The second novel in the Strange Angels series picks up with Dru neatly tucked away in a Schola that's more like a prison than a secret training facility. Except for one tiny detail... she's the only girl in the place and is totally surrounded by tons of cute boys. But a traitor in the Order wants Dru dead and she can't trust anyone except for Graves. Too bad he's being kept busy with a new crew of wulfen teens and doesn't have time for her. As she learns the truth about who she can and can't trust, Dru's only hope may be to save herself — although the one gift that makes her special is draining away, and she doesn't know how to get it back. Will Dru survive long enough to find out who is really after her? Or is she destined for the same fate as her murdered parents? Lili's characters come alive on the page in a way that's visually stunning and she creates the same terrific pace, danger and teen romance as in Strange Angels.

Three single women in their fifties meet when they join a choir. Lucy, recently widowed, is a cook and food journalist; Joanna, a successful business woman, never married; Rebecca is a divorced interior decorator. Each of the women is at a crossroads and they quickly form a bond.

Sealed for one hundred and twenty-five years, Wilkie Collins's scribbled words launch a feverish descent into the underbelly of Victorian London as he is dragged into Charles Dickens's pursuit of a spectral figure known only as Drood.

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder — and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.

When thirteen-year-old Johnny's talking computer Kovac detects an extraterrestrial signal, his life is set to change for ever. Until then, stuck in his children's home in Castle Dudbury New Town, with the nasty cook Mr Wilkins watching his every move, football had been his only escape. But soon things start happening around him that Johnny doesn't understand: why is his mother, who is on life support in a hospital for the criminally insane, being guarded by sinister looking men? And why was a journalist murdered shortly after Johnny talked to him? When Johnny finds out he has a sister, he decides to run away to find her. His search for answers takes him farther from home than he could ever have imagined, on a spectacular journey through time and space. Along the way he visits new worlds, prehistoric Earth and the lost city of Atlantis before finally discovering the truth about his parents and who he really is.

Oskar and Eli. In very different ways, they were both victims. Which is why, against the odds, they became friends. And how they came to depend on one another, for life itself. Oskar is a 12 year old boy living with his mother on a dreary housing estate at the city's edge. He dreams about his absentee father, gets bullied at school, and wets himself when he's frightened. Eli is the young girl who moves in next door. She doesn't go to school and never leaves the flat by day. She is a 200 year old vampire, forever frozen in childhood, and condemned to live on a diet of fresh blood. John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel is a unique and brilliant fusion of social novel and vampire legend, a deeply moving fable about rejection, friendship and loyalty.

Sherlock Holmes' nemesis lives again. It's the turn of the century and Moriarty has been away from London for several years, setting up crime syndicates in the US. But he's suddenly called back to London to deal with the European upstart criminals who have attempted to oust him.

The trouble with being a vampire is... You can't get a decent haircut. You live on guinea-pig blood. And even worse, most of the world's population wants to kill you. For no good reason. Nina Harrison became a vampire in 1973, when she was fifteen. Since then, life's been one big drag — mostly because she spends all her time with a bunch of vampires, in a vampire therapy group. Then one of them gets staked by an anonymous vampire slayer, and things become even worse: while tracking down the culprit, Nina and her fellow vampires end up in the middle of an illegal werewolf-fighting racket, and find themselves the target of some genuine villains who'll stop at nothing to get their werewolf back.

Dru Anderson: Night Hunter. Knife Wielder. Heart Breaker. Dru can sense evil, which helps when she and her Dad are tracking down ghosts, suckers, wulfen, and the occasional reanimated corpse. It's a dangerous life, but it's the only one she knows. Then Dru's dad turns up dead and she suddenly finds herself in the middle of a deadly game where every move she makes could be her last. Dru is more special than she realizes — and whatever killed her dad could be coming for her next. Can Dru stay alive long enough to fall for one — or both — of the guys hungry for her affections? Find out in the heart-stopping first book in a thrilling series.

December, and the river is rising. The village of Ledwardine has never been flooded in living memory. Within days it will be an island. There's no electricity. The church is serving as a temporary mortuary for two people who drowned. Only one man feels safer. An aggressively-atheist author has been moved, for his own safety, Rushdie-style, into a secluded house just outside the village. Fundamentalist Christians have hated him for years. Now he's offended the Muslims. Bad move.Meanwhile, archaeologists, assisted by Merrily's teenage daughter, Jane, are at work in Coleman's Meadow, unearthing an ancient row of standing stones which some people would rather stay buried. The atheist's temporary home is close to the site. And his young wife is becoming conspicuously agitated. Is it the fear of discovery — or the kind of fear that she, of all people, could never disclose? One thing is clear: the last person who's going to be welcome in that house is an exorcist. With the flood water washing up Church Lane towards the vicarage and the shop running out of cigarettes it looks like a cold and complex Christmas for Merrily Watkins in an ancient community forced to untangle its own history against the swirling uncertainty of the future.

The second installment in the Millennium Trilogy sees Lisbeth Salander wanted for murder while Blomkvist tries desperately to clear her name. Lisbeth Salander is a wanted woman. Two Millennium journalists about to expose the truth about sex trafficking in Sweden are murdered, and Salander's prints are on the weapon. Her history of unpredictable and vengeful behaviour makes her an official danger to society — but no-one can find her. Mikael Blomkvist, editor-in-chief of Millennium, does not believe the police. Using all his magazine staff and resources to prove Salander's innocence, Blomkvist also uncovers her terrible past, spent in criminally corrupt institutions.

Is the young man simply drunk or does his staggering walk suggest something more sinister? When he collapses in front of the two sisters on that dark, wet night, the women guess rightly that he's been poisoned. So begins this gripping tale set in the town of Banff, Scotland in the 1620s. The body of the victim, the apothecary's apprentice, is found in the house of Alexander Seaton — a fallen minister, the discovery of whose clandestine love affair has left him disgraced and deprived him of his vocation. Why was the body moved to Seaton's house? What is the significance of the unusual poison used to kill him? And why would anyone want to murder this likeable young man? Seaton sets out to find answers to these and many other questions, embarking on a journey where he encounters the witch hunt, extreme religious prejudice, cruelty and the darkness in men's souls. It is also a personal quest that leads Alexander to the rediscovery of his faith in God and his belief in himself. Among her many strengths, Shona MacLean is brilliant at evoking period and place. You feel you are in those cold, dark, northern rooms, eavesdropping on her characters. You are totally involved in the rich, convincing world she has re-created.

Dr Ruth Galloway is in her late 30s. When she's not digging up bones or other ancient objects, she lectures at a university in Norfolk. She lives, alone but happily so, in a bleak, marshy area called Saltmarsh overlooking the sea and Norfolk's vast skies with her cats and Radio 4 for company. She's a salty character — quirky. When a child's bones are found in the marshes, near a dig that Ruth and her former boyfriend Peter worked on ten years before, Ruth is called upon to date them. They turn out to be bronze-age bones and DCI Harry Nelson, who called on Ruth for help, is disappointed. He had hoped they would be the bones of a child called Lucy who's been missing, presumed dead, for ten years. He has been getting letters about her ever since — odd letters with references to ritual and sacrifice, and including quotes from the Bible and Shakespeare. Then a second girl goes missing and Nelson gets another letter — like the ones about Lucy. Is it the same killer? Is it a ritual murder, linked in some way to the site near Ruth's remote home? Then one of Ruth's cats is killed and clearly she's in danger from a killer who knows that her expert knowledge is being used to help the police with their enquiries.

50 Big Ideas You Really Need to Know is a concise, accessible and popular guide to the central tenets of Western thought. Every important principle of philosophy, religion, politics, economics, the arts and the sciences is profiled in a series of short illustrated essays, complemented by an informative array of timelines and box features. Platonism, The Soul, Communism, Aristotelianism, Faith, Fascism, The Golden rule, Atheism, Racism, Altruism, Secularism, Feminism, Pluralism, Fundamentalism, Islamism, Liberty, Creationism, Capitalism, Toleration, War, Globalization, Scepticism, Duty, Classicism, Reason, Utopia, Romanticism, Punishment, Liberalism, Modernism, Materialism, Democracy, Surrealism, Relativism, Conservatism, Censorship, Utilitarianism, Imperialism, Big Bang, Existentialism, Nationalism, Chaos, Evil, Social contract, Evolution, Fate, Republicanism, Relativity, Quantum mechanics, Gaia.

Bernie Gunther is the ideal narrator for Philip Kerr' bleak tale of the dirty deals made by victors and vanquished alike in post-war Germany. Having learned that there's no way to distinguish 'the one from the other', the cynical P.I. has the moral clarity to see through the deceit and hypocrisy of both friend and foe.It is Munich, in the year 1949. Amid the chaos of defeat, it's home to all the backstabbing intrigue that prospers in the aftermath of war. A place where a private eye can find a lot of not-quite-reputable work: cleaning up the Nazi past of well-to-do locals, abetting fugitives in the flight abroad, and sorting out rival claims to stolen goods. It's work that fills Bernie with disgust — but it also fills his sorely depleted wallet. Then a woman seeks him out. Her husband has disappeared. She's not looking to get him back — he's a wanted man who ran one of the most vicious concentration camps in Poland. She just wants confirmation that he's dead. It's a simple enough job. But in post-war Germany, nothing is simple...

Posing as an escaping Nazi war-criminal Bernie Gunther arrives in Buenos Aires and, having revealed his real identity to the local chief of police, discovers that his reputation as a detective goes before him. A young girl has been murdered in peculiarly gruesome circumstances that strongly resemble Bernie's final case as a homicide detective with the Berlin police. A case he had failed to solve. Circumstances lead the chief of police in Buenos Aires to suppose that the murderer may be one of several thousand ex Nazis who have fetched up in Argentina since 1945. And, therefore, who better than Bernie Gunther to help him track that murderer down? Redolent with atmosphere, this novel ends up asking some highly provocative questions about the true extent of Argentina's Nazi collaboration and anti-semitism under the Perons.

Augustus Cain is a man with his back against the wall. A war-scarred wanderer, he faces a past he wants to forget, a present without prospect or fortune, and an uncertain future marred by the loss of his most prized possession — his horse — which he has carelessly gambled away. But he is not without skill — he has an uncanny, if unwelcome, ability to track the most elusive runaway slaves. And to repay a debt and keep his horse, he must head north from Virginia and retrieve a runaway named Rosetta. When he eventually runs Rosetta to ground in Boston, Cain discovers she carries a secret — and the size of the bounty on her head begins to make more sense. Fleeing the northern states pursued by a posse of Unionists, Cain finds himself increasingly drawn to Rosetta and starts to wonder if his five hundred dollar fee — if any fee — could ever be enough to return her to her master...

Ten high achieving ladies are gathered together in the week between Christmas and the New Year, at the expensive Castle Spa, seeking, through Botox, aromatherapy and general all round pampering, a new beginning to their lives. The Ladies lounge around in the Jacuzzi, drinking champagne and eating chocolate telling each other the stories of their lives. Starting with the Trophy wife's tale: her spell in a Greek prison has left her in serious need of a makeover; the Brain Surgeon's tale: of twins and mistaken identity; the Judge's tale: of the sex change which allowed him to judge the pleasures of the bedchamber from both male and female perspectives. The manicurist, the public speaker, the journalist, the company director, the ex vicar's wife, the screenwriter, all share their stories, ending with the stepmother's tale, a reversal of Cinderella's fate, with the stepmother as victim... Sparkling, witty, always compassionate and occasionally libidinous, Fay Weldon's new novel recalls Boccaccio's late medieval masterwork, The Decameron. Boccaccio dedicated his book to the ladies of his time, who were forced to hide their amorous passions under a veil of discretion, while men were free to indulge theirs.

It is 1867, Canada: as winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man's cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township — journalists, Hudson's Bay Company men, trappers, traders — but do they want to solve the crime or exploit it? One-by-one the assembled searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to wild animals, madmen and fugitives, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for 17 years, a Native American culture, and a fortune in stolen furs before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good. In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation and humour into a panoramic historical romance, an exhilarating thriller, a keen murder mystery and ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, one of the books of the year.

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared off the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family. There was no corpse, no witnesses, no evidence. But her uncle, Henrik, is convinced that she was murdered by someone in her own family — the deeply dysfunctional Vanger clan. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomqvist is hired to investigate, but when he links Harriet's disappearance to a string of gruesome murders from forty years ago, he needs a competent assistant — and he gets one: computer hacker Lisbeth Salander — a tattoed, truculent, angry girl who rides a motorbike like a Hell's Angel and handles makeshift weapons with the skill born of remorseless rage. This unlikely pair form a fragile bond as they delve into the sinister past of this island-bound, tightly-knit family. But the Vangers are a secretive lot, and Mikael and Lisbeth are about to find out just how far they're prepared to go to protect themselves — and each other.