The Pyramid of Mud is the twenty-second Montalbano mystery from Italy's finest crime writer Andrea Camilleri It's been raining for days in Vigata & the persistent downpours have led to violent floods overtaking the Inspector's beloved hometown sweeping across the land & leaving only a sea of mud behind It is on one of these endless grey days that a man
- a Mr Giuglu Nicotra
- is found dead His body discovered in a large sewage tunnel half naked & with a bullet in his back The investigation is slow & slippery to start with but when Montalbano realizes that every clue he uncovers & every person he interviews is leading to the same place the world of public spending
- & with it the Mafia
- the case begins to pick up pace But there's one question that keeps playing on Montalbano's mind in his strange & untimely death was Giuglu Nicotra trying to tell him something?



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How many times have you written an email at work read it back & found that it didn't make as much sense as you'd hoped? or worse someone else has told you that they can't follow it The Pyramid Principle will show you how to communicate your ideas clearly & succinctly Barbara Minto reveals that the mind automatically sorts information into distinctive pyramidal groupings However if any group of ideas are arranged into a pyramid structure in the first place not only will it save valuable time & effort to write it will take even less effort to read & comprehend it The Pyramid Principle explains how to think creatively reason lucidly & express ideas with clarity define complex problems & establish the objectives of any document assess your ideas & recognize their relative importance structure your reasoning into a coherent & transparent argument analyze your argument to confirm its effectiveness The clear communication of ideas whether to clients colleagues or the management board is a key factor in determining personal success Applying the Pyramid Principle will enable you to present your thinking so clearly that the ideas move off the page & into the reader s mind with a minimum of effort & a maximum of effect Bring your ideas to life! ...

When Kurt Wallander first appeared in Faceless Killers he was a senior police officer just turned forty with his life in a mess His wife had left him his father barely acknowledged him; he ate badly & drank alone at night The Pyramid chronicles the events that led him to such a place We see him in the early years doing hours on the beat whilst trying to solve a murder off-duty; witness the beginnings of his fragile relationship with Mona the woman he has his heart set on marrying; & learn the reason behind his difficulties with his father These thrilling tales provide a fascinating insight into Wallander's character from the stabbing of a neighbour in 1969 to a light aircraft accident in 1989 every story is a vital piece of the Wallander series showing Mankell at the top of his game Featuring an introduction from the author The Pyramid is an essential read for all fans of Kurt Wallander ...

The Qajar Pact explores new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Iranian state & society & is the first broad study of lower social groups in this period Vanessa Martin argues that Qajar government was certainly despotic but was also founded on a consensus based on the Islamic principles of consultation & negotiation The author focuses on the role of the non-elite groups in urban society up to the years before the Constitutional Revolution ...

Both the original The Quacks of Quedlinburg & The Herb Witches expansion all packaged up in one big box bundle! Also thrown in for good measure is the mini-expansion Wolfgang's Exchange Office In The Quacks of Quedlinburg players are charlatans or quack doctors each making their own secret brew by adding ingredients one at a time Take care with what you add though for a pinch too much of this or that will spoil the whole mixture! Each player has their own bag of ingredient chips During each round they simultaneously draw chips & add them to their pot The higher the face value of the drawn chip the further it is placed in the swirling pattern increasing how much your potion is worth Push your luck as far as you can but if you add too many cherry bombs your pot explodes! At the end of each round players gain victory points & coins to spend on new ingredients to add to their bags depending on the strength of the ingredients in their pots But players with exploded pots must choose points or coins not both! The player with the most victory points at the end of nine rounds wins the game Included in this box are The Quacks of Quedlinburg the base game The Quacks of Quedlinburg The Herb Witches the first expansion adding Witches that grant powers once per game as well as more ingredient books The Quacks of Quedlinburg Wolfgangs Exchange Office a mini-expansion adding new conditions for end-game scoring ...

The Quality Companion provides the first dedicated look at the prolific Golden Age publisher which spawned a treasure trove of beautiful art & classic characters including the modern-day " Freedom Fighters"
- Uncle Sam Phantom Lady Black Condor The Ray Human Bomb & Doll Man
- as well as Plastic Man the Blackhawks & others now under the DC Comics umbrella It provides the first-ever A-Z in-depth character profile of every Quality costumed hero many of whom were superbly-produced but are now long-forgotten It also reprints in full-color several 1940s key stories of these characters from such rare 1940s collector's items as Smash Comics Police Comics National Comics Feature Comics & Crack Comics & features Golden Age art by the top artistic talents of that era including Lou Fine Reed Crandall Jack Cole Chuck Cuidera Matt Baker Will Eisner & others! Creators who were instrumental in the revival of the Quality characters from the 1970s to today are also interviewed including Roy Thomas Len Wein & Jimmy Palmiotti

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A murder mystery featuring Lord Edward Corinth & Verity Browne When the Nazis seize Austria in March 1938 Verity Browne is one of the first to be deported from Vienna as a well-known anti-Fascist Before she leaves she is able to arrange for a young Jew George Dreiser to escape to England But where he expects to find safety he finds danger & sudden death instead Lord Edward Corinth also finds death where he least expects it in the grounds of Lord Mountbatten's country house There his nephew Frank stumbles on a corpse Although the police are satisfied that the man died of natural causes Edward's niece persuades Edward that all is not as it seems In this classic investigation Verity & Edward find that death comes more often than not to the innocent & that many lives are left to the mercy of strangers Praise for David Roberts'A gripping richly satisfying whodunit with finely observed characters sparkling with insouciance & stinging menace' Peter James'A really well-crafted & charming mystery story' Daily Mail'A perfect example of golden-age mystery traditions with the cobwebs swept away' Guardian ...

This satirical novel recounts the effect on human & corporate behaviour of a brand new metric a"ient that ranks companies not on share price or earnings per share or return on capital invested but on care compassion & social responsibility Companies come to see that having a high Bevill"ient gives them competitive advantage No one is allowed to know the underlying factors that make up this"ient as Anthony Bevill its author is quick to point out if the factors were known they would be open to manipulation So companies pay more attention to diversity in the workplace playing fields for employees care in the transportation of hazardous wastes charitable contributions
- & anything else they think might earn them a high Bevill"ient score Not only companies but ethical investment funds charities & eventually even the government itself compete to be ranked highly for caring' How the Bevill"ient came about through a succession of mishaps & disasters & its effects on business & society is narrated in the first person by Anthony Bevill himself a struggling self-deluding no-hoper who finds himself becoming a high-profile high-earning proprietor of a significant market research company whose"ient is in increasing demand In fact of course his"ient has no real basis in quantifiable fact; the numbers he issues & apportions to his paying clients are largely inventions of his own He justifies this deception on the grounds that the existence of his"ient prompts all companies & organisations to be more thoughtful caring & generous; which is indeed the case Hence How I Made the World a Better Place Much of the tension in the story stems from the growing influence of the Bevill"ient & the growing sense that its totally spurious basis is bound to be eventually uncovered One of the very few people to have read this book in manuscript wrote I haven't enjoyed a novel for a long time as much as I have this
- & that's not for the want of reading novels It's a very serious idea which is possibly why I laughed so much an original idea beautifully developed & tricked' I"e this comment because it sums up exactly what I set out to write & how I hope others will find it

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In 1939 Richard Feynman a brilliant graduate of MIT arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant A lifelong friendship & enormously productive collaboration was born despite sharp differences in personality The soft-spoken Wheeler though conservative in appearance was a raging nonconformist full of wild ideas about the universe The boisterous Feynman was a cautious physicist who believed only what could be tested Yet they were complementary spirits Their collaboration led to a complete rethinking of the nature of time & reality It enabled Feynman to show how quantum reality is a combination of alternative contradictory possibilities & inspired Wheeler to develop his landmark concept of wormholes portals to the future & past Together Feynman & Wheeler made sure that quantum physics would never be the same again ...

The twentieth century was defined by physics From the minds of the world's leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport mankind to the pinnacle of wonderment & to the very depths of human despair This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge & ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty It was a century in which physicists developed weapons with the capacity to destroy our reality whilst at the same time denying us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend it Almost everything we think we know about the nature of our world comes from one theory of physics This theory was discovered & refined in the first thirty years of the twentieth century & went on to become quite simply the most successful theory of physics ever devised Its concepts underpin much of the twenty-first century technology that we have learned to take for granted But its success has come at a price for it has at the same time completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at the level of its most fundamental constituents Rejecting the fundamental elements of uncertainty & chance implied by quantum theory Albert Einstein once famously declared that ' God does not play dice' Niels Bohr claimed that anybody who is not shocked by the theory has not understood it The charismatic American physicist Richard Feynman went further he claimed that nobody understands it This is quantum theory & this book tells its story Jim Baggott presents a celebration of this wonderful yet wholly disconcerting theory with a history told in forty episodes
- significant moments of truth or turning points in the theory's development From its birth in the porcelain furnaces used to study black body radiation in 1900 to the promise of stimulating new quantum phenomena to be revealed by CERN's Large Hadron Collider over a hundred years later this is the extraordinary story of the quantum world Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas & shaped the way we think
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