Charles Sprawson
- himself an obsessional swimmer & diver
- explores the meaning that different cultures have attached to water.

...

High summer in Cuba, 1953, & Havana gleams with possibility. Flush with booming casinos, sex, & drugs, Havana is a lucrative paradise for everyone from the Mafia & United Fruit to pimps, porn-makers, & anyone looking to grab a piece of the action
- including the Cuban government, which naturally honours the interests of its old ally, the United States of America. Of course, where there's paradise, trouble can't be far behind. Trouble, in this case, makes its entrance in the terrifically charismatic & silver-tongued form of a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro. The Caribbean is fast becoming a strategic Cold War hub, & Soviet intelligence has taken Castro under its wing. The CIA's response is to send the one man capable of eliminating Castro: the legendary gunfighter & ex-Marine hero Earl Swagger, who proved his lethal talent in Stephen Hunter's previous bestsellers Hot Springs & Pale Horse Coming. In Cuba, Earl finds himself up to his neck in treacherous ambiguity, where the old rules about honour & duty don't apply, & where Earl's target seems to have more guts & good luck than anyone else in Cuba. Blending real-world figures into a lightning-paced narrative, Stephen Hunter once again proves himself the master of literary adventure & suspense.
...

Did you know that foreigners who want to live in Britain have to pass a government test to get in? It's true, & some of the questions are harder than ' Why does everyone hate Manchester United?'

So the Have I Got News For You team have, in a moving & totally out of character display of public-spiritedness, compiled this Guide to Modern Britain to help guide you around, er, modern Britain. With reassuringly jaundiced reflections on everything from the global recession, religion & the Royal Family to the NHS, education & the media, it

...

Each day, in honour of a Parisian tradition, a town crier calls out the local news to all who will listen. Over the course of a few days a number of disturbing messages are slipped in to his box, messages of portentous & malicious intent referring to the Black Death. Strange marks have also appeared on the doors of several buildings: symbols once used to ward off the plague. Detective Commissaire Adamsberg begins to sense a connection, even a grotesque menace. Then charred & flea-bitten corpses are found. The press seizes on their plague-like symptoms, & the panic sets in. ...

Joss le Guern is a town crier in Paris's 14th arrondissement. He calls out the local news three times a day to all who will listen. Over the course of a few days, however, a number of enigmatic & disturbing messages are slipped in to the daily news, & he becomes increasingly alarmed. Superintendent Adamsberg is visited by an extremely troubled woman who has found strange marks on the door of her building: upside down 4s marked out in black paint. This, & the appearance of the frightening messages, are exactly the kind of mysteries Adamsberg loves. In the course of his inquiries he begins to sense a sinister & often grotesque menace. & when a charred corpse is found, Adamsberg knows he's dealing with a particularly serious & chilling case. Have Mercy on Us All is Fred Vargas's masterpiece so far. She is exceptional at building mood & tension, &, as Henning Mankell portrays the social realities of contemporary Sweden in his Inspector Wallander mysteries, so Vargas does the same for Paris & France. ...

What do men run away from? Not war, not physical hardship, but the day-to-day emotional demands of impossible domestic situations. That's women's work. This is a story of female courage, where black comedy turns to disturbing pathos revolving around the rights of an indomitable woman ...