The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. For fifty years after Dr Watson's death, a packet of papers, written by the doctor himself, lay hidden in a locked box. The papers contained an extraordinary report of the case of Jack the Ripper and the horrible murders in the East End of London in 1888. The detective, of course, was the great Sherlock Holmes — but why was the report kept hidden for so long? This is the story that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote. It is a strange and frightening tale...

Aurelio Zen is posted to Calabria, where in the heart of a tight-knit traditional community there has been a brutal murder. Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence and uncover the truth. But his mission is complicated by another secret which has drawn strangers from the other side of the world — a hunt for buried treasure launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing his bizarre and deadly obsession.

When the corpse of the shady industrialist, who owns the local football team, is found both shot and stabbed with a Parmesan knife, Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen is called to Bologna to oversee the investigation. Recovering slowly from surgery, Zen is only too happy to take on what at first appears to be an undemanding assignment.

The discovery of an unidentified, decomposed corpse in a railway wagon marks the beginning of Zen's most difficult and dangerous case. Set against the backdrop of the 3000-year-old city of Catalina, in the shadow of Mount Etna, Blood Rain finds Aurelio Zen at his most desperate and driven.