Ariana Franklin combines the best of modern forensic thrillers with the drama of historical fiction in the enthralling second novel in the Mistress of the Art of Death series, featuring medieval heroine Adelia Aguilar. Rosamund Clifford, the mistress of King Henry II, has died an agonizing death by poison-and the king's estranged queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the prime suspect. Henry suspects that Rosamund's murder is probably the first move in Eleanor's long-simmering plot to overthrow him. If Eleanor is guilty, the result could be civil war. The king must once again summon Adelia Aguilar, mistress of the art of death, to uncover the truth. Adelia is not happy to be called out of retirement. She has been living contentedly in the countryside, caring for her infant daughter, Allie. But Henry's summons cannot be ignored, and Adelia must again join forces with the king's trusted fixer, Rowley Picot, the Bishop of St. Albans, who is also her baby's father. Adelia and Rowley travel to the murdered courtesan's home, in a tower within a walled labyrinth-a strange and sinister place from the outside, but far more so on the inside, where a bizarre and gruesome discovery awaits them. But Adelia's investigation is cut short by the appearance of Rosamund's rival: Queen Eleanor. Adelia, Rowley, and the other members of her small party are taken captive by Eleanor's henchmen and held in the nunnery of Godstow, where Eleanor is holed up for the winter with her band of mercenaries, awaiting the right moment to launch their rebellion. Isolated and trapped inside the nunnery by the snow and cold, Adelia and Rowley watch as dead bodies begin piling up. Adelia knows that there may be more than one killer at work, and she must unveil their true identities before England is once again plunged into civil war . . .

Japan, 1865, the women’s palace in the great city of Edo. Bristling with intrigue and erotic rivalries, the palace is home to three thousand women and only one man — the young shogun. Sachi, a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl, is chosen to be his concubine. But Japan is changing, and as civil war erupts, Sachi flees for her life. Rescued by a rebel warrior, she finds unknown feelings stirring within her; but this is a world in which private passions have no place and there is not even a word for ‘love’. Before she dare dream of a life with him, Sachi must uncover the secret of her own origins – a secret that encompasses a wrong so terrible that it threatens to destroy her ....

For Maxine Williams, being married to Blake was an amazing adventure. Brilliant, charismatic, and wholly unpredictable, as an entrepreneur he had made millions and grabbed headlines. His only shortcoming was as a husband, and now they have worked out an odd but amicable divorce, and share three children they both adore. Blake gets to keep his globe-trotting lifestyle — dating a succession of beautiful, famous and very young women — while Maxine raises their kids in Manhattan and pursues her passion, working as a child psychiatrist. Then, everything changes... Maxine finds a new love just as a tragedy transforms Blake from carefree playboy to compassionate, responsible grown-up. He wants Maxine in his life again — as a partner in a humanitarian project that could affect countless lives. But Maxine is on the cusp of a new life and almost certain that Blake, a.k.a. the Rogue, is a man capable of doing anything — except change. Or is he?

A spellbinding tale of war, loss, history, and one woman's unbreakable spirit. Annabelle Worthington, born into a life of privilege, was raised amid the glamour of New York society. But everything changes on a cold April day in 1912, when the sinking of the Titanic alters her world forever. Finding strength within her grief, Annabelle throws herself into volunteer work, nursing the poor and igniting a passion for medicine that will shape the course of her life. But a seemingly idyllic marriage brings more grief, and pursued by a scandal she does not deserve Annabelle flees New York for war-ravaged France. There she finds her true calling, working as an ambulance medic on the front lines. When the war ends, Annabelle begins a new life in Paris — now a doctor and mother, her past almost forgotten... until a fateful meeting opens her heart to the world she had left behind.

Three sassy, but very different heroines: knock-out brunette Peaches Gold, LA's most influential madam, who in her late thirties is certainly fooling everyone that she's much younger than she looks; twenty-something blonde South African yacht stewardess Frankie Willis, and English socialite Lady Emma Harvey — in her prime at nearly fifty. The hooker, the maid, and the lady. They have every reason to distrust and despise each other, but their hatred for one man will unite them. Forever. That man is Yuri Khordinsky. He's typical of the new-comers to the ranks of the world's super-rich — a handsome, ludicrously wealthy, utterly ruthless Russian with a murky past, desperate for acceptance in society. And he'll stop at nothing to get it.

When the National Security Agency's invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls in its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power.

CERN Institute, Switzerland: a world-renowned scientist is found brutally murdered with a mysterious symbol seared onto his chest. The Vatican, Rome: the College of Cardinals assembles to elect a new pope. Somewhere beneath them, an unstoppable bomb of terrifying power relentlessly counts down to oblivion. In a breathtaking race against time, Harvard professor Robert Langdon must decipher a labyrinthine trail of ancient symbols if he is to defeat those responsible u the Illuminati, a secret brotherhood presumed extinct for nearly four hundred years, reborn to continue their deadly vendetta against their most hated enemy, the Catholic Church.

Harvard professor Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call while on business in Paris: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been brutally murdered inside the museum. Alongside the body, police have found a series of baffling codes. As Langdon and a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, begin to sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to find a trail that leads to the works of Leonardo Da Vinci – and suggests the answer to a mystery that stretches deep into the vault of history. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine code and quickly assemble the pieces of the puzzle, a stunning historical truth will be lost forever…

Sitting among the rows of tills in Supersafe supermarket in the North of England, the fortunes of a young checkout girl are on the brink of change … Linda works the tills at Safeshop. It's what everyone does. The grammar school girls get the careers; the comp girls get the two-bit college courses and the low wage jobs. But when model agent Rafe brings his disposable razors to Linda's till, he recognises the raw talent that could transform both their lives. Almost overnight, Linda becomes Crystalline, a supermodel catapulted onto the international stage. But in the blur of first class flights and flashy restaurants, will she begin to forget where Crysatline ends and Linda begins? The bittersweet story of a young checkout girl's rise to fame, this is prize-wining playwright Jim Cartwright's first novel. Bearing the hallmarks of his best-loved play, THE RISE AND FALL OF LITTLE VOICE and ROAD, this rollicking debut takes the reader on a journey from which there is no going back.

Englishman Paul West has just received an offer he can't refuse: two weeks in the sun, all expenses paid, with a beautiful blonde called Gloria Monday. M, as Gloria likes to be known, is down south to report on caviar trafficking but it soon becomes obvious that she s interested in something a lot more fishy than caviar. Meanwhile Paul s best friend Elodie is marrying a French aristocrat, and Paul is asked to do the catering. Cooking for the French is a risky assignment at the best of times, but Paul, who is starting to feel a bit like James Bond, assures her that nothing can go wrong. Or can it? As Paul is sexually harassed by an English hen party, picked on by French commandoes and arrested by excitable gendarmes, he realises that events are spiralling out of control. And when he discovers that M s real target is France s biggest fish of all the new President and that he s coming to Elodie s wedding, Paul knows that the merde really is about to hit the fan.

Grand Central station, New York. 1:23pm. What starts as a normal day on the New York City subway becomes a race against time when a commuter train is hijacked. It is packed with passengers and the ransom is one million dollars. The NYPD frantically pursue the train on the city streets, but the question remains: the subway is a closed system – surely there is no way out... But the four hijackers, led by a mercenary named Ryder, have thought about this. And once they receive their ransom money, they plan to send the train off at top speed toward the terminal station where it will crash, killing all the passengers...

What makes a father violent? It takes a brave man to find out... As a volunteer at St Margaret’s Hospice, eager and helpful Meryl is looking for a role in life. The arrival of Jamie, the son of a patient, may be just what she is after. He is good-looking, young and, above all, troubled. Jamie’s father has only a few days to live, but between father and son is a lifetime of misunderstanding and unhappiness. Could the most powerful legacy Jamie faces be an inability to love? With well-meaning Meryl hovering in the background, Jamie embarks on his long dark night of the soul, facing the secrets, lies and heartbreaks behind his father’s life. Meanwhile his dying father, seemingly unconscious to it all, relives his extraordinary history, from the triumphs of his life as a boxer, to the onset of a crippling illness he doesn’t understand. And in the quiet of the night, he receives strange visitors of his own….

«There's a caste system even in murder. Seven years ago, Vivek 'Vicky' Rai, the playboy son of Cabinet Minister, murdered Ruby Gill at a trendy restaurant in New Delhi simply because she refused to serve him a drink. Now Vicky Rai is dead, killed at his farmhouse at a party he had thrown to celebrate his acquittal. Six guests are discovered with guns in their possession — and each one is equally likely to have pulled the trigger. Who are these six suspects? And what were they doing in the farmhouse that night? In this elaborate mystery, we join Arun Advani, India's best-known investigative journalist, as the lives of these six suspects unravel before our eyes. Ingeniously plotted, «Six Suspects» is the work of a master storyteller.»

A masterful epic of love, war, treason, plague, famine, witchcraft, anti-Semitism and the Inquisition 14th-century Spain, the medieval city of Barcelona is enjoying a golden age of prosperity. Its humblest inhabitants are building, stone by stone, a magnificent church to overlook their harbour. This is the Cathedral of the Sea: a church to be built for the people by the people. In its shadow, Arnau, a young serf on the run from his feudal lord, struggles to earn his freedom. After famine, plague and thwarted love, Arnau's fortunes begin to turn when King Pedro makes him a baron as a reward for his courage in battle. But he is also forced to marry Eleonor, a ward of the King whom he does not love. His newfound status excites jealousy from his friends who plot his downfall with devastating consequences. Arnau's journey from slave to nobleman is the story of a struggle between good and evil that will turn Church against State and brother against brother ...

«Generation Kill» is about the young men sent to fight their nation's first open-ended war since Vietnam. Despite the flurry of media images to come of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you have never really met any of these people, who serve as front-line troops. For whatever reason, the media simply doesn't get them. As we all know, news accounts of the last two wars focused almost exclusively on battlefield imagery of high-tech weapons wreaking astounding destruction, comply with analysis from retired army grandees and other experts, punctuated by the odd heart-warming patriotic sound-bite. The troops themselves play a role in the media's presentation of recent wars rather like extras in «The Triumph of the Will». They are everywhere yet somehow invisible. When they speak you get the sense that what they are saying has been carefully scripted.Now «Generation Kill» tells the soldiers' story in their own words. The narrative focuses on a platoon of 23 marines, many of them veterans of Afghanistan, whose elite reconnaissance unit spearheaded the blitzkrieg on Iraq. This is the story of young men that have been trained to become ruthless killers. It's about surviving death. It's about taking part in a war many questioned before it even began. Evan Wright was the only reporter with First Recon, which operated well ahead of most other forces, usually behind enemy lines. They were among the first marines sent into the fight and one of the last units still engaged on the outskirts of Iraq, even after the city centre fell. «Generation Kill» is not just a combat chronicle but an inside look at how people fighting in war actually experience it. It is both an action narrative like «Black Hawk Down» and a detailed portrait of a generation at war along the lines of «Band of Brothers». It is not a book you are going to forget in a hurry.»

Two small towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, nothing but twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher can't find a ride, so he walks. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets are four redneck deputies who want to run him out of town. Mistake. They're picking on the wrong guy. Jack Reacher is a big man, and he's in shape. No job, no address, no baggage. Nothing, except bloody-minded curiosity. What is the secret the locals seem so keen to hide? A hard man is good to find. Ex-military cop Reacher is today's most addictive hero. Now he pulls on a tiny loose thread, to unravel conspiracies that expose the most shocking truths. Because, after all, Jack Reacher has nothing to lose.

A cargo ship is apprehended by the authorities off the coast of Spain, loaded to the gunwales with enough arms and ammunition to start a war. Twenty years later, an unknown aggressor seems intent on eradicating those responsible for the treachery, one by one. The last victim was brutally tortured with a Black & Decker drill, then shot through the head. And Nick Stone — ex-SAS, tough, resourceful, ruthless, highly trained — is next on the killer's list... In his most daunting mission yet, Nick Stone must find a man who shared that past, and who may know more about the present threat than he is prepared to reveal. As the two find themselves pursued across sea and desert, they become ever more enmeshed in a deadly network of betrayal, to which Stone himself unwittingly holds the key. And in a final confrontation that echoes his worst nightmares, only he can stop the unthinkable and save the lives of those he holds most dear.

«Most of us grow up having always known to touch wood or cross our fingers, and what happens when a princess kisses a frog or a boy pulls a sword from a stone, yet sadly some of these things are now beginning to be forgotten. Legends, myths, fairytales: our world is made up of the stories we told ourselves about where we came from and how we got there. It is the same on Discworld, except that beings which on Earth are creatures of the imagination — like vampires, trolls, witches and, possibly, gods — are real, alive and in some cases kicking on the Disc. In «The Folklore of Discworld», Terry Pratchett teams up with leading British folklorist Jacqueline Simpson to take an irreverent yet illuminating look at the living myths and folklore that are reflected, celebrated and affectionately libelled in the uniquely imaginative universe of Discworld.»

What is fashion? Who decides what's in and what's out? Is the catwalk really catty? And what's so super about supermodels? Based entirely on true but anonymous stories, Material Girl covers six months in a designer's life and gives you exclusive access to a world where women get paid thousands for getting dressed in the morning and where the wrong shirt length can cost you your career. Tracking the development of a collection from concept to catwalk, onto the front pages of Vogue and then to the high street, it reveals the shocking mark-ups, the fabulous extremes and the shoddy shortcuts which the fashion industry would rather you didn't know about...