Stopping to get money from a cash machine one evening, a man inexplicably falls to the ground: dead. A taxi driver is brutally murdered by two teenaged girls. Quickly apprehended they appal local policemen with their total lack of remorse. One girl escapes police custody & disappears without trace. Soon afterwards a blackout covers half the country. When an engineer arrives at the malfunctioning power station, he makes a grisly discovery. Inspector Kurt Wallander is sure that these events must be linked
- somehow. Hampered by the discovery of betrayals in his own team, lonely & frustrated, Wallander begins to lose conviction in his role as a detective. The search for answers leads Wallander dangerously close to a shadowy group of anarchic terrorists, hidden within the anonymity of cyberspace. Somehow these criminals seem always to know the police's next move. Wallander finds himself fighting to outsmart them In their gripping police procedural about our increasing vulnerability in the modern digitalised world.
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Stopping to use a cash machine one evening, a man inexplicably falls to the ground: dead. A taxi driver is brutally murdered by two teenage girls. Quickly apprehended they appal local policemen with their total lack of remorse. One girl escapes police custody & disappears without trace. Soon afterwards, a blackout covers half the country. When an engineer arrives at the malfunctioning power station, he makes a grisly discovery. Inspector Kurt Wallander is sure that these events must be linked
- somehow. Hampered by the discovery of betrayals in his own team, lonely & frustrated, Wallander begins to loose conviction in his role as a detective. The search for answers leads Wallander dangerously close to a shadowy group of anarchic terrorists, hidden within the anonymity of cyberspace. Somehow these criminals seem always to know the police's next move & Wallander finds himself fighting to outsmart them.
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Tough, resourceful & ruthless, ex-SAS trooper Nick Stone is now working for British Intelligence on deniable operations. ...

In Janet Davey's highly acclaimed first novel English Correspondence, she mesmerised readers with the way she drew the most acute & complex observations about family life out of the simplest of stories. In her second, she demonstrates again a stunning ability to show how the families we come from, & the families we form, influence everything we do. Set in a seaside town on the Kent coast, First Aid takes place over one summer weekend. Jo's husband Peter has left her a couple of years previously to live with another woman, & she is now caring single-handedly for her teenage daughter, son & toddler. She just about makes ends meet by working in a local junk shop
- a place where the objects that have given significance to other people's lives find themselves washed up in the bargain basket. A love affair with a man without family ties is just beginning to give her life new meaning when the man inexplicably lashes out at her & cuts her face. Jo's instinct is to pack hasty bags &, with three children in tow, take the train to London to stay with the grandparents who raised her. But, a few miles into the journey, her daughter jumps off the train & runs away. As we follow Jo's awkward attempts to explain things to her grandparents, & her daughter's uncomfortable nights on the junk shop floor, we gradually learn what led up to the attack
- & how everyone would like to escape the ties that bind them & begin afresh. Mothers, daughters, wives, husbands, bachelors, pensioners, teenagers & lovers: the breadth of human experience conveyed between the covers of this short novel is astonishing.

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' Fighting was raging on the other side of the Channel, but in London, in the warmth of a drowsy late-September afternoon, the war seemed a long way away. The roads were strangely quiet & deserted, for petrol restrictions had reduced motor traffic almost to zero. London seemed breathless, in the tense expectancy of disaster.

The alarm was given soon after nightfall. At Biggin Hill & a score of other airfields, pilots scrambled from their quarters & sprinted for their aircraft. Within seconds the air was full of the noise of engines, as the squadrons taxied out & took off into the ever-darkening sky'.

The First Blitz is told in two parts, each detailing the events of a single week. The first part tells the story of the first London Blitz
- six raids by German bombers in eight nights in 1917. Part two focuses on the events of August 1918 & the countdown to the incendiary raids that would have destroyed much of London & Paris had they not been called off at the very last minute.




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