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Orion Books
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November, 1940. I.A. Serebin, a writer from Odessa and former decorated Hero of the Soviet Union, is on his way to Istanbul following a cryptic letter from a former lover. Ostensibly there on official business for the International Russian Union, an emigre organisation based in Paris, he is drawn into a clandestine world of international spies and political players. With war in Europe drawing nearer, Serebin is recruited by the British secret services — his mission to stop the export of Romanian oil to Germany. In a race against time, Serebin's journey will take him from the glittering salons of Paris to the back alleys of Bucharest and the Black Sea ports, in a covert operation to staunch the flow of oil, the precious 'blood of victory'. |
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Frank Meyer had got out of ' the life' safely. He had put an end to his mercenary days, turned over a new leaf and settled down with his wife and children. It had been a hard decision but, encouraged by his boss and friend Joe Pike, he had walked away. Ten years later, a group of armed men break into his Los Angeles home and brutally gun down him and his family. It's a vicious, cold and professional job. The crew leave no trace behind except the bodies. But they have made one catastrophic, and almost certainly terminal, mistake — Joe Pike. Because Pike is now determined to hunt down and eliminate everyone involved in the attack, one by one. And it doesn't matter that, as he starts to investigate, he discovers that these criminals are bigger and better organised than he ever could have imagined, because they are about to learn the first rule...Don't make Joe Pike mad... |
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There is only one person who can tell Stieg Larsson's story other than himself — his lifelong companion and muse, Eva Gabrielsson. Here she tells the story of their 30-year romance, of Stieg's upbringing and early years, and how this shaped his morals and personality. She talks of his life-long struggle to expose Sweden's Neo-Nazis, of his struggle to keep the magazine he founded, EXPO, alive, his difficult relationships with his immediate family, and the joy and relief he discovered writing the Millennium trilogy. Above all, this is a love story, and shows that if there was another secret besides Larsson's own imagination and convictions, it was his absolute love for his companion and her nurturing of their privacy and shared passions. Their story is told as a series of short vignettes, and Eva Gabrielsson speaks with rare candour and dignity, inspired only by the truth as she knows it. This book is poignant in its account of two soulmates and the life they shared, and most importantly is deeply insightful into the man everyone wants to know better, and about whom so little is known. I would have preferred to have never written this book. It speaks of Stieg, of our life together, and of my life after his death, writes Gabrielsson early in her book. It was written because she alone can tell this story. |
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Lily Bard has started over in the quiet town of Shakespeare, Arkansas, where she works as a cleaning lady. But she's about to go back to where she came from, and where Lily goes, danger follows... Determined to move beyond her violent past, Lily heads to Bartley, her hometown, for her sister's Christmas Eve wedding. But there's something in the air besides festive cheer: the town's doctor and nurses have been bludgeoned to death, and Lily's detective boyfriend has followed an eight-year-old kidnapping case straight to Bartley. It just might have something to do with the murders... and with her sister's fiance. With only three days to the wedding, Lily must work fast to clean up the messy case before her sister promises to love, honour and obey a killer. |
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Over the years, Myron Bolitar has walked a tight rope between sports agent, friend, problem solver and private eye. When former tennis star Suzze T and her rock star husband, Lex, encounter an anonymous Facebook post questioning the paternity of their unborn child, Lex runs off, and Suzze — at eight months pregnant — asks Myron to save her marriage, and perhaps her husband's life. But when he finds Lex, he also finds two people he wasn't looking for: his sister-in-law, Kitty, wife of Myron's estranged brother, and her teenage son, Mickey, who is achingly familiar. But this boy that he has never met blames Myron for everything that has happened to his parents... As Myron races to locate his missing brother while their father clings to life after a savage heart-attack, he must face the lies that led to the estrangement long ago — including the ones told by Myron himself. He must also answer the questions that Mickey's arrival has thrown up. Who is Myron Bolitar really? And can he heal the damage of the past? |
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Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and coexistence. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the 'centre of the world' and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem's biography is told through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women — kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores — who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime's study, Montefiore illuminates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a unique chronicle of the city that many believe will be the setting for the Apocalypse. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice — in heaven and on earth. |
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The Straits of Gibraltar, 1940. In the heart of a storm at sea, Captain Gonzalez rescues a group of German castaways. When the storm subsides, their leader gratefully offers the captain a strange-looking emblem made of gold and diamonds, in exchange for safe passage to the coast of Portugal. |
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An Autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers' bar in the city's factory district, he will meet with the military attache from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, with war coming to Europe, and French and German operatives locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attache, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn in to a world of abduction, betrayal and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations. Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amidst an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters — Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence, last seen in Furst's The Polish Officer; the mysterious and sophisticated Doctor Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier's brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed. The Spies of Warsaw is Alan Furst's finest novel to date — the history is precise, the writing evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel — exciting, atmospheric, erotic and impossible to put down. |
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Young lawyer Georg Polger gives up a comfortable existence in Germany to work as a freelance translator in the South of France. But business in the picturesque village is far from booming, and Georg struggles to make ends meet. One day he is approached by a certain Mr Bulnakoff, who wants Georg to take over a local translation agency. The previous owner has just died in mysterious circumstances. Everything seems to be going perfectly: Georg falls in love with Bulnakoff's attractive secretary, Francoise, and takes on a lucrative project left unfinished by his predecessor, translating plans for military helicopters. But everything changes when Georg notices Francoise copying his plans. She tells Georg that Bulnakoff has threatened to harm her brother, who lives in Poland, if she refuses to do his bidding. When Georg confronts Bulnakoff Francoise disappears, and mysterious elements within the village try to hound him out. All he has left of Francoise is a picture she gave him of a church, which she told him was in Warsaw. But when a friend tells him the church is actually in New York, Georg flies to America in a desperate bid to track down Francoise, and unravel the web of deceit. Tailed from his arrival, Georg quickly realises that he is stuck between the CIA and the KGB, and further out of his depth than he can begin to comprehend. But which side was he working for? Who is the mysterious Mr Bulkanoff? And did he ever know the real Francoise? |
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Miss Gabriel Dain Leggett is young and wealthy, with a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her. They die — violently. Is she the victim of a family curse? The short, squat, utterly unsentimental Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts and finds himself confronting something infinitely more dangerous. This is the Continental Op's most bizarre case. |
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Conan the Cimmerian: he rose from boy-thief and mercenary to become kingof Aquilonia. Neither supernatural fiends nor demonic sorcery could oppose the barbarian warrior as he wielded his mighty sword and dispatched his enemies to a bloody doom on the battlefields of the legendary Hyborian Age. Collected together for the first time anywhere in the world, in chronological order, are all Robert E. Howard's definitive stories of Conan, exactly as he wrote them, as fresh, atmospheric and vibrant today as when they were first published in the pulp magazines more than sixty years ago. |
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Sookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress at Merlotte's, in her home town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. Other than being telepathic, she's always considered herself pretty normal — though she had a hard time at first, until she learned to filter out other people's thoughts. She thought life was pretty dull, but then the vamps and the weres and the shifters came out of the closet, and she met a vampire called Bill and she couldn't hear him at all... And Bill was her first love, even if he hadn't been alive since the 1860s. But then Sookie found herself all caught up in vampire politics, and betrayal, and since then her life has been anything but normal. And life in Bon Temps has never been the same. |
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Annie O'Neill has it all: a cosy Manhattan apartment, a beautiful bookshop and a network of supportive friends. But at the heart of her life is a hole — a place vacated by her father when he died in her childhood. So when a mysterious man named Forrester enters the shop and claims to be her father's oldest friend she jumps at the chance to find out more of her own past. But Forrester's not being free with the answers she needs. He's much more interested in telling her a story about a ruthless ganglord and a fifty-year-old betrayal. A betrayal that she will realise far too slowly, has something very much to do with her... |
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Daniel Ford has 30 days to live. Accused of the horrific murder of his best friend Nathan 12 years before, he has exhausted all appeals and now faces the long walk to the electric chair. All he can do is make peace with his God. Father John Rousseau is the man to whom the last month of Daniel's life has been entrusted. All the two men have left to do is rake over the last ashes of Ford's existence. So he begins to tell his story. Beginning with his first meeting with Nathan, aged 6, on the shores of a lake in 1952, through first loves, Vietnam, the death of Kennedy, and finally their flight from the draft which ended in Nathan's brutal murder. |
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John Tanner is looking forward to a weekend party with his closest friends, the Ostermans, the Tremaynes and the Cardones. But then the CIA tell him that they are all suspected Soviet agents: fanatical, traitorous killers working for a massive Communist conspiracy. Tanner cannot know who are his friends and who are his deadly enemies. |
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Agent Pendergast has become one of crime fiction's most endearing characters. His greatest enemy is one who has stalked him all of his life, his cunning and diabolical brother Diogenes. And Diogenes has thrown down the gauntlet. Now, several of the people closest to Pendergast are viciously murdered, and Pendergast is framed for the deeds. On the run from federal authorities, with only the help of his old friend NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta, Pendergast must stop his brother. But how can he stop a man that is his intellectual equal--one who has had 20 years to plan the world's most horrendous crime? |
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AYMATE OF THE DAY Jack Ryan has a man's fists, a boy's mind, and the cunning of an ex-con. Nancy Hayes has a woman's sleek moves and the instincts of a shark. Now, in a Michigan resort town, a rich man wants Jack gone and Nancy for himself. For Ryan the choice is clear: Nancy's promises of pleasure, her crazy, thrill-seeking schemes of breaking into homes, shooting guns, and maybe stealing a whole lot of money are driving him half mad. But there's one thing Ryan doesn't know yet: his new playmate is planning the deadliest thrill of all. Razor-sharp and wholly unpredictable, The Big Bounce is an Elmore Leonard classic--a sly, beguiling story of a man, a woman, and a nasty little crime. |
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Sookie Stackhouse likes living in Bon Temps, Louisiana, and she likes working as a cocktail waitress at Merlotte's. But she is having a streak of bad luck. First her co-worker is killed, and no one seems to care. Then she comes face-to-face with a beastly creature which gives her a painful and poisonous lashing. Enter the vampires, who graciously suck the poison from her veins (like they didn't enjoy it). The point is: the vampires saved her life. So when one of the bloodsuckers asks for a favour, she obliges — and soon Sookie's in Dallas, using her telepathic skills to search for a missing vampire. She's supposed to interview certain humans involved, but she makes one condition: the vampires must promise to behave, and let the humans go unharmed. But that's easier said than done, and all it takes is one delicious blonde and one small mistake for things to turn deadly... |
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An Englishman's home is his castle. Or at least it should be. But as Anthony Anscombe surveys Winchford Priory, his beautiful Elizabethan house in Oxfordshire, lurking in the village are more than one or two reminders of a life well-lived. His first wife was the hauntingly beautiful girl he married in an impulsive rush of hedonism. Amanda was never going to live up to her role as the wife of a country squire, so why does she still cast such a long shadow in Anthony's life? Sandra, the second wife, came to Anthony's rescue. Sturdy, dependable and relentlessly practical, Sandra had plans to turn the Priory into a proper family home, until that summer when it all went horribly wrong... And then there's Dita, a force of nature. Effortlessly glamorous and achingly wealthy, Dita storms through Anthony's life, organising and rearranging — particularly when it comes to previous Mrs Anscombes and their children. With the entire cast of his life roosting in the village, it's no wonder Anthony doesn't have a minute's peace. |
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1849: Bess Hardemon arrives at the grimly Dickensian Priors Heath school, little knowing that she will one day end up as an inspiring and legendary headmistress — but at considerable personal cost. 1970: Sarah Beckett is delighted to gain a place at Priors Heath — as much for the pride of her parents as for herself — but will she fit in? The plight of a nineteenth century schoolteacher, trapped by her duty to her job, is mirrored by a modern day woman's fight to escape the shackles of a broken marriage. Bess Hardemon, a tough and canny young teacher is determined to make a difference at her new school. At the cost of her own chance of finding love, Bess remains trapped by her duty, a confinement echoed a century later by Sarah, who must make her own choice between duty and her efforts to save a broken marriage. |
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