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Little, Brown and Company
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It's a case of espionage, skulduggery and much unpleasantness. And it's also Gerald's first official governmental assignment. Deep in training, he's totally unaware that Princess Melissande has opened her own witching locum agency a one-stop-shop where magical problems are solved, for a price. Then she's offered a job that puts her on a collision course with Gerald and the future looks disagreeable, to say the least. Witches Incorporated is to investigate staff pilfering in a prestigious magical Research and Development firm. One with ties to the government. Confusion arises when Melissande and Gerald discover that they are both working at the firm undercover, but with separate allegiances. Deciding to team up rather than work apart, Gerald and Melissande find that their number one suspect is Gerald's professional rival. To succeed, they'll have to overcome a fair bit of chaos and the ultimate threat of Gerald's untimely death. |
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Jo and Gemma are friends who meet for coffee every Saturday to gossip and discuss the state of the world. At one such meeting, Gemma mentions killing her boss and Jo goes along with the joke. But Jo is not amused when she finds a real body on the beach at Selsey soon afterwards — an unidentified nearly-naked woman, who has been drowned. It take DCI Hen Mallin and her team some time to discover who the woman is, and as they are investigating, Jo and Gemma are getting into more trouble — they keep coming across dead bodies... Peter Lovesey's thirtieth novel explores one of his favourite themes — the innocent caught up in sinister events. His previous Hen Mallin book, The Circle, was described by Gerald Kaufman in The Scotsman as 'this gem of a book... the superb Peter Lovesey provides yet another novel of unalloyed delight'. |
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Baird College's Mendenhall echoes with the footsteps of students heading home for Thanksgiving break and Robin Stone, who won't be going home, swears she can feel the creepy, hundred-year-old residence hall breathe a sigh of relief for its long-awaited solitude. As a massive storm approaches, four other lonely students reveal themselves to Robin: Patrick, a handsome jock; Lisa, a manipulative tease; Cain, a brooding musician; and Martin, a scholarly eccentric. Each has forsaken a long weekend at home for their own secret reasons. The five unlikely companions establish a tentative rapport, but they soon become aware of another presence disturbing the building's ominous silence. Are they the victims of an elaborate prank, or is the energy evidence of something genuine — something intent on using them for its own terrifying ends? |
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When a woman is burned to death in Grandal Field in Devon, it seems like a case of mistaken identity. Until DI Wesley Peterson learns of a legend involving a French woman who burned to death there in the thirteenth century. And when he discovers that records of a previous excavation on the site have vanished, and that two archaeologists involved in that dig died in tragic circumstances, Wesley starts to investigate the possibility of a link between the legend and recent events. But edging closer to the truth brings unexpected danger to Wesley. For the truth echoes a story of twisted love and obsession from many centuries ago — a truth that almost costs Wesley his life... |
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The double christening of her sisters' two kids gets Holly Bennett thinking. She would seriously love to have a baby one day, but for the first time in ages being adopted has become a stumbling block for her. Does she want to start a family of her own when she doesn't even know who she really is or where she's come from? With an on-off boyfriend who she's swiftly falling out of lust with, Holly decides to move back to her home town to be near her adoptive family. Who knows, it may be the change she needs to get her life back on track — and the place to be if she wants to begin tracing her roots. But these roots prove trickier to trace than Holly has expected. That is, until she hires her own oh-so-sexy private investigator to take charge... |
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Alix, arrogant, middle-aged and angry comes home to the derelict port of Liverpool as her mother lies dying. Irritably resigned to living alone for the rest of her life she suddenly finds herself erotically attracted to a stranger. Joseph is an American architect who has come to the city to build a hotel. Refusing to accept that his wife has left him or the trauma of a war he once fought in, the question is whether these survivors of the battles of the Seventies are meant for each other or not. And what happened to a factory in Dresden which long ago made the perfect face cream... 'Perhaps her most accessible novel to date... Grant's prose is blunt, honest, yet often beautiful and bitingly funny. Equally comfortable discussing concepts of justice and grooming routinme, the voices Grant creates are striking and authentic. Her characters are irascible, witty, fierce, and full of the contradictions and blind spots that make them wholly human. This is a compelling and satisfying novel'. Rachel Seiffert, author of The Dark Room. |
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Ex-cop Luther Malone — member of a very secret paranormal society — and Grace Renquist, quirky librarian, are a strange partnership. Grace has been hired as an aura-reading consultant in the quest for a murder suspect, but has zero field experience. Her bodyguard, Luther, walks with a cane and isn't good with a gun! So the last thing they expect is for romantic sparks to fly between them at their hotel in Maui, where they're posing as honeymooners. However, their attraction must be suppressed quickly when rogue operatives for an underground group pour into the luxury resort. Grace recognises the dark spikes in their auras — she saw the same pattern in someone else in another life — and she understands how dangerous these people can be. While the pair's employers scramble to get them backup, Luther and Grace have to think on their feet. The criminals in their midst aren't just high-level sensitives — they've enhanced their talent with a potent and unpredictable drug. And as Grace knows all too well, if you don't control your powers, your powers will control you... |
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'Dear Mr Cornford, It is with regret that I begin the task of to writing to you about your niece, Emily. Her recent behaviour, which I have outlined to you in previous letters, compels me to request that she be formally removed from the school and returned to your care with immediate effect'. And so Emily Hudson, niece and ward, is dispatched into the care of her distant and cold uncle, to take residence at the family's Newport beach house at the outbreak of the Civil War. She is an orphan, the sole member of her family not claimed by consumption. In that first lonely summer, it is Emily's cousin William — himself an outsider — who is her saviour. Her spirit and vibrancy are at odds with the stilted climate of American society: a woman should be a paragon of virtue, definitely not an aspiring painter with no fortune to speak of. William's friendship offers Emily the chance to escape to London to pursue her dreams, but his patronage soon turns darker and more controlling. And as Emily's health falters, she turns to some rather unsuitable means to find the release she craves... |
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After experiencing a precognitive dream that shatters her engagement and changes her life forever, young California psychology professor Laurel MacDonald decides to get a fresh start by taking a job at Duke University in North Carolina. She soon becomes obsessed with the long-buried files form the world-famous Rhine parapsychology experiments, which attempted to prove if ESP really exists. Along with another charismatic professor, she uncovers disturbing reports, including a mysterious case of a house supposedly haunted by a poltergeist, investigated by another research team in 1965. The two professors and two exceptionally gifted Duke students move into the grand, abandoned mansion to replicate the investigation, unaware that the entire original team ended up insane... or dead. |
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Alexandria, Egypt, 1977. During a clandestine dive to an old shipwreck, archaeologist Isabella Warnock unearths an artefact unlike anything she has ever seen: an astrarium, a powerful ancient device rumoured to have shaped the destinies of pharaos and kings since the beginning of time. But her discovery comes at a terrible price, and it falls to her husband Oliver to keep the priceless object safe. Grief-stricken, Oliver refuses to believe in the astrarium's mysterious significance — until he finds himself up against someone willing to go to any lengths to obtain the powerful device. Catapulted into an extraordinary world of conspiracy and Egyptology, where age-old sorcery and ancient legends clash violently with modern-day ambitions and the gritty world of oil exploration, Oliver has little time to get the astrarium to safety, before he, too, pays with his life... |
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Two best friends and their brother husbands. Blissfully happy and living life to the full. But when a honeytrap is set to catch one brother cheating, their lives come crumbling down around them. |
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Betsy Taylor has problems that only a vampire queen/suburban wife could possibly understand... such as fifty thousand angry werewolves. That's what Betsy is facing when she takes her werewolf friend Antonia's body to Cape Cod, where the Pack resides at Wyndham Mansion. Because Antonia died in her service, Betsy is alive and well — and wracked with guilt. She has no idea if the Wyndham werewolves will welcome her with fangs or friendship. While Betsy and her husband Sinclair try to make nice, their legal ward BabyJon is freaking out every werewolf he comes in contact with. Meanwhile, Betsy's posse back at the St. Paul mansion are not happy. Increasingly frantic emails alert Betsy to her half-sister's increasingly erratic behavior. Looks like the devil's daughter is coming into her own — and raising hell. All in the name of making Betsy's life easier, of course. |
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'THIS IS AN ASSASSINATION. NOT YOURS. BUT AN ASSASSINATION NONE THE LESS'. Avery Cates, criminal 'king' of New York, has climbed his way to the top of a heap of trouble. On his knees in the snow, with a gun to his head, Avery thinks this must finally be it. Instead, he is injected with nanotech and left confused but alive. Then everyone around him starts dying. With every moment bringing humanity closer to extinction, Cates finds he will be either executioner or saviour of an entire world. |
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It has been said that the natural state of science fiction is the short story. If that is so, you won't find a better exporation of that state than Charles Stross's new collection. Centred around an original and previously-unpublished novella (TBD), UNPLUGGED is a showcase of some of the best short SF of the 21st century. With a introduction from the author and containing hitherto uncollected works such as, Missile Gap, Trunk and Disorderly and Rogue Farm, and some gems previously available only in small press publications, such as A Colder War and Antibodies, UNPLUGGED will illustrate perfectly why award-winning editor and anthologist, Gardner Dozois, once declared 'Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow'. |
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Bob has been behind a desk for too long, busy indexing and archiving the Laundry's secret files, and he's longing for a break when his wife, Mo, announces that she's landed a teaching assignment at a staff college in Cambridge. And he's worrying at the problem of a missing manuscript — an unfinished policy document found in the personal effects of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller (rtd) after his death — which is absent from the Laundry archives. (Fuller was not only the tactician who first invented Blitzkrieg warfare in 1917-18; he was also #2 to Aleister Crowley in the OTO, and a heavyweight Cabalist). So Bob follows Mo to Cambridge, and is startled to find a Russian spy sneaking around after him. The Fuller Memorandum is missing, and the FSB want it badly. It's got something to do with Fuller's occult obsessions, and something to do with the Laundry's creation in 1941. But Bob doesn't realize just how much is at stake until someone tries to kill Mo, and his boss Angleton starts behaving oddly before lapsing into a coma. The theft of Fuller's document is at the heart of a murderous conspiracy rooted in the GULAGs, and Bob is dumped into a deadly race against time — because if he can't work out where it's been hidden, and how it's connected to Angleton's mysterious illness, it's going to be curtains for the Laundry (and possibly the world) as the cultists of Chernobog try to raise darkness at noon. |
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On the eve of her wedding anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband to come home, listening for his car along the dark, icy roads. As the night draws on, and he fails to appear, Mary reflects on the true nature of their marriage: the secrets, the silences, and the unmentionable yet inescapable fact that for each loss and disappointment, there has been a corresponding physical gain: the woman she once was is now imprisoned in mountainous flesh. The Wife's Tale is the inspirational story of the journey Mary is finally forced to make across a continent, ostensibly in search of her husband, but eventually towards the self she has buried for too long. |
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Sophie and Jess Raven grow up knowing that a few little lies are necessary. You look great. It was only a joke. He's just stressed. It doesn't matter. Everything's fine. Everybody does it, don't they? But what about the big lies love, power and money? Are they ever justified? When Sophie discovers what her father, Bill, is doing with his accountant, Anthea, and Jess falls in love with the perfect man, should Sophie keep quiet or tear her family apart with the truth? And if she tells, who will pay the ultimate price? |
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With her caramel coloring and green eyes, American Jade del Cameron is nothing short of exotic. But don't mistake her for a hothouse flower; she's tough, brave, smart, and stubborn, as she proved during her service in France during the Great War. What's more, she's a crackerjack shot. Her temperament and talents get a workout when she agrees to investigate the death of the father of a young fighter pilot who died in the war, and to track down the young man's illegitimate half brother. It's a task that takes her to colonial East Africa, where she encounters racial and gender prejudice as well as kindness, courage, and greed. She also comes face-to-face with superstitions that blend seamlessly into reality. Arruda manufactures an intriguing backdrop for the debut of her new series, delivering both a heady sense of East Africa's cultural and geographical landscape during the early 1900s and an outspoken heroine, who proves herself gratifyingly ahead of her times in numerous ways. |
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From Rich Hall, the grouchy, deadpan, comic genius and brilliantly witty author of THINGS SNOWBALL and OTIS LEE CRENSHAW: I BLAME SOCIETY comes this wonderful new collection of stories. With his trademark humour, this is guaranteed to delight his loyal fanbase as well as drawing new readers. Rich Hall quit his job as a hurricane namer for the United States Meteorological Service eighteen years ago and hasn't looked back. Looking like a Pearl Jam roadie, Rich is a master of absurdist irony — he particularly likes to lay into Americans and life across the Pond at every opportunity. |
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After more than 30 years Anne Greves feels compelled to break her silence about her first lover, and a treacherous pursuit across Cambodia's killing fields. Once she was a motherless girl from taciturn immigrant stock. Defying fierce opposition, she falls in love with Serey, a gentle rebel and exiled musician. She's still only 16 when he leaves her in their Montreal flat to return to Cambodia And, after a decade without word, she abandons everything to search for him in the bars of Phnom Penh, a city traumatized by the Khmer Rouge slaughter. Against all odds the lovers are reunited, and in a political country where tranquil rice paddies harbour the bones of the massacred, Anne pieces together a new life with Serey. But there are wounds that love cannot heal, and some mysteries too dangerous to know. And when Serey disappears again, Anne discovers a story she cannot bear. Haunting, vivid, elegiac, The Disappeared is a tour de force; at once a battle cry and a piercing lamentation, for truth, for love. |
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