax, or more specifically, the relation between the form of inflected verbs and the position of those verbs. She surveys 530 languages and shows that, with the exception of agreement markers, the positioning of verbal inflectional markers relative to verb stems is compatible with a syntactic approach to morphology.