The Coral Thief, originally $25, for sale at $5 - Price: $5 in Oakland, Arkansas

I just finished this book and found it a very good read.  This historical novel centers on Paris around the time of the revolution, and concerns a mysterious lady thief, a great deal of natural history as it applies to the Jardin de Plantes.  The volume itself is like new -- you could never tell that anyone had read it.  Rebecca Stott is an excellent writer.
Here's the blurb from the inside flap of the front cover:
"Paris, xxxx. Napolean has just surrendered at Waterloor and is on his way to the island of St. Helena to begin his exile.  Meanwhile, Daniel Connor, a young medical student from Edinburgh, has just arrived in Paris to study anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes -- only to realize that his letters of introduction and a gioft of precious coral specimens, on which his tenure with the legendary Dr. Cuvier depends, have been stolen by the beautiful woman with whom he shared a stagecoach.
"In the fervor and tumult of post revolutionary Paris, nothing is quite as it seems.  In trying to recover hgis lost valyables, Danmiel discovered that his beautriful adversary is in fact a philosopher-thief who lives in a shadowy world of outlaws and emigres.  Daniel's fall into this underworld is a;lso a floight, for as he falls in love with the mysterious coral thief and she draws him into an audacious plot that will leave him with a future very different from the one he has envisioned for himself, Daniel discobvered a radical theory of evolution and mutability that irrevocably changes his conception of the world in which he lives.
The Coral Thief, as riveting and beautifully rendered as Ghostwalk, Rebecca Stott's first novel, is a provocative and tantalizing mix of history, philosophy and suspense.  It conjures up vividly both the feats of Napolean and the accomplishmernts of those working without fame or glory to change our ideas of who we are and the world in which we live."