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Deception, blackmail, murder, revenge — these are the themes of stories that move from London to the coast of Spain, from Mauritius to Dublin to Dordogne. Whether his subject is assassination by stealth, the cruel confidence trick or the cold shock of coincidence, Frederick Forsyth is never less than compulsive, the detail always authentic. Ten stories with the master's touch, this is a brilliantly readable first collection by an incomparable craftsman of suspense.

Spolit, feckless Temple Drake, the daughter of a judge, runs away from school with an unsuitable man. Abandoned by him with a gang of moonshiners, Temple falls into the clutches of the psychotic Popeye, one of the most grotesque characters of Faulkner's imagination. A compelling, shocking tale of perverted justice in the Deep South, Sanctuary is also a moving plea for courage in the darkest of circumstances.

The hit BBC series «Sherlock» offers a fresh, contemporary take on the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, and has helped introduce a whole new generation of fans to the legendary detective. In this new edition of Conan Doyle's first collection of short stories, «Sherlock» co-creator Mark Gatiss explains how these gripping tales inspired and influenced the new series. «Sherlock: The Adventures» contains twelve short stories first published in «The Strand» magazine between 1891 and 1892 and then published as a collection in October 1892. It includes some of Conan Doyle's best tales of murder and mystery, such as «The Adventures of the Speckled Band», in which the strange last words of a dying woman 'It was the band, the speckled band!' and a inexplicable whistling in the night are the only clues Sherlock Holmes has to prevent another murder; and, «The Five Orange Pips», in which an untimely death and the discovery of the letter containing five orange pips lead to a cross-Atlantic conspiracy.

'Between grief and nothing I will take grief'. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his one chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injuries of the spirit.

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague, blameless life are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

A series of seemingly unconnected murders In Africa, four nuns and an unidentified fifth woman are brutally murdered — the death of the nameless woman covered up by the local police. A year later in Sweden, Inspector Kurt Wallander is baffled when a retired car dealer is found impaled and the body of a missing florist is discovered strangled. With only a skull, a diary, and a photo of three men as clues, Wallander will need all of his strength to uncover the reason behind these deaths and their elusive connection to the unsolved murder of the fifth woman.

Readers will agree that this touching and dramatic new installment in Alexander McCall Smith's beloved and best-selling series is the finest yet. In this story, Precious Ramotswe deals with issues of mistaken identity and great fortune against the beautiful backdrop of Botswana's remote and striking Okavango Delta. Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi head to a safari camp to carry out a delicate mission on behalf of a former guest who has left one of the guides a large sum of money. But once they find their man, Precious begins to sense that something is not right. To make matters worse, shortly before their departure Mma Makutsi's fiance, Phuti Radiphuti, suffers a debilitating accident, and when his aunt moves in to take care of him, she also pushes Mma Makutsi out of the picture. Could she be trying to break up the relationship? Finally, a local priest and his wife independently approach Mma Ramotswe with concerns of infidelity, creating a rather unusual and tricky situation. Nevertheless, Precious is confident that with a little patience, kindness and good sense things will work out for the best, something that will delight her many fans.

From the end of the last Ice Age (10,000 years ago) to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965, Adrian Sykes narrates the history and achievements of these islands, their inhabitants and their origins, through the stories of some 3000+ men and women who have shaped not just our history but the modern world. The story is interspersed with countless inventions, deeds of daring do and wickednesses, as well as the origins of innumerable words and phrases, often surprisingly early, from Nosey Parker — Elizabeth I of her Archbishop of Canterbury, to mayonnaise — the battle of Mahon, which the victorious French admiral celebrated by inventing mayonnaise and after which we hanged Admiral Byng who lost it to encourage the others, as Voltaire put it. Sykes astonishes on every page, whether with the origin of everyday phrases or nursery rhymes or the countless inventions of the British, from the lead pencil (1568), the tin can, the bicycle, screw propeller and jet engine to DNA, LCD crystals, cement, the electric kettle, the vacuum cleaner and Marmite. Beautifully illustrated and with maps of exceptional clarity, this is a book hard to put down in which you learn something very surprising on every page.

The English, Peter Ackroyd tells us in this fascinating collection, see more ghosts than any other nation. Each region has its own particular spirits, from the Celtic ghosts of Cornwall to the dobies and boggarts of the north. Some speak and some are silent, some smell of old leather, others of fragrant thyme. From medieval times to today, stories have been told and apparitions seen — ghosts who avenge injustice, souls who long for peace, spooks who just want to have fun. The English Ghost is a treasury of such sightings — which we can believe or not, as we will. The accounts, packed with eerie detail, range from the door-slamming, shrieking ghost of Hinton Manor in the 1760s and the moaning child that terrified Wordsworth's nephew at Cambridge, to the headless bear of Kidderminster, the violent daemon of Devon who tried to strangle a man with his cravat and the modern-day hitchhikers on Blue Bell Hill. Comical and scary, like all good ghost stories, these curious incidents also plumb the depths of the English psyche in its yearnings for justice, freedom and love.

This is an immortal love story. Have you ever loved someone so much that you'd do anything for them? When Dr Luke Findley turns up to his hospital shift in the small town of St Andrews, Maine, he's expecting just another evening of minor injuries and domestic disputes. But instead, Lanore McIlvrae walks into his life — and changes it forever. For Lanny is a woman with a past... Lanny McIlvrae is unlike anyone Luke has ever met. Hers is a story of love and betrayal that defies time and transcends mortality — but this tale cannot end until Lanny's demons are finally put to rest. Her two hundred years on this earth have seen her seduced by both decadence and brutality — yet through it all she has only ever had one true love in her life. Until now. An unforgettable novel about the power of unrequited love to elevate and sustain, but also to blind and ultimately destroy, The Taker is an immortal love story on an epic scale...

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. The book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius — a thrillingly beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. The copying and translation of this ancient book, the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age, fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and, had revolutionary influence on writers from Montaigne to Thomas Jefferson.

The year is 1895, Jeff. Salah Rajani, a troubled Muslim boy living in a dilapidated mansion surrounded by orange groves, suffers from peculiar visions about a disaster which is set to befall his people. His life is changed by the arrival of a handsome young man, a dynamic Jewish settler, new to the city, by the name of Isaac Luminsky. Luminsky covets both the fertile lands of the Rajani estate and Salah's beautiful mother Afifa, and his friendship with the boy is destined to lead to violence and tragedy. This rich and colourful novel is made up of the two opposing journals of Hilu's intriguing and extraordinary protagonists as they negotiate love, honour and betrayal in the changing world of nineteenth-century Palestine.

In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's night storm. In the early hours of the next morning, all 84 men aboard died. Helen O'Mara is one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. Her story starts years after the Ranger disaster, but she is compelled to travel back to the 'February' that persists in her mind, and to that moment in 1982 when, expecting a fourth child, she received the call informing her that Cal was lost at sea. A quarter of a century on, late one winter's night, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son John, in another time zone, on his way home. He has made a girl pregnant and he needs his mother to decide what he should do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help. With grace and precision, and a shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore reveals the whole story to us. And just as, finally, we watch the oil rig go down, we see Helen emerging from her grief to greet a new life.

Sebastian and Oskar have been friends since their days studying physics at university, when both were considered future Nobel Prize candidates. But their lives took divergent paths, as did their scientific views. Whenever Oskar comes to visit from his prestigious research post in Geneva, there is tension in the air, and it doesn't help their friendship that he feels Sebastian has not lived up to his intellectual capacities, having chosen marriage and fatherhood as an exit strategy. A few days after a particularly heated argument between the two men, Sebastian leaves his son sleeping in the back seat while he goes into a service station. When he returns, the car has disappeared without trace. His phone rings and a voice informs him that in order to get his son back he must kill a man. As Sebastian's life unravels, the only person he can safely reach out to is Oskar. Then Detective Schilf comes on the scene, with a most unorthodox method of uncovering the truth. With intelligence, wit, precision, and grace, Juli Zeh crafts a philosophical thriller which uses the clash of the ideal and the material worlds, the bending of reality, and the search for a definition of time to explore the ideas of guilt and innocence and the infinite configurations of love.

Dublin 1907, a city of whispered rumours. A young actress begins an affair with a damaged older man, the leading playwright at the theatre where she works. Rebellious and flirtatious, Molly Allgood is a girl of the inner city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America. She has dozens of admirers but in the backstage of her life there is a secret. Her lover, John Synge, is a troubled genius, the son of a once prosperous landowning family, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions. Yet his life is hampered by convention and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives. Scarred by a childhood of loneliness and severity he has long been ill, but he loves to walk the wild places of Ireland. The affair, sternly opposed by friends and family, is turbulent, sometimes cruel, often tender. Many years later, an old woman makes her way across London on the morning after a hurricane. Christmas is coming. As she wanders past bombsites and through the city's forlorn beauty, a snowdrift of memories and lost desires seems to swirl. She has twice been married: once widowed, once divorced, but an unquenchable passion for life has kept her afloat as her dazzling career has faded. A story of love's commitment, of partings and reconciliations, of the courage involved in living on nobody else's terms, Ghost Light is a profoundly moving and ultimately uplifting novel.

Some crimes strike too close to home... Private detective Bill Smith is hurtled headlong into the most provocative-and personal-case of his career when he receives a chilling late night telephone call from the NYPD. They're holding his fifteen-year-old nephew Gary. But before he can find out what's going on, Gary escapes Bill's custody and disappears into the dark and unfamiliar streets... With his partner, Lydia Chin, Bill tries to find the missing teen and uncover what it is that has led him so far from home. Their search takes them to Gary's family in a small town in New Jersey, where they discover that one of Gary's classmates was murdered. Bill and Lydia delve into the crime-only to find it eerily similar to a decades-old murder-suicide... The situation is not helped by Bill's long term estrangement from his sister. But now, with his nephew's future at stake, Bill must unravel a long-buried crime and confront the darkness of his own past...

Na Ga was always in search of a better life. But now she sits, alone, in a hotel room in Wanting, a godforsaken town on the Chinese-Burmese border. Plucked from her wild life as a rural eel-catcher, Na Ga is first abandoned by her would-be rescuers in Rangoon. Later, as a teenager, she finds herself chasing the dream of a new life in Thailand — where further betrayals and violations await. Yet it seems that her fighting spirit will not be broken. But for how long can Na Ga belong nowhere and with no one? In the dingy hotel in Wanting, she is forced to confront her compulsion to keep running, and to ask herself why, until now, she's resisted the journey home.

This is the tale of three women — one witch, one mermaid and one missing — and how Ruby was caught up in between. The Black Country town of Cradle Cross — home to buttonmakers, canal folk, and more than its share of widows — is bounded by canals, grief and superstition. Caught within this web is motherless thirteen-year-old Ruby, who dreams of escaping the soot and smoke of her home-town for the clear air of the sea. When a mysterious stranger named Isa Fly appears in the doorway of Captin Len's Fried Fish Shop on a quest to find her dying father's missing wife and daughter, Ruby and Captin Len are both enchanted. But some of the townsfolk are instantly suspicious of the outsider and when Ruby introduces Isa to Truda Blick, the bluestocking graduate who has just inherited the town's button factory, the women are pushed to the brink of riot. Only Ruby knows enough to save them. But first she must save herself.

Maya Lowe is one of the world's biggest movie stars. Steve Watkins is her life-long friend. Both swear their relationship hasn't changed since they shared a school desk as London teenagers. But can a friendship like theirs really survive a fame as great as Maya's? Can a man like Steve, working away for a Heathrow logistics company, seriously remain part of her life? He certainly thinks so. But amid the twists and turns of Maya's public and private lives, the gulf between what Steve thinks and what is actually true gets ever wider. And in a world where the obsession with celebrity seems to make everyone want to be one, truth is hard to find. Set in modern-day Britain, America and France, Alastair Campbell's second novel is part psychological thriller, part exploration of the psychology of fame. Steve is a brilliantly ambiguous figure, narrating a story full of morally complex characters from the worlds of film, business, TV, journalism and private investigation. Whether through stars with a love-hate relationship with their public; agents milking the culture of celebrity; a media that cannot get enough because the public always want more, Campbell depicts a society feeding vainly on fame, and the dangerous consequences for those caught up in its frenzy.

Singapore — a trading post where different lives jostle and mix. It is 1927, and three young people are starting to question whether this in between island can ever truly be their home. Mei Lan comes from a famous Chinese dynasty but yearns to free herself from its stifling traditions; ten-year-old Howard seethes at the indignities heaped on his fellow Eurasians by the colonial British; Raj, fresh off the boat from India, wants only to work hard and become a successful businessman. As the years pass, and the Second World War sweeps through the east, with the Japanese occupying Singapore, the three are thrown together in unexpected ways, and tested to breaking point. Richly evocative, «A Different Sky» paints a scintillating panorama of thirty tumultuous years in Singapore's history through the passions and struggles of characters the reader will find it hard to forget.

Deepdene has been swept by what seems to be a vicious tropical disease. Luckily Eve and Jess are both healthy so they're taking their chance to enjoy the unseasonal heat wave. But then teenagers start to disappear. The spread of the disease worsens and the town is placed under lockdown. A demon is among them. It could be anybody. And now there's nowhere to go... The third title in this successful series. It is suitable for all fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed and Twilight.

It is 1982 and Thatcher is in Downing Street, Human League is in the charts and Dallas is on the telly. But the girls of Albacore Street are too busy to notice. For Stella, Bridget, Vinnie, Maxine and Nell, life revolves around demos, parties and no-strings sex. Against a background of Greenham Common and the Miner's Strike, however, they are about to learn that life is not quite as simple as they thought. Twenty years on and they are juggling like mad, but dropping all the balls. Their partners are straying, their daughters want plastic surgery, and their careers have stalled. Living increasingly separate lives, the tie that binds them grows thinner, until tragedy brings them back together, giving them a chance to refocus themselves on their friendship, their misdirected lives, and their survival.

One of the most celebrated thrillers ever written, The Day of the Jackal is the electrifying story of the struggle to catch a killer before it's too late. It is 1963 and an anonymous Englishman has been hired by the Operations Chief of the O.A.S. to murder General de Galle. A failed attempt in the previous year means the target will be nearly impossible to get to. But this latest plot involves a lethal weapon: an assassin of legendary talent. Known only as The Jackal this remorseless and deadly killer must be stopped, but how do you track a man who exists in name alone?

'The whites want war and we will give it to them' — Sitting Bull. This is the archetypal story of the American West. Whether it is cast as a tale of unmatched bravery in the face of impossible odds or of insane arrogance receiving its rightful comeuppance, Custer's Last Stand continues to captivate the imagination. Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly reconstructs the build-up to the Battle of the Little Big Horn through to the final eruption of violence. Two legendary figures dominate the events: George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull. No longer the fresh-faced 'Boy-General' of the Civil War, Custer was now mired in financial, professional and political problems. A clear and just cause had been replaced by ambiguity and frustration — by ill-fated efforts at peace treaties, treachery and compromises on both sides. Forced to take to the plains to feed themselves, and increasingly outraged by the government's policies towards them, the Sioux and Cheyenne became infused with a new sense of collective identity and purpose. Between six and eight thousand people came together in the largest ever gathering of Native Americans. If the government should be foolish enough to pursue them, they would stand and fight. Sitting Bull was in his mid-forties, His charisma and political savvy had enabled him to emerge as their leader. A vision he received during a Sun Dance — of soldiers falling from the sky — was widely understood to presage a great victory. Nathaniel Philbrick brings vividly to life all those involved — from the Oglala Sioux warrior Crazy Horse and Major Marcus Reno who led the first attack, to Libby Custer waiting with the other army wives at Fort Lincoln. He evokes too the history, geography and haunting beauty of the Great Plains and provides the finest account to date of what happened there — and why — at the end of June 1876.