Jack Searle is an American widower, bringing up his two stepdaughters Lidia & Marina alone in the border town of Laredo after losing his wife to cancer. Jack often takes the girls to visit their Mexican family over the border in Nuevo Laredo. Marina, the elder sister, persuades him to let her go there without him one night, to attend a concert with her cousin Patricia. Jack wants to say no
- Nuevo Laredo is a very dangerous city, controlled by drug cartels & devastated by violence & corruption. But eventually he agrees
- she`s growing up & he has to let her have some independence. Marina & Patricia head out to the concert, but they never come back. A frantic hunt for them begins, with Jack leading the way. But this is Nuevo Laredo, & girls go missing all the time here. They`re lucky to find that a good cop
- Gonzalo Soler
- is leading their investigation, but soon the whole police force is suspended due to endemic corruption. The army take over the city, & finding the missing girls is not their priority. To survive this nightmare & have any chance of finding Marina & Patricia, Jack & Gonzalo must take the law into their own hands. Their efforts to find the girls become more & more dangerous, & they uncover truths about the city of Nuevo Laredo that neither one of them ever wanted to face.



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In the Yugoslav wars tens of thousands of Europeans vanished. In a desperate need for news, their families prayed for a message, begged for the truth & fell for blackmail. In almost every case, the missing had been murdered. But without word, witness or body, the bereaved could not accept their loss. Their torment was drawn out as long as ten, even eighteen years
- for many it continues still. Children waited for parents to return from the grave. Mothers made up their dead son`s beds. Old men couldn`t bury their descendants. The living also lost their lives. For the first time in war DNA has been used to match blood & bone, reuniting families divided by death, enabling survivors to find closure & to begin to live again. These fifteen, heartbreaking Balkan stories
- told by Rory Mac Lean & Nick Danziger, two of Europe`s most sensitive chroniclers
- represent a tiny proportion of an immense tragedy. ” Missing Lives” gives a voice to the unacknowledged suffering of these families, to all who went missing by force, & reminds us that in war
- whatever the technological advances
- there is no greater loss than the disappearance of those we love.




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The hilarious true story of an amateur boating adventure. Yacht racing. A world of privilege & money. Beautiful women, bronzed men, & Simon le Bon explaining that he used to be in a b&. It`s not like that for everyone. Somewhere much, much further down the ladder it all looks very different. As a teenager, Michael Hutchinson raced tiny plywood dinghies on Belfast Lough, amid shoals of sewage-eating jellyfish. For him, sailing became the kind of obsession that often as not ends with a psychiatric intervention. Turning pro was his only dream. Then, at the age of eighteen, driven to despair by his own unremitting mediocrity, he gave up. But he never stopped dreaming about it
- what was he missing out on? How good or bad had he really been? Had it really been a wasted youth? At last, fifteen years later, he went back. Missing the Boat is the story of his comeback season, on the South Coast of Engl&, in Irel&, & in the glamorous resorts of the Mediterranean. It`s about the yachts, the people, the regattas, & just what it was like to dive back into a world that had become entirely alien. Michael Hutchinson won the Best First Book at the British Sports Book Awards.
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72 HOURS TO FIND HER...` Hits the sweet spot between literary & crime fiction
- Gripping` ERIN KELLY ` For those who love their
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` It was an empty landscape now with huge horizons in every direction, a compressed, steam-rollered desert where man had no place. We lacked the skills to carry out even basic fixes. If the van stopped working we were stuck. No one knew where we were & our last mobile phone signal had been 150 miles away.` Fifty-something & tired of arguing with John Humphrys over the day`s headlines, journalists Geoff Stayton & David Treanor found themselves eagerly volunteering for redundancy. But rather than easing into retirement with the odd round of golf, they decided to buy a van & drive off to Mongolia. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time
- In an epic journey through Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Siberia & across the Gobi desert, they discover more about each other in a few weeks than they did sharing an office for years. Lying in wait are crooked cops, bent border guards & dodgy mechanics, but also welcoming & curious locals, eager to help the pair on their mission.
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Lost in the jungle! Beck Granger is on a trip to Colombia in his school holidays. His anthropologist uncle has taken him along on a visit to Don Rafael de Castillo, a descendent of a great explorer who is claimed to have discovered a lost City of Gold. But the secret of the city died with the explorer
- until now... His uncle & Don Rafael believe they know where to find the city & Beck gets to go along for the ride. But when the two men are kidnapped, Beck is left to solve this new mystery on his own. With Marco & Christina, the Don`s children. he must set off into the wilds of Colombia to find the city
- & bring his uncle back. Beck must build a raft & negotiate wild river rapids, make camp, defend his friends from wild animals & keep them all alive in the jungle. A fast-paced, exciting new adventure full of real survival details & gruesome tips.

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Mission: Survival Location: The Sahara Desert Dangers: Diamond smugglers; heatstroke; scorpions. After being forced to parachute out of a smugglers` plane, teenage adventurer Beck Granger is about to face his toughest survival challenge yet
- the Sahara Desert. Blistering sun, shifting sand dunes, & no water for hundreds of miles... Can he survive the heat & make it out alive?
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Mission: Survival. Location: The Alaskan mountains. Dangers: Blizzards; grizzly bears; white-water rapids. A fatal plane crash. A frozen wilderness. The world`s youngest survival expert is in trouble again... Beck Granger must find help across the mountains
- but even if he survives the deadly cold, can he escape the hungry wolf that is on his trail? The second book in an explosive adventure series from real-life survival expert Bear Grylls.
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In the sixteenth century, the vast & sophisticated empire of China lay almost entirely unknown to Western travellers. As global trade expanded, this land of reputedly boundless wealth, pale-faced women, & indecipherable tongues began to feed the fantasies of European merchants & adventurers. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, saw in this great people millions of souls who would be damned unless the Christian message could be brought to them. In this book, Mary Laven tells the extraordinary story of the first Jesuit mission to China. Confronting enormous challenges, the Italian priest Matteo Ricci & a tiny handful of learned companions gained permission from the notoriously xenophobic Wanli emperor to settle in the fabled Forbidden City. Living among eunuchs & mandarins, wearing the clothes of Confucian scholars, Ricci & his associates strove to master the language & culture of their hosts. At the same time, they energetically preached the virtues of Western art & science. In ” Mission to China” Mary Laven brings this remote world vividly to life. ...

Frederic Stahl, born of Viennese intelligentsia, ran away to sea at the age of seventeen. Embarking in America, his matinee idol looks & Old-World charm took him to Hollywood, & a life of movies & women. But by autumn 1939, the unease in Europe has spread even to Stahl`s glamorous enclave. War has been declared, & though bullets & bombs are yet to fly, his decision to shoot a film in Paris seems ill-advised. The Parisians know this is their last spring & a time to be passionate. Soon after his arrival, Stahl is drawn into a clandestine world of foreign correspondents, exiled Spanish republicans &, of course, spies of every sort. For as a celebrity from neutral America
- who can travel across the continent freely
- Stahl could be very useful indeed.. . Returning to the Brasserie Heiniger, & some of the colourful cast from THE WORLD AT NIGHT, this is a headily atmospheric portrait of a continent in the grip of The Phony War.

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