Transworld Publishers

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are tough private investigators who know the blue-collar neighbourhoods and ghettos of Boston's Dorchester section as only natives can. Working out of an old church belfry, Kenzie and Gennaro take on a seemingly simple assignment for a prominent politician: to uncover the whereabouts of Jenna Angeline, a black cleaning woman who has allegedly stolen confidential Statehouse documents. But finding Jenna proves easy compared to staying alive. The investigation escalates, implicating members of Jenna's family and rival gang leaders, while uncovering extortion, assassination and child prostitution extending from bombed-out ghetto streets to the highest levels of state government. With slick, hip dialogue and a lyrical narrative pocked by explosions of violence, A Drink Before the War confronts a city in which institutionalized bigotry and corruption are often the norm, and the true nature of 'racial incidents' is rarely clear. Dennis Lehane's remarkable debut is at once a pulsating crime thriller and a mirror of our world, one in which the worst human horrors are found closest to home, and the most vicious obscenities are committed in the name of love.

Heard the one about the airline that has introduced 'corpse cupboards' on new planes to cope with the number of people who die in the air? Heard the story about the First Class air hostess who got fired for sitting on the face of a passenger during a long haul flight? Heard about the amount of knickers and false teeth that are left behind in the body of the plane? Heard how pissed-off stewards put laxatives in your drinks? Heard about the pilot who ran out of runway? Heard of the disabled passengers who miraculously walk again? No? Then you haven't read Air Babylon. Do you know the best place to have sex on a plane? Do you know how to dress for an upgrade? Do you know that one drink in the air equals three on the ground? Do you know who is checking you in? Who is checking you out? Do you know exactly what happens to your luggage once it leaves your sight? Is it secure? Are you safe? Do you really know anything about the business that you entrust your life to several times a year? Air Babylon is a trawl through the highs, the lows, and the rapid descents of the travel industry. It catalogues the births, the deaths, the drunken brawls, the sexual antics, and the debauchery behind the scenes of the ultimate service industry — where the world is divided into those who wear the uniform and those who don't...

Susan had never hung up a stocking. She'd never put a tooth under her pillow in the serious expectation that a dentally inclined fairy would turn up. It wasn't that her parents didn't believe in such things. They didn't need to believe in them. They know they existed. They just wished they didn't. There are those who believe and those who don't. Through the ages, superstition has had its uses. Nowhere more so than in the Discworld where it's helped to maintain the status quo. Anything that undermines superstition has to be viewed with some caution. There may be consequences, particularly on the last night of the year when the time is turning. When those consequences turn out to be the end of the world, you need to be prepared. You might even want more standing between you and oblivion than a mere slip of a girl — even if she has looked Death in the face on numerous occasions...

'Anything you do in the past changes the future. The tiniest little actions have huge consequences. You might tread on an ant now and it might entirely prevent someone from being born in the future'. There's nothing like the issue of evolution to get under the skin of academics: especially when those same academics are by chance or bad judgement deposited at a critical evolutionary turning point when one wrong move could have catastrophic results for the future. Unfortunately in the hands of such an inept and cussed group of individuals, the sensitive issue of causality is sadly only likely to receive the same scant respect that they show to one another...

The place is St Oswald's, an old and long-established boys' grammar school in the north of England. A new year has just begun, and for the staff and boys of the school, a wind of unwelcome change is blowing. Suits, paperwork and Information Technology rule the world and Roy Straitley, Latin master, eccentric, and veteran of St Oswald's, is finally — reluctantly — contemplating retirement. But beneath the little rivalries, petty disputes and everyday crises of the school, a darker undercurrent stirs. And a bitter grudge, hidden and carefully nurtured for thirteen years, is about to erupt. Who is Mole, the mysterious insider, whose cruel practical jokes are gradually escalating towards violence — and perhaps, murder? And how can an old and half-forgotten scandal become the stone that brings down a giant?

Ex-deniable operator Nick Stone seems to be living his dream, not a care in the world as he steers his camper van round the surfing and parachuting centres of Australia, a board on the roof, freefall rig behind him, and a beautiful young backpacker at his side. But, when he witnesses on TV the massacre of children in a terrorist siege in the other side of the world, long-suppressed memories are triggered and Nick finds himself catapulted once more into working for the American secret services — only this time, of his own free will. As events unfold in the bleak, medieval villages of Azerbajhan and teeming streets of modern Istanbul, it isn't long before Nick discovers the true objective of the mission on which he has embarked. His talents are being misused by those who stalk the corridors of power...and he is determined to make a stand. Hurtled at breakneck pace through a deadly landscape of greed, violence and ever-shifting allegiances, the reader will be left in no doubt that McNab is the master of the genre — and «Aggressor» is McNab at his searing, blockbusting best.

It is Jerusalem, 70 AD. As the legions of Rome besiege the Holy Temple, a boy is given a secret that he must guard with his life. It is Southern Germany, December 1944. Six emaciated prisoners drag a mysterious crate deep into a disused mine. They too give their lives to keep the secret safe — they are murdered by their Nazi guards. It is Egypt, Valley of the Kings, present day. A body is discovered among some ruins. It appears to be an open-and-shut case but the more Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor police uncovers about the dead man, the more uneasy he becomes. And his investigation turns out to be anything but routine. Khalifa doesn't know it yet, but he is on the trail of an extraordinary long-lost artifact that could, in the wrong hands, turn the Middle East into a blood bath. It's a dangerous path he's taking — and to make matters worse, he's not alone...From ancient Jerusalem, the Crusades, Cathar heretics and coded medieval manuscripts to the Holocaust, hidden Nazi treasure and the murderous present-day, «The Last Secret of the Temple» is a thrilling, rollercoaster ride of adventure in search of a two thousand year-old mystery and a pulse-pounding race against time.

Alice never imagined that she would end up like this. Is she the only mother who feels so permanently panic-stricken at the terrors of the modern world — or is it normal to sit up in bed all night popping bubble wrap? She worries that too much gluten and dairy may be hindering her children's mental arithmetic. She frets that there are too many cars on the road to let them out of the 4x4. Finally she resolves to take control and tackle her biggest worry of all: her daughter is definitely not going to fail that crucial secondary school entrance exam. Because Alice has decided to take the test in her place...With his trademark comic eye for detail, John O'Farrell has produced a funny and provocative book that will make you laugh, cry and vow never to become that sort of parent. And then you can pass it on to your seven-year-old, because she really ought to be reading grown-up novels by now...

There are starter jobs, starter cars, starter houses. And then there are starter wives...When her husband dumps her (by cell phone) just months before their ten-year wedding anniversary, Gracie Pollock is left reeling. Though her role as the wife of a semifamous studio executive often left her cold, Gracie had grown accustomed to the unique privileges extended to Tinseltown's elite. Gracie really believed that she and Kenny were different from other Hollywood couples. She never thought she'd be a starter wife. But now that her marriage is over, she's a social pariah and things go from bad to worse when she learns — via her florist — that her husband has upgraded: Kenny is dating a famous blonde pop starlet. Gracie seeks refuge at her best friend's Malibu mansion for some much needed divorce therapy, but soon she's associating with all the wrong people including the security guard, Kenny's boss — one of Hollywood's better known Lotharios — and a mysterious hunk who saves her from drowning. But who is he?

Koom Valley — that was where the trolls ambushed the dwarfs, or the dwarfs ambushed the trolls. It was far away. It was a long time ago. But if he doesn't solve the murder of just one dwarf, Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork City Watch is going to see it fought again, right outside his office. With his beloved Watch crumbling around him and war-drums sounding, he must unravel every clue, outwit every assassin and brave any darkness to find the solution. And darkness is following him. Oh...and at six o'clock every day, without fail, with no excuses, he must go home to read «Where's My Cow?», with all the right farmyard noises, to his little boy. There are some things you have to do.

What lies ahead is already here...America is a difficult place to live below the surface. But Gabriel and Michael Corrigan are trying to do just that. Since childhood, the brothers have been shaped by the stories that their father has told them about the world in which they live. After his mysterious disappearance, they have been living 'off the grid' — that is, invisible to the intrusive surveillance networks that monitor our modern lives. But no-one is as invisible as they would like to believe. Nathan Boone, a mercenary, has been tasked to hunt down the brothers. The only person who stands between them and certain death is Maya, a tough young woman playing at leading a normal life. But her background is anything but normal. She has been trained to fight and survive at whatever cost. When she is summoned to protect the brothers, she must leave everything behind if she is to succeed...

Samantha is a high-powered lawyer in London. She works all hours, has no home life, and cares only about getting a partnership.She thrives on the pressure and adrenalin. Until one day… she makes a mistake. A mistake so huge, it’ll wreck her career. She walks right out of the office, gets on the first train she sees, and finds herself in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, she is mistaken for the interviewee housekeeper and finds herself being offered the job. They have no idea they’ve hired a Cambridge-educated lawyer with an IQ of 158 – Samantha has no idea how to work the oven. Disaster ensues. It’s chaos as Samantha battles with the washing machine…the ironing board…and attempts to cook a cordon bleu dinner.But gradually, she falls in love with her new life in a wholly unexpected way. Will her employers ever discover the truth? Will Samantha’s old life ever catch up with her? And if it does…will she want it back?

Jack Burns’ mother, Alice, is a tattoo artist in search of the boy’s father, William, a virtuoso organist, who has fled America to Europe. To fund her journey, she plies her trade in the seaports of the North Sea as she tracks her four-year-old son’s errant father. But Alice is a mystery, and William can’t be found. And even Jack’s memories are subject to doubt. Jack returns to the United States, and studies in Canada and New England, but his life is still shaped by the events of his childhood quest, in particular his relationships with older women. It is only when he becomes a Hollywood actor that what he has experienced in the past comes into telling play in his present...

How can a drug that makes people fall madly in love be a bad thing? So thinks Professor Bacci when he inadvertently unlocks the biochemical key to falling in love, and develops a drug capable of creating emotions indistinguishable from the real thing. Determined that the world should benefit from his discovery, he seeks funding and business advice from a private Swiss bank, owned by the secretive Kappel family. Unknown to Bacci, however, Helmut Kappel sees love as a sickness to be exploited, and has his own plan for abusing the drug's power — a cynical nightmare of breathtaking arrogance far removed from Bacci's naive dream of spreading love around the world. Ripped from tomorrow's headlines, «The Venus Conspiracy» is Michael Cordy's latest glimpse of a compelling future where even human emotions can be bought and where true love can be faked...

Connie Farrell, a New York restaurant critic, is sitting in a first class seat on her way to Venice for the second honeymoon of a lifetime. There’s only one problem – Tom, her high school sweetheart and husband of ten years, is not sitting next to her. It seems downright rude. And not the least bit romantic. Enter Marco, an impossibly handsome gondolier, who guides her through the unimaginable delights of the city that has haunted her dreams. The water, the crumbling palaces, the dark and mysterious alleyways — and of course the mouth-watering delicacies she is fed at every turn — makes it all seem too good to be true. Indeed, back home in New York her dreams become a nightmare. Connie must discover the truth, a dish at once harder to swallow and yet ultimately more delicious than any she could find in a four-star restaurant.

Cairo, June 1942. A city blistering under the lash of a relentless summer and panicked by the implacable advance of Hitler's most talented general, Erwin Rommel. It is the worst possible time and place for the body of a senior British officer to be found in a rubbish bin, bathed in blood. His murder has been made to look like a political assassination by local extremists opposed to British rule, but former New York cop Joe Quinn isn’t buying that. He senses more fundamental human emotions at play. For Quinn, it’s like old times, a reminder of his past. One he doesn’t want to revisit. Thrown out of the New York Police Department as a liability after the tragic death of his son, he probably shouldn’t be a cop any longer, but maybe he’s just what this case needs. The investigation leads him through the underbelly of an exotic, violent and seedy city to the heart of the Cairo’s high command and the possibility that a highly placed spy is feeding the allies’ most sensitive secrets to Rommel, waiting out in the desert. Only one woman has seen the killer — an American named Amy White. The trouble is Joe Quinn's already falling for her and if he doesn't stop the spy soon, then not just Amy, but everything else he holds dear is certain to be brutally eliminated ...

It is New Year’s Eve when the storm of the century hits northern California. For Quinn Thompson, what happens in the storm’s wake will bring down a barrier he has built around himself since his wife’s death. For neighbor Maggie Dartman, it will spark friendship at a time when she needs it most. And for Jack Adams, a carpenter who will repair Quinn’s and Maggie’s homes, the storm brings an opportunity: to help two people and to be repaid with the greatest gift of all. Then something extraordinary begins to happen... Maggie, still grieving a loss, slowly comes alive again — and Jack finally shares a painful secret he has hidden for years. But Quinn, a man who has scaled heights of success in business, is now adrift, waiting as builders put the finishing touches on his newest passion, a 180-foot yacht he plans to sail around the world. Looking back at all he missed with his family while he built his empire, Quinn is consumed by guilt, focused only on escaping to the sea. But as his plans near completion, and his friendship with Maggie begins to change, Quinn faces a choice — between a safe haven and an adventure of the heart.

Six shots. Five dead. One heartland city thrown into terror. But within hours the cops have it solved. A slam-dunk case. Except for one thing. The accused man claims: You got the wrong guy. After that, all he’ll say is: Get Reacher for me. Jack Reacher lives off the grid. Lone righter of wrongs, irresistible to women. What could connect the ex-military cop to this obvious psychopath? Those who know call Reacher ‘the thinking reader’s action hero’. Sharp, exciting, addictive, One Shot is sure to get you hooked.

Pat Conroy’s inspired masterpiece relates the dark and violent chronicle of an astounding family: the Wingos of Colleton, South Carolina. No reader will forget them. And no reader can remain untouched by their story. All Wingos share one heritage … shrimp fishing, poverty and the searing memory of a single terrifying event – the source of Tom Wingo’s self-hatred and of his sister Savannah’s suicidal despair. To save himself and Savannah, Tom confronts the past with the help of New York psychologist Susan Lowenstein. As Tom and Susan unravel the bitter history of his troubled childhood, in episodes of grotesque humour, poignant lyricism and shattering violence, the door opens vividly onto a world peopled by a cast of colourful, eccentric and unforgettable characters.

‘The newspapers referred to it as the case of the seventy-seven clocks. There was quite a fuss at the time. We got into terrible trouble. Dear fellow, it was one of our most truly peculiar cases. I remember as if it was yesterday’. In fact, Arthur Bryant remembers very little about yesterday, but he does remember the oddest investigation of his career… It was late in 1973. As strikes and blackouts ravaged the country during Edward Heath’s ‘Winter of Discontent’, sundry members of a wealthy, aristocratic family were being disposed of in a variety of grotesque ways – by reptile, by bomb, by haircut. As the hours of daylight diminish towards Christmas, Bryant & May, the irascible detectives of London’s controversial Peculiar Crimes Unit, know that time is the key – and time is running out for both the family and the police. Their investigations lead them into a hidden world of class conflict, craftsmanship and the secret loyalties of big business. But what have seventy seven ticking clocks to do with it? Now the full story can at last be revealed, in this most eerie of adventures that features Arthur Bryant at his rudest, John May at his most exasperated and a gallery of colourful, bizarre characters who could only make their home in a city like London…

Control was the word Dr Toby Harper lived by. She strove to keep her life in order, her ER in order. But no one could have been prepared for the man she admits one quiet night to the Springer Hospital. Delirious and in critical condition from a possible viral infection of the brain, he barely responds to treatment. And then he disappears without trace. The subsequent search leads Toby to a second patient with the same infection. And it reveals an unsettling twist – the infection can only be spread through direct tissue exchange. Soon Toby's on a trail that winds from a pregnant sixteen-year-old prostitute to an unexpected tragedy in her own home. Only then does she discover the unthinkable: a terrifying and deadly epidemic is about to be unleashed...

Kenzie and Gennaro have been hired to find four-year-old Amanda McCready, abducted from her home without leaving a trace. Despite extensive news coverage and dogged investigation, the police inquiry has so far uncovered nothing. The case is rife with oddities: Amanda’s strangely indifferent mother and her dangerous, drug-addled friends; her loving aunt and uncle; and two cops who have found so many abused or dead children they may already be over the edge. As the Indian summer fades, Amanda McCready stays gone – banished so completely that she seems never to have existed. And when a second child disappears, Kenzie and Gennaro face a local media more interested in sensationalizing the abductions than helping to solve them, a police force seething with lethal secrets, and a faceless power determined to obstruct their efforts. Caught in a deadly tangle of lies and betrayal, they must confront the horror of what the world can inflict on its children in order to unravel a riddle that’s anything but child’s play.

In the great floating city of Sanctaphrax, blizzards howl through the streets as the Edgeworld descends into an endless winter. Quint, the son of a sky pirate, has just begun his training at the Knights Academy — training that involves heading out over the Edge on tethers to develop his flying skills. But when Quint breaks the rules and head out to Open Sky on his own, he runs into the great sky leviathan known as a cloud-eater, and must use all his skill and ingenuity if catastrophe is not to strike the Edgeworld...

Saturday night is a nightmare when youre single. Saturday night is for couples and everyone knows it. Victoria Total Bloody Relationships Disaster Shepworth is single and knows all about Saturday nights alone. A broken relationship with the guy she thought was the one has led to a string of disastrous dates. Now shes fed-up with being on her own and is once again in search of the man of her dreams. But life begins to look decidedly more interesting when she becomes involved in an internet romance with glamorous Frenchman, Pierre Dubois. Little does she know he could be closer than she thinks...