The Arctic is heating up. While China, the US & Russia are militarizing the North pole
- sending submarines & ice-breakers
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When Henry's wife is stabbed to death, he pays a prostitute to give him an alibi. Her body is discovered, strangled, & the police realise they are dealing with a serial killer who will stop at nothing to cover his tracks. While they are hunting for evidence, another prostitute is brutally murdered. On the track of a vicious killer, Ian doesn't realise he is risking the life of his young colleague, Polly. Already established as a popular character in his own right, Ian Peterson appears in a supporting role in the first three Geraldine Steel novels. Cold Sacrifice is the start of his own career as protagonist in a brand new detective series. ...

When Spenser's closest ally, Hawk, is brutally injured & left for dead while protecting bookie Luther Gillespie, Spenser embarks on an epic journey to rehabilitate his friend in body & soul. Hawk, always proud, has never been dependent on anyone. Now he is forced to make connections: to accept the medical technology that will ensure his physical recovery, & to reinforce the tenuous emotional ties he has to those around him. Spenser quickly learns that the Ukrainian mob is responsible for the hit, but finding a way into their tightly knit circle is not nearly so simple. Their total control of the town of Marshport, from the bodegas to the police force to the mayor's office, isn't just a sign of rampant corruption-it's a form of arrogance that only serves to ignite Hawk's desire to get even. As the body count rises, Spenser is forced to employ some questionable techniques & even more questionable hired guns while redefining his friendship with Hawk in the name of vengeance. ...

Lieutenant Lorraine Page had everything -- a devoted husb&, two beautiful daughters & an impressive career with the Homicide Squad. It's impossible to believe that she could be thrown out of the police force & end up on Skid Row.
Lorraine's ex-colleagues soon forget her, as the hunt for a nightmare serial killer spirals into an all-out search for a missing witness: a victim who escaped.
Lorraine Page is that witness. Against her will she is drawn into the investigation, & forced to face her past & her overwhelming guilt...

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Lieutenant Lorraine Page had everything -- a devoted husb&, two beautiful daughters & an impressive career with the Homicide Squad. It's impossible to believe that she could be thrown out of the police force & end up on Skid Row. Lorraine's ex-colleagues soon forget her, as the hunt for a nightmare serial killer spirals into an all-out search for a missing witness: a victim who escaped. Lorraine Page is that witness. Against her will she is drawn into the investigation, & forced to face her past & her overwhelming guilt... ...

Dallas, November 22nd, 1963. Wayne Tedrow Jr. has arrived to kill a man. The fee is $6, 000. He finds himself instead in the middle of the cover-up following JFK's assassination. There follows a hellish five-year ride through the sordid underbelly of public policy via Las Vegas, Howard Hughes, Vietnam, CIA dope dealing, Cuba, sleazy showbiz, racism & the Klan. This is the 1960s under Ellroy's blistering lens, the icons of the era mingled with cops, killers, hoods, & provocateurs. " The Cold Six Thousand" is historical confluence as American nightmare. It is a fierce, epic fiction. It is a masterpiece. ...

cold snack is an immensely readable collection, among the most accessible that well-loved poet Janet Charman has written. The book brims with poems of suburbia, families, workplaces, ordinary life. In the first section Charman explores the pains & pleasures (mostly the pains) of becoming a schoolteacher in midlife, ‘rerouted back to class’—the fish-swim of routine, pedagogy & (teacher) truancy, parentÂ-teacher interviews, assessment ‘in the jelly sway of the kelp forest’. The second section, ‘televisioner’, is a single long sequence that views the over-confident 1980s from the unlikely perspective of a receptionist for a television station. The poet plays with the news & the people & stories behind the news, remembering the Springbok tour, a bomb scare, the ‘occasional politician’ & the shock arrival of computers: ‘the wall had gone up / Berlin / Jerusalem / in the news room’. In the third bittersweet & more intimate section lyricism combines with observation to produce some powerful poems to end the collection. All the poems show Charman’s ear for the spoken language & her acute awareness of the sounds, shapes, colours around us & the way they are inhabited by our emotions. Moving & impressive. ...

For innumerable people in Great Britain, the second half of the forties was a period of return to homes & former occupations after the volcanic dislocations of the war. Michael, having repeatedly risked his life as an Air Force pilot, is now back in his comfortable & privileged existence as a fellow of a major Oxford college. After the excitements of her years in SOE, the Special Operations Executive, his cousin Christine is attempting to fulfil her tutor's high expectations of her as a classical scholar of note.

For the German prisoners crowded together in a camp on the outskirts of the town there have been no such returns. But at least the previously sever edict against any sort of fraternisation has been in some measures relaxed. So it is that a chance conversation that Michael initiates with a solitary prisoner, Thomas, precipitates a friendship between the fastidious don & a little group of prisoners, whom he eventually introduces to Christine.

Soon Michael has become profoundly attached to Klaus, a previously robust East Prussian hideously wounded before his capture, who remains unaware of the dormant passion that he has aroused. Christine starts a tumultuous affair with Thomas, a would-be composer. Inevitably the relationship is a difficult one in a world in which many of the victors oppose relationships of any kind with representatives of the hated enemy.

King's descriptions of the grimness of the lives of Germans, labouring outdoors in the bitter old, & of the conflict between the natural humanity of the British & their desire for reparations, are etched with memorable sharpness.





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Evan Shepard is a young man with a chequered past when he first meets the Drakes, after his car breaks down outside their house.

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Evan Shepard is a young man with a chequered past when he first meets the Drakes, after his car breaks down outside their house. Behind him, he has a troubled adolescence, a failed marriage & a little daughter, but his meeting with the quiet & beautiful Rachel heralds a new start. However, after their swift marriage, things don't work out quite as planned & the stresses of living with Rachel's family, in their shared house in Cold Spring Harbor, begin to take their toll on the new couple. ...