Marian Deacon has always been overshadowed by her cousin Madeleine a glamorous selfish model who will stop at nothing to reach the top. But their ordinary lives suddenly change with the arrival of Paul OConnell a handsome charismatic writer who draws them into the mysterious disappearance of Olivia Hastings & the glamour & danger of her life in Italy & New York. Stolen Beginnings" is a compelling story of what happens when girls become women & when love
- & fate
- get in their way."

...

When the Japanese entered the war in 1941 some 20 000 British civilians in the European colonies in Asia were rounded up & marched off to concentration camps where they were to remain for three long years. Over 3 000 of them were children. This is the first time their extraordinary experiences of suffering endurance & bravery have been collected together. STOLEN CHILDHOODS offers a window to a forgotten era & explores what happened when that world was brutally & suddenly shattered. Living on what effectively became the frontline of a war in daily contact with an enemy whose values were totally alien they witnessed acts of shocking violence. Harrowing but ultimately uplifting internment from a childs perspective is a complex
- & untold
- story. It is a story that features horror suffering & self-sacrifice but also celebrates the resilience adaptability & irrepressibility of the human spirit.

...

Months later the schoolgirl was systematically groomed & raped by a group of predatory Asian men. They separated her from her friends & passed her between them violating her & treating her as a sexual plaything. But worse was yet to come. Katie was contacted by Zeb the evil ringleader. He lured her with drugs & alcohol before raping her at a secret house
- his private lair
- where he exploited & abused young girls. Zeb was calculating & sadistic. He introduced others into the grooming ring until Katie felt she had no option but to comply with his perverse desires. The abuse continued for two agonising years until Zeb came up with an even more sickening plan. Scared for her life Katie was trapped. She needed to tell someone but who could she turn to & how would she escape the clutches of these depraved men? Stolen Girl is the shocking true story of lost childhood innocence. But it is also one of hope & how Katie found the courage & strength not only to escape her abusers but also to bring them to justice.

...

To lose one child is terrible; to lose two is unimaginable. For no one to believe that you are innocent of their deaths & to be imprisoned because of it must be unbearable. Yet this is the reality Sally Clark had to face. The daughter of a policeman wife of a solicitor & a solicitor herself just when she was grieving from the tragic death of her second child the system shed always believed in turned against her. Justice suddenly seemed a far-off principle as she was convicted & her initial appeal quashed. Her family lawyers & various volunteers were relentless in their fight to clear her name. Finally following three long years in prison suffering abuse & the bleak horrow of bereavement Sally Clark was finally acquitted by the Court of Appeal in 2003. Her release caught the nations attention & paved the way for succesful appeals by wrongly convicted mothers such as Angela Canning. As Lord Justice Judge said Unless we are sure of guilt the dreadful possibility always remains that a mother already brutally scarred by the unexplained deaths of her babies may find herself in prison for life for killing them when she should not be there at all." Written with the power of a thriller the book is a tragic but ultimately uplifting story of a mothers love & a familys gutsy fight for what they knew to be right." ...

Dido Twite heroine of Black Hearts in Battersea & Nightbirds on Nantucket is on her wildest adventure yet. On her way back to London aboard the Thrush Dido & crew are summoned to the aid of the tyrannical queen of New Cumbria. Her island is an infernal place where birds carry off men & fish eat human flesh. The queen is greatly distressed because a neighbouring king has stolen her lake. Dido faces fire flood wild beasts & ultimately threat of execution in order to get the lake back. Is she equal to the challenge? A rich mixture of legend fantasy humour & pure snowballing adventure. ...

On 10 June 1991 eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was abducted from a school bus stop within sight of her home in Tahoe California. It was the last her family & friends saw of her for over eighteen years. On 26 August 2009 Dugard her daughters & Phillip Craig Garrido appeared in the office of her kidnapper's parole officer in California. Their unusual behaviour sparked an investigation that led to the positive identification of Jaycee Lee Dugard living in a tent behind Garrido's home. During her time in captivity at the age of fourteen & seventeen she gave birth to two daughters both fathered by Garrido. Dugard's memoir is written by the 30-year-old herself & covers the period from the time of her abduction in 1991 up until the present. In her stark utterly honest & unflinching narrative Jaycee opens up about what she experienced including how she feels now a year after being found. Garrido & his wife Nancy have since pleaded guilty to their crimes. ...

After discovering that she was a stardust spirit Lucy has spent a magical year with her new stardust friends Allegra Faye & Ella flying through the woods at night-time using their magic powers to save animals & the environment. Its now Autumn & Lucys powers have become stronger than anyone could imagine
- she can do things that even adult stardust spirits struggle too. But even though Lucy is delighted with her new powers & loves showing them off her friends are a little upset. So when Lucy gets trapped in the woods by a dark spirit who wants to steal her stardust & therefore also her powers she wishes she had listened to her friends much more! But friendship even more powerful than the strongest magic & working together the girls manage to defeat the dark spirit for good.
...

The pulse-quickening heartbreaking devastatingly powerful follow-up to INFINITE DAYS. Lenah Beaudonte should be dead. But having sacrificed herself to save another she finds herself awakening with strange powers that are neither vampire nor human
- & with a new enemy on her trail. In her vampire life Lenah had thought that being human was all she ever wanted; but the human heart suffers pain heartbreak & loss. With her new powers growing & the dark force of the Nex after her soul Lenah faces a choice: between the mortal love of gorgeous Justin whose passion fed her human soul & taking a different path to become the mistress of her own destiny wherever that may lead.. .
...

Destroyed by fire years ago the infamous Philadelphia State Hospital was known as a warehouse for the criminally insane. But one man never left. By night Luther walks Philadelphia's backstreets drawing to him the mad the corrupt the fallen. By day he roams the catacombs beneath the city killing his prey. Detectives Kevin Byrne & Jessica Balzano are called to a bizarre murder scene: a man has been killed by a railroad spike driven into his head & left sitting on a bench in a local park. But it is just the beginning of a trail of evil that leads back to the hospital & the nightmares it still contains... ...

Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the small Minnesota town of Deephaven an entire family has been killed
- husband wife two daughters dogs. There's something about the scene that pokes at Lucas's cop instincts
- it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he's seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is a seriously upscale town & the husband was an executive vice president at a big bank. It just doesn't seem to fit. Until it does. & where it leads Lucas will take him into the darkest nightmare of his life.

...