Laura Chases older sister Iris married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor & eighty-two is living in Port Ticonderoga a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life in particular the events surrounding her sisters tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following. Sexually explicit for its time The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman & a man on the run. During their secret meetings in rented rooms the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on Planet Zycron. As the invented story twists through love & sacrifice & betrayal so does the real one; while events in both move closer to war & catastrophe. By turns lyrical outrageous formidable compelling & funny this is a novel filled with deep humour & dark drama. ...

The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries long after every other ultimate discovery had been made. This is the story of the men & women who risked everything to find it earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary Amundsen Hillary & Armstrong. In 2004 two great scientist-explorers attempted to find the bottom of the world. Bold American Bill Stone was committed to the vast Cheve Cave located in southern Mexico & deadly even by supercave standards. On the other side of the globe legendary Ukrainian explorer Alexander Klimchouk
- Stones opposite in temperament & style
- had targeted Krubera a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the Republic of Georgia. Blind Descent" explores both the brightest & darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover
- to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering & ocean exploration pale by comparison. These supercavers spent months in multiple camps almost two vertical miles deep & many more miles from their caves exits. They had to contend with thous&-foot drops deadly flooded tunnels raging whitewater rivers monstrous waterfalls mile-long belly crawls & much more. Perhaps even worse were the psychological horrors produced by weeks plunged into absolute perpetual darkness beyond all hope of rescue including a particularly insidious derangement called " The Rapture". " Blind Descent" is a testament to human survival & endurance
- & to two extraordinary men whose relentless pursuit of greatness led them to heights of triumph & depths of tragedy neither could have imagined."



...

The Number One bestselling detective series. Nothing keeps a crime hidden like fear & DS Logan Mc Rae hits a dead-end in this 5th crime thriller from the award-winning Stuart Mac Bride. ' You can't be an eyewitness if I cut out your eyes...' Someone's preying on Aberdeen's growing Polish population. The pattern is always the same: men abandoned on building sites barely alive their eyes gouged out & the sockets burned. With the victims too scared to talk & the only witness a paedophile who's on the run Grampian Police is getting nowhere fast. The attacks are brutal they keep on happening & soon DS Logan Mc Rae will have to decide how far he's prepared to bend the rules to get a result. The Granite City is on the brink of gang warfare; the investigating team are dogged by allegations of corruption; & Logan's about to come to the attention of Aberdeen's most notorious crime lord... ...

When her husband & son are murdered she thought she'd lost it all. But for Sarah Durandt the nightmare is just beginning.. . Sarah has just witnessed the execution of the man who confessed to killing her husband & son among others. Returning home to the small town of Hopewell Sarah vows to search for the graves of her murdered family
- something the killer would never reveal. But her hunt leads to shocking revelations & in a race to save everything she holds dear Sarah is forced to swallow the ultimate betrayal & the cruellest of lies.
...

A motorway service station on the M1: dimly lit run down poorly supervised flickering lights dark corners; a favourite stopover for long-distance lorry drivers on their way up north from London. Behind it a body is found in a ditch that of a girl barely out of her teens. She appears to have no family no friends no connections anywhere. Other girls have gone missing in the vicinity & no one has stepped forward to claim them. Anna Travis is assigned to the case. Her blood runs cold when she receives a letter from a lifer -- someone she was responsible for arresting in the past -- who writes to her from prison asking her to visit him urgently. For he claims he knows who the killer is... ...

The first in Robert Wilson's Seville series featuring the tortured detective Javier Falcon. The man is bound gagged & dead in front of his television. The terrible self-inflicted wounds tell of his violent struggle to avoid some unseen horror. On the screen? In his head? What could make a man do that to himself? It's Easter week in Seville a time of passion & processions. But detective Javier Falcon is not celebrating. Appalled by the victim's staring eyes he is inexorably drawn into this disturbing mystifying case. & when the investigation into the dead man's life sends Javier trawling though his own past & into the shocking journals of his late father a famous artist his unreliable memory begins to churn. Then there are more killings & Falcon finds himself pushed to the edge of a terrifying truth... ...

Love is not consolation it is light. From the author of Maps for Lost Lovers" comes a searing exquisitely written novel set in Pakistan & Afghanistan in the months following 9/11
- a story of war of one familys losses & of the simplest most enduring human impulses. Jeo & Mikal foster-brothers from a small Pakistani city secretly enter Afghanistan: not to fight with the Taliban but to help & care for wounded civilians. But it soon becomes apparent that good intentions cant keep them out of harms way... From the wilds of Afghanistan to the heart of the family left behind
- their blind father haunted for years by the death of his wife by the mistakes he may have made in the name of Islam & nationhood Jeos steadfast wife & her superstitious mother
- Aslams prose takes us on an extraordinary journey through war tragedy love & brotherhood."


...

Charlie Bassett thought he was done with a military life but a soldier is always a soldier & now he must fight one last battle. A ticking bomb; a band of notorious terrorists; & a price on his head: Charlie is back on the front line & this time his foes are not only his countrys enemies but the ghosts of his own past. The Final War" is an explosive page-turner full of grit wit & heart-stopping action." ...

Mary Hetherington was a mother who dominated her family. She was kind efficient & generous
- providing they did what she wanted.
...

A death in the family-from-hell bring Detectives Fry & Cooper to a remote & unfriendly rural community in their fourth psychological thriller. And as it grew dark Withens became almost entirely silent. Except for the screaming. A small village in the Peak District Withens is troubled by theft & vandalism mostly generated by local family-from-hell the Oxleys. Now it is the focus of a murder investigation -- a mans body has been found on the bleak moors nearby & the man is an Oxley. To crack the case DC Ben Cooper must break open the delinquent clan. His boss DS Diane Fry is also in Withens. Grim new evidence has turned up in the case of a missing student but her parents refuse to believe she could be dead. The darkness in Withenss heart is growing. & things are only going to get nastier! ...