Books with title The Golden Skull

Joanne and her friends pile into Ken's Corvette with a picnic basket and climb to the top of Mount Lemmon at nine thousand feet enshrouded in pine forests. Let the senior school picnic commence! They start playing hide-and-seek. Joanne races back into the woods to conceal herself behind a tall pine. She trips over a human skull. It is just lying there on the ground staring back at her with vacant eyes.A thug points a gun in her back and threatens her that if she tells anyone what she saw she will die. He backs her up against another tree and makes her count to one hundred before she opens her eyes. The thug and the skull are gone!What is the lone skull doing on the mountain top? Who was killed? How long ago? Joanne finds herself ensnared in an elaborate intrigue from which she can only hope to emerge alive.

In biblical times, Itamar, the tailor's son, has carefully carried the High Priest's robe—with its little golden bells sewn onto the hem—home for his father to mend. But one day, one of the bells is missing! When nobody turns in the lost bell at the Claiming Stone, Itamar wonders if the tiny bell will ever be found. A surprise ending brings the story into modern times when an archaeologist finds a golden bell at a Jerusalem dig.

On an eerie waste plot, Josh finds a cat's skull that belongs to Nancy, a strange Polish woman who feeds wild cats. From that moment the skull seems to have power over Josh's life and possibly his death, yet he cannot relinquish it."I tell you, boy, you take. But then...it take you. More...and more...you want it until you are dead but cannot die. How you like that, boy? Dead...but still alive." Nancy's words are ominous.Kevin, a sinister new classmate persecutes Josh, steals the skull, and incites Josh's friends to beat him up on a lonely path beside a rail track.Unless Josh can find a solution to the problem of the skull and Kevin, worse may happen. This is a story of a boy, on the brink of maturity, who discovers himself.

It seemed as though a dragon, for it could be nothing else, had reared out of the ground in the night . . . and then been turned to stone by the first rays of the dawn sun. Starting with the living beast, the Megalosaurus herself, over 144 million years ago, The Skull follows the Marchant family from generation to generation, exploring key moments in history shaped by radical philosophical and scientific change. Whether feeding in a frenzy, seen as evidence of the devil, kept as a token of scientific heritage or used an easy way to make a quick buck, the Megalosaurus skull continues to change lives over millennia, long after her untimely demise. In this superb fictional tale, scientific and historical fact is blended with drama, intrigue, and life-changing scientific discoveries that not only affect the Marchants, but science, philosophy and civilisation as we know it.

It is circa 2600 BC in ancient Mesopotamia during a terrible drought, and Jomar and Zefa's father must send his children away to the city of Ur because he can no longer feed them. At fourteen, Jomar is old enough to apprentice with Sidah, a master goldsmith for the temple of the moongod, but there is no place for Zefa in Sidah's household. Zefa, a talented but untrained musician, is forced to play her music and sing for alms on the streets of Ur. Marjorie Cowley vividly imagines the intrigues, and harsh struggle for survival in ancient Mesopotamia.

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. These are no ordinary princesses-- they're Rescue Princesses! The Rescue Princesses are going to Princess School! They're excited, but also a little worried--will they still have time to help animals in need? Princess Ella has lost her pet rabbit. She hopes that her new friends, the Rescue Princesses, are just the girls to bring her bunny home.

Three 13-year-olds dabble in "CSI" to reveal a town's long-kept secret. The first in the Remy and Roadkill Series. To help practice facial reconstruction, Remy purchases a monkey skull at an estate sale. Curious how the animal died, she enlists the aid of the school's outcast -- a teen with a strange fascination in dead animals. They team up with a runaway and together take a job in the mansion's library. But they have more than shelving books on their minds, because when Remy completed her reconstruction, she discovered that the skull wasn't from an animal. There are others who know the skull is human. And there is one person who will stop at nothing to keep its identity a secret.

"I tell you, boy, you take. But then...it take you. More and more...you want it until you are dead but cannot die." Old Nancy's words are prophetic but Josh, popular and happy, becomes a victim of his active imagination. When he finds a cat's skull belonging to the strange pagan woman who feeds wild cats on a vacant lot, Josh assumes that it is powerful magic. He keeps it, thinking that it will help him to deal with Kevin, a sinister bully who has joined his class. The skull seems to act like a curse when Kevin steals it and gains mastery over Josh's friends. They beat him up on a lonely path beside a railway. Unless Josh can find a solution to his problem, there may be worse to come. "The Skull" is a story of self-discovery by a child of eleven on the brink of maturity. The pagan superstition in the book, combined with conflict between Josh and the psychopathic Kevin, resembles award winning author David Almond's "Clay". A similar theme of bullying appears in Anne Fine's "The Tulip Touch": pagan magic features in Theresa Breslin's "Whispers in the Graveyard" and Harriet Goodwin's "The Hex Factor".