Orion Books

The first of the interlinked plotlines is set in Russia during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Fandorin is charged with protecting the Trans-Siberian Railway from Japanese sabotage in a pacy adventure filled with double agents and ticking bombs. Then we travel back to the Japan of the late 1870s. This is the story of Fandorin's arrival and life in Yokohama, his first meeting with Masa and the martial arts education that came in so handy later. He investigates the death of a Russian ship-captain, fights for a woman, exposes double-agents in the Japanese police, fights against, and then with the ninjas, and becomes embroiled in a shocking finale that interweaves the two stories and ties up the series as a whole.

All is not well at Buckshaw, home of Flavia de Luce... With the family finances in a parlous state, Flavia's father has, with deep misgivings, rented Buckshaw to a film company for a location shooting. Naturally enough, director, crew and stars do nothing to endear themselves to the household — especially the servants — until, when a heavy snowfall cuts off Bishop's Lacey from the rest of the world, the actors are talked into staging a benefit performance in the parish hall. But old jealousies surface, and the leading lady is murdered. Flavia, who has been enlisted to help out behind the scenes, finds herself up to her knees in snow — and murder!

HBO's Game of Thrones reigns as cable's highest-rated series. This official companion book gives fans new ways to enter this fictional world and discover more about the beloved (and reviled) characters and the electrifying plotlines. Hundreds of set photos, production and costume designs, storyboards, and insider stories reveal how the show's creators translated George R. R. Martin's best-selling fantasy series into the world of Westeros. Featuring interviews with key actors and crew members that capture the best scripted and unscripted moments from the first two seasons, as well as a preface by George R. R. Martin, this special volume, bound in a lavishly debossed padded cover, offers exclusive access to this unprecedented television series.

A tale of murder, artistic rivalry and literary trickery; a chinese puzzle of a novel where nothing is quite what it seems a narrator whose agenda is artful and subtle; a narrative that pulls you in and plays an elegant game with you. The Dream Archipelago is a vast network of islands. The names of the islands are different depending on who you talk to, their very locations seem to twist and shift. Some islands have been sculpted into vast musical instruments, others are home to lethal creatures, others the playground for high society. Hot winds blow across the archipelago and a war fought between two distant continents is played out across its waters. The Islanders serves both as an untrustworthy but enticing guide to the islands, an intriguing, multi-layered tale of a murder and the suspect legacy of its appealing but definitely untrustworthy narrator. It shows Christopher Priest at the height of his powers and illustrates why he has remained one of the country's most prized novelists.

John Lennon was a writer as well as a musician. It was entirely natural for him to put pen to paper whenever he had an idea, a thought, a reaction or a desire to communicate. He lived — and died — in an age before emails and texts. Pen and ink was what he turned to. John wrote letters and postcards all of his life; to his friends, family, strangers, newspapers, organisations, lawyers and the laundry — most of which were funny, informative, campaigning, wise, mad, poetic, anguished and sometimes heartbreaking. For the first time, John's widow, Yoko Ono, has given permission to publish a collection of his letters. The Editor is the Beatles' official biographer, Hunter Davies, who knew John well. John's letters are in a way something of a mystery — where are they all? Over the years many have come up at auction, then sold to dealers and collectors. Or they have been kept by the recipients, locked up safely. It has been a wonderful piece of detective work tracing many of these 150 letters, which are arranged in chronological order, so that a narrative builds up, reflecting John's life. It will be visual — in a sense that many of the letters are reproduced as they were, in his handwriting or typing, plus the odd cartoon or doodle. THE LENNON LETTERS is fundamentally a book to read and study, providing a unique insight into the mind of one of the great figures of our times.

This is the story of Dr Alfred Jones, a fisheries scientist — for whom diary — notable events include the acquisition of a new electric toothbrush and getting his article on caddis fly larvae published in 'Trout and Salmon' — who finds himself reluctantly involved in a project to bring salmon fishing to the Highlands of the Yemen — a project that will change his life, and the course of British political history forever. With a wickedly wonderful cast of characters — including a visionary Sheikh, a weasely spin doctor, Fred's devilish wife and a few thousand transplanted salmon — Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a novel about hypocrisy and bureaucracy, dreams and deniability, and the transforming power of faith and love.

There is only one person who can tell Stieg Larsson's story other than himself — his lifelong companion and muse, Eva Gabrielsson. Here she tells the story of their 30-year romance, of Stieg's upbringing and early years, and how this shaped his morals and personality. She talks of his life-long struggle to expose Sweden's Neo-Nazis, of his struggle to keep the magazine he founded, EXPO, alive, his difficult relationships with his immediate family, and the joy and relief he discovered writing the Millennium trilogy. Above all, this is a love story, and shows that if there was another secret besides Larsson's own imagination and convictions, it was his absolute love for his companion and her nurturing of their privacy and shared passions. Their story is told as a series of short vignettes, and Eva Gabrielsson speaks with rare candour and dignity, inspired only by the truth as she knows it. This book is poignant in its account of two soulmates and the life they shared, and most importantly is deeply insightful into the man everyone wants to know better, and about whom so little is known.

1760. Jamie Fraser is a paroled prisoner-of-war in the remote Lake District. Close enough to the son he cannot claim as his own, his quiet existence is interrupted first by dreams of his lost wife, then by the appearance of Tobias Quinn, an erstwhile comrade from the Rising. Lord John Grey — aristocrat, soldier, sometime spy — is in possession of papers which reveal a damning case of corruption and murder against a British officer. But the documents also hint at a far more dangerous conspiracy. Soon Lord John and Jamie are unwilling companions on the road to Ireland, a country whose castles hold dreadful secrets, and where the bones of the dead are hidden, in an epic story of treachery — and scores that can only be settled in blood.

When black cloaked Sarah Canary wanders into a railway camp in the Washington territories in 1873, Chin Ah Kin is ordered by his uncle to escort the ugliest woman he could imagine away. Far away. But Chin soon becomes the follower. In the first of many such instances, they are separated, both resurfacing some days later at an insane asylum. Chin has run afoul of the law and Sarah has been committed for observation. Their escape from the asylum in the company of another inmate sets into motion a series of adventures and misadventures that are at once hilarious, deeply moving, and downright terrifying.

Marley was dead. Again. The legendary Ebenezeer Scrooge sits in his house counting money. The boards that he has nailed up over the doors and the windows shudder and shake under the blows from the endless zombie hordes that crowd the streets hungering for his flesh and his miserly braaaaiiiiiinns! Just how did the happiest day of the year slip into a welter of blood, innards and shambling, ravenous undead on the snowy streets of old London town? Will the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future be able to stop the world from drowning under a top-hatted and crinolined zombie horde? Was Tiny Tim's illness something infinitely more sinister than mere rickets and consumption? Can Scrooge be persuaded to go back to his evil ways, travel back to Christmas past and destroy the brain stem of the tiny, irritatingly cheery Patient Zero? It's the Dickensian Zombie Apocalypse — God Bless us, one and all!

D/I Faraday is gone and the police are left reeling. As his boss attempts to limit any possible PR damage his one time shadow on the force, ex D/C Winter is ever more concerned that he may have made the biggest mistake of his life throwing in his lot with the city's drug baron, Bazza McKenzie. Especially as Bazza is becoming increasingly desperate and violent as his empire begins to crumble under the weight of austere times. And, in the person of D/S Jimmy Suttle there's a new will at the heart of Portsmouth's embattled police force to nail Bazza once and for all, the one man Faraday was always desperate to bring to justice. Graham Hurley's new novel is about loss. It is about the decisions we make in life, about the impact our lives have on others. Hurley's trademark authenticity has been allied to an ever increasing sense of drama as he charts the lives of his vivid characters and paints a stunning portrait of a city and a country at war with itself. A war which throws the police into the front line. Happy days?

In the second book in Vina Jackson's exhilarating new romance trilogy, fiery musician Summer and wealthy academic Dominik experience the passions and pitfalls of a thrilling love affair with a difference.

Megan once walked on the wild side. Now she's got two kids, a perfect husband, a picket fence, and a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Ray used to be a talented documentary photographer, but at age forty he finds himself in a dead-end job posing as a paparazzo pandering to celebrity-obsessed rich kids. Broome is a detective who can't let go of a cold case — a local husband and father disappeared seventeen years ago, and Broome spends the anniversary every year visiting a house frozen in time, the missing man's family still waiting, his slippers left by the recliner as if he might show up any moment to step into them. Three people living lives they never wanted, hiding secrets that even those closest to them would never suspect. As the terrible consequences of long-ago events crash together in the present and threaten to ruin lives they will discover the hard truth that the line between one kind of life and another can be as whisper-thin as a heartbeat...

There is a secret history of the world — a history in which an alien virus struck the Earth in the aftermath of World War II, endowing a handful of survivors with extraordinary powers. Some were called Aces — those with superhuman mental and physical abilities. Others became Jokers — cursed with bizarre mental or physical disabilities. Some turned their talents to the service of humanity. Others used their powers for evil. Wild Cards is their story. Return to the beginning of the long running shared-world series edited by George R. R. Martin, featuring stories and characters who would go on to become legends. Super-heroes have never been more real. Originally published in 1987, Wild Cards I includes powerful tales by Roger Zelazny, Walter Jon Williams, Howard Waldrop, Lewis Shiner, and George R. R. Martin himself. And this expanded edition contains further original tales set at the beginning of the Wild Cards universe, by eminent new writers like Hugo-winner David Levine, noted screenwriter and novelist Michael Cassutt, and New York Times bestseller Carrie Vaughn.

THE GAME'S AFOOT... November 1890. London is gripped by a merciless winter. Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are enjoying tea by the fire when an agitated gentleman arrives unannounced at 221b Baker Street. He begs Holmes for help, telling the unnerving story of a scar-faced man with piercing eyes who has stalked him in recent weeks. Intrigued, Holmes and Watson find themselves drawn into a series of puzzling and sinister events, stretching from the gas-lit streets of London to the teeming criminal underworld of Boston. As they delve deeper into the case, they stumble across a whispered phrase the House of Silk: a mysterious entity and foe more deadly than any Holmes has encountered, and a conspiracy that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of society...

Three children have been lost to the world, horrifically murdered. The crimes seem to be linked to those carried out by a serial killer — from the previous century... In this sequel to The Talisman, Jack Sawyer is now in his late thirties and has taken early retirement from the LAPD, retreating to a small town in Wisconsin. He has no memory of his adventures as a twelve-year-old boy, when he travelled into a parallel universe in search of the talisman that would save his mother's life. Now, with the attacks on the three children, Jack is forced out of retirement. But there is more to these cases than murder, and Jack must retrieve his childhood memories if he is to rescue the latest victim...

Spero Lucas has a new line of work. Since he returned home after serving in Iraq, he has been doing special investigations for a defence attorney. He's good at it, and he has carved out a niche: recovering stolen property, no questions asked. His cut is 40%. A high-profile crime boss who has heard of Lucas's speciality hires him to find out who has been stealing from his operation. It's the biggest job Lucas has ever been offered, and he quickly gets a sense of what's going on. But before he can close in he tangles with a world of men whose amorality and violence leave him reeling. Is any cut worth your family, your lover, your life?

Malcolm Fox is has been sent to Fife to investigate whether fellow cops covered up for a corrupt colleague, Detective Paul Carter. Carter has been found guilty of misconduct — and the man who reported him was his own uncle. What should be a simple job is soon complicated by conspiracy and cover-up — and a brutal murder, a murder committed with a weapon that should not even exist. The spiralling investigation takes Fox back to 1985, a year of turmoil in British political life. Terrorists intent on a split between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom were becoming more brazen and ruthless, sending letter-bombs and poisonous spores to government offices, plotting kidnaps and murder, and trying to stay one step ahead of the spies sent to flush them out. Fox has a duty to get at the truth, while the body count rises, the clock starts ticking, and he fights for his professional and personal life.

Dizzy the dog loves to sing, but the mean old Alley Cats won't let him join their chorus. But what do cats know about singing anyway? It's time to show them just what the dogs can do!

AARDVARK: shouts at BAKED BEANS: drops on cat KETCHUP: decorates mother with Mr Punishment has the perfect punishment for every naughtiness in the world and every day his telephone rings with parents desperate for his advice. But Mr Punishment never seems to get it quite right — with chaotic results!

AC/DC moved to Britain from Sydney in 1975, and soon set up a residency at London's Marquee Club. Their short hair (including the odd mullet), loud rock and attitude chimed well with the lingering pub rock and soon-to-be punk crowd. They weren't really a band for guitar solos, and singer Bon Scott was the original bike-riding, speed-snorting, fighting man. An ex-convict he lived life fast and short; he died in February 1980, just before Back in Black, their huge-selling album, took off, and the second period of AC/DC (with Brian Johnson as lead vocalist) was ushered in. Back in Black has gone on to sell 45 million copies worldwide, and as the band have become a global phenomenon so their recessiveness has increased. Mick Wall, the don of heavy metal writing, seeks to penetrate the wall around the Young brothers, and write the first authoritative, in-depth critical account of AC/DC.

A witness. Such a simple concept — and yet for Dexter Morgan, a perfectly well-disguised serial killer, the possibility of a witness is terrifying. As an upstanding blood-spatter analyst for the Miami Police, Dexter has always managed to keep the darker side of his life out of the spotlight. An expert at finding truly bad people — murderers who've long escaped justice — Dexter has long been giving them his own special brand of attention. But now someone has seen him in the act. Dexter is being followed, manipulated and mimicked, leading him to realise that no one likes to have a double — especially when his double's goal is to kill him. Dexter is not one to tolerate such displeasure... in fact, he has a knack for extricating himself from trouble in his own pleasurable way.

Ed Hartlepool has been living in self-imposed exile for five years, but with a settlement regarding his inheritance looming, he must return to his ancestral seat, Hartlepool Hall. On his return, he discovers that his father has left him, along with the house, a seven million pound tax bill, two massive overdrafts, an 80-year-old butler, and a vast country estate that is creaking at the seams. Not only that, but there is a strange woman in residence — Lady Alice — who seems to have made herself very much at home. With the debts mounting, it seems that Ed's only recourse is to turn to his friend Annabel's new boyfriend, a property developer who plans to turn Hartlepool Hall into luxury flats and a golf course. But can Ed save his inheritance without such a drastic move? And is Lady Alice really the person she claims to be?

This volume contains 25 classic short stories, including «We Can Remember It For You Wholesale», which inspired the film «Total Recall».