Are you fabulous & very, very single?
Do you secretly suspect that you suck at love?

Author Cindy Lu knew for a long


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In April 1204, the armies of Western Christendom wrote another bloodstained chapter in the history of holy war. Two years earlier, aflame with religious zeal, the Fourth Crusade set out to free Jerusalem from the grip of Islam. But after a dramatic series of events, the crusaders turned their weapons against the Christian city of Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire & the greatest metropolis in the known world. The crusaders spared no one in their savagery: they murdered old & young, they raped women & girls
- even nuns
- in their frenzy. They also desecrated churches & plundered treasuries, & much of the city was put to the torch. In celebration of the victory, a prostitute from the crusader army climbed onto the altar of the Hagia Sophia & gyrated to obscene songs; barbarism cloaked in the mantle of religious warfare had swept aside one of the great civilisations of history. Some contemporaries were delighted: God had approved this punishment of the effeminate, treacherous Greeks; others expressed shock & disgust at this perversion of the crusading ideal. History has judged this as the crusade that went wrong & even today the violence & brutality of the western knights provokes deep ill-feeling from many Greek Orthodox towards the Catholic Church. In this remarkable new assessment of the Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips doesn't just follow the fortunes of the leading players, but explores the conflicting motives that drove the expedition to commit the most infamous massacre of the crusading movement & looks at the experience of crusading from the perspective of a knight.

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In April 1204, the armies of Western Christendom wrote another bloodstained chapter in the history of holy war. Two years earlier, aflame with religious zeal, the Fourth Crusade set out to free Jerusalem from the grip of Islam. But after a dramatic series of events, the crusaders turned their weapons against the Christian city of Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire & the greatest metropolis in the known world. The crusaders spared no one in their savagery: they murdered & raped old & young
- they desecrated churches, plundered treasuries & much of the city was put to the torch. Some contemporaries were delighted: God had approved this punishment of the effeminate, treacherous Greeks; others expressed shock & disgust at this perversion of the crusading ideal. History has judged this as the crusade that went wrong. In this remarkable new assessment of the Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips follows the fortunes of the leading players & explores the conflicting motives that drove the expedition to commit the most infamous massacre of the crusading movement.
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While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant; meanwhile, in the distracting aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, the surgeon is seduced by his housekeeper. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband's left h&, that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, & healthy... ...

The first time Laurie & her dad see the white rider watching them from the deep, cool shadows of the trees, he is alone. Laurie is convinced that his appearance has a meaning, that somehow he is trying to tell them something
- something her dad needs to pay attention to. Is the rider somehow linked to the genetic research into squirrels that Laurie is helping her dad with in the lab?

When a second rider with a bloody sword appears alongside the first, & then a third & a fourth, Laurie knows she must try to understand who they are & what they represent. With the help of her brother & his best friend, she discovers what the riders mean but will it be too late to stop the inevitable chain of events that has been set in motion... ?


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Plan Aurora, hatched in a remote dacha in the forest outside Moscow & initiated with relentless brilliance & skill, is a plan within a plan that, in its spine-chilling ingenuity, breaches the ultra-secret Fourth Protocol & turns the fears that shaped it into a living nightmare.

A crack Soviet agent, placed under cover in a quiet English country town, begins to assemble a jigsaw of devastation. MI5 investigator John Preston, working against the most urgent of deadlines, leads an operation to prevent the act of murderous destruction aimed at tumbling Britain into revolution...

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' He saw on man raise his weapon & take aim at him... &, the next instant, felt a fierce sear of pain in his right thigh...'



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What could be worse than starting a new school where your dad's the headmaster? Pike soon finds out when he's befriended by Ryan Foxcroft. Loud & aggressive, Ryan lies about his past & attracts trouble. Trouble is, this makes him a prime suspect when the school is hit by acts of sabotage. But is he really responsible? Is hacking into the school records a good idea, especially when you find out information that seems to incriminate him? In his efforts to defend Ryan, uncover the truth & make sure his dad's school passes the next inspection, Pike finds himself getting involved with some very nasty people & unravelling secrets which were never meant to be discovered. ...