Pete Cross

"Frank and Stanley are touring a battleship when Japanese planes zoom overhead, dropping bomb after bomb. As explosions roar and sailors scream, Frank and Stanley realize the unthinkable is happening: Japan is attacking America! The war has come to them. Frantically, the boys struggle to find safety. But disaster and danger are everywhere--from torpedoes underwater to bullets on the beach ... to the shocking cruelty that thier friends and neighbors...

Set against the background of political upheaval in France following the rule of Napoleon I, the novel tells the story of the peasant Jean Valjean, a convict struggling to escape his past and on the run, hunted by Inspector Javert, a police agent with a ruthless conscience. Their world encompasses a broad section of the outcasts, rejects and rebels of early 19th-century French society, as events take in a tour of the city's sewers, the battle of Waterloo...