Search results for ""duckworth books""

Layer cake (n): a metaphor for the murky layers of the criminal world. Smooth-talking drug dealer X has a plan to quietly bankroll enough cash to retire before his thirtieth birthday. Operating under the polished veneer of a legitimate businessman, his mantra is to keep a low profile and run a tight operation until it’s time to get out. When kingpin Jimmy Price asks him to find the wayward daughter of a wealthy socialite who’s been running around with a cokehead, he accepts the job with the promise that after this he can leave the criminal world behind with Jimmy’s blessing. Oh, and he needs to find a buyer for two million ecstasy pills acquired by a crew of lowly, loud-mouth gangsters, the Yahoos. Simple enough, until an assassin named Klaus arrives to scratch him off his list, revealing this job is much more than it seems at first. From the glitz of the London club scene of the 1990’s to the underbelly of its criminal world, Layer Cake is the best in British crime fiction.

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How did Freudian Theory come together as a body of ideas, and how did these ideas attract followers who spread this model of mind throughout the West? Makari contextualises Freud's early psychological work amid the great changes occurring in late-nineteenth-century European science, philosophy, and medicine, showing how Freud was a creative, inter-disciplinary synthesizer whose immersion in pre-existing domains of study led to the creation of Freudian Theory. He looks at how Freud's followers built a heterogeneous movement in the years leading to 1914, at the growth of the movement, and its subsequent collapse with the departures of Bleuler, Jung and Adler. Finally, Makari examines the critical, but neglected, Weimar period, when there was an attempt to rebuild a more pluralistic psychoanalytic community. This reformation resulted in the broader theoretical reach of psychoanalysis and its greater acceptance across the Western world outside Europe, where the rise of fascism was to lead to the destruction of psychoanalysis and the culture that once sustained it.

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The touching, honest and laugh-out-loud account of what it's like to become a first-time mum after 40 Whatever your age, becoming a mum for the first time brings excitement, anxiety and numerous challenges. But how do you cope when, to top it all off, you discover you are almost old enough to be the mother of everyone else in your birth prep group? As one in five babies is born to a mum over 35, and the number of women over 40 giving birth has doubled, The Secret Diary of a New Mum (Aged 43 1/4) is Cari Rosen's timely and hilarious account of becoming a first-time mother in her 40s. Whether it's deftly side-stepping questions about your age and baby number two, weeping as younger counterparts ping back into their size ten jeans within thirty seconds of giving birth, or your doctor suddenly referring to you as geriatric, Cari approaches the shared experiences of an ever-increasing number of mothers with insight, humour and honesty.

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Set amidst the urban fantasia of Hong Kong, William Marshall's Yellowthread Street novels raise crime fiction to a high art form. Surrealistic and suspenseful, vivid in their procedural details and brilliant in their scope, they are the work of a uniquely gifted writer. "As an inspired poet of the bizarre, [Marshall] orchestrates underlying insanity into an apocalyptic vision of the future." - New York Times Book Review "Marshall's novels feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure." - TIME In the seamy Hong Bay district of Hong Kong, crimes of every shape and size were commonplace. But not letter bombs. Not till Mr Leung and Mr Ramaswamy were successively spread bloodily over the office walls. When Detective Inspector Spencer narrowly escaped becoming victim number 3, the Yellowthread Street police were grimly determined to track down the culprit – before the Special Branch got to him. But unless they could find the link between the neatly timed warning letters, the ghosts in the Chinese graveyard and the strange mission of Mr Conway Kan the millionaire, the killer would go free ... Gelignite is another tense and exciting drama from the pen of a master. Full of real police procedure, suspense and fine irony, but with whole extra dimensions of the surreal and the poignant, William Marshall's Yellowthread Street novels have no real compare. For those open to their charms, this series is a hidden masterpiece of crime fiction.

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When a flood of perfectly faked banknotes hits the market, retired art teacher Miss Emily Seeton, the Yard’s famed ‘MissEss’, is chosen to investigate a respected Geneva bank. Somehow, the forger is also mixed up in the theft of valuable paintings. But Miss S. is new to air travel – surely the names Geneva and ‘Genova’ must be the same place? Bamboozling both the crooks and the police who vainly try to keep tabs on her, innocently humming the fraudsters’ musical password, she trips gaily along the dangerous trail. Serene amidst every kind of skullduggery, this eccentric English spinster steps in where Scotland Yard stumbles, armed with nothing more than her sketchpad and umbrella!

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Miss Seeton is most embarrassed . . . Her every attempt at a portrait of little Effie Goffer has become a chilling picture of a corpse. Is Miss Seeton actually drawing a clue to a series of child murders in rural England? Scotland Yard thinks so, and wants Miss Seeton to turn from sketching . . . to catching a killer skilled in a very deadly art. Retired art teacher Miss Seeton steps in where Scotland Yard stumbles. Armed with only her sketch pad and umbrella, she is every inch an eccentric English spinster and at every turn the most lovable and unlikely master of detection.

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Trouble is brought to the doorstep of the tranquil coastal village Combe Tollbridge when new visitors arrive.

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When the body of the most popular author at a literary festival, Sir Downton Tabby, is found in a secluded part of the grounds, Hettie and her faithful sidekick Tilly are plunged into crisis as a serial killer stalks the festival.

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A witty, fast-paced thriller, with a dash of mathematics and a large dose of danger.

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When Sarah Cassells, a young British woman who has just completed her training as a chef, hears of her father’s violent death on Ibiza, she refuses to believe it is suicide. She heads to Ibiza to investigate and soon gets caught up with an art dealer; two beautiful jet-setters; a remarkable American woman who is not what she seems – and with Johnson Johnson, the mysterious portrait painter who shows up on his yacht, Dolly. As Ibiza prepares to celebrate Holy Week with the traditional processions, events become more and more macabre…

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Ex-SAS officer Tom Knight is now a 73-year-old private detective in a seaside town, with a bad leg, a taste for good weed and a morbid fear of growing old. He’s also fallen in love with Fran, a sprightly 52-year-old carer at a retirement home. The bad news is that she’s dumped him for lying about his age. So when she’s framed for the murder of three old ladies at the home he resolves to win her back by proving her innocence. His quest takes him behind the town’s veil of respectability... He even faces up to his fear of old age and dementia, by going undercover at the care home where the murders happened. But will it be enough to win back the lady of his dreams? Proving that you’re just as young as you feel, the Tom Knight mysteries combine delicious comedy with a precision-engineered plot.

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A mystery lands – literally – at Tom Winscombe’s feet, and another riotous mathematical adventure begins… Tom Winscombe and Dorothy Chan haven’t managed to go on a date for some time, so it’s a shame that their outing to a Promenade Concert is cut short when a mysterious cowled figure plummets from the gallery to the floor of the arena close to where they are standing. But when they find out who he was, all thoughts of romance fly out of the window. Just who are the Fractal Monks, and what does Isaac, last of the Vavasors and custodian of the papers of famed dead mathematical geniuses Archie and Pye, want with them? How will other figures from the past also demand a slice of the action? And what other mysteries are there lurking at the bottom of the sea and at the top of mountains? The answers lie in The Riddle of Fractal Monks.

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Community music projects always spread harmony… don’t they? When players in Stockwell Park Orchestra fear they may be getting out of touch with the community, they invite children from two nearby schools to join them for a season. Supercilious, rich Oakdean College pupils have never mixed with the rough Sunbridge Academy kids, and when things go missing and rumours spread, the situation threatens to turn ugly. DCI Noel Osmar has to tread carefully: after all, he’s off duty. Step forward, Carl the trombonist. Can music heal social rifts? Who has been stealing and why? And will the orchestra’s newly-composed fanfare turn out to be fantastic… or farcical?

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Welcome to Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And often does... A hapless gang of crooks, led by pawnbroker Harold Sneed, have managed pull off ‘the big one’: a wages snatch at a factory in Shrewsbury. Two gang members take the money back to Birmingham by train, changing at a station almost on the doorstep of Sir Humphrey of Batch Hall. It’s there that things start to unravel. The money goes missing. Misunderstanding follows misunderstanding, until it leads the crooks to Batch Hall when everyone is busy with a historical re-enactment show. Among the replica firearms is a real gun, carried by Harold Sneed with murderous intent and Humphrey in mind. Sneed is now convinced that Humphrey – an overweight former short-order cook from the Bronx – is a Mafia mobster lying low. And on top of this, he believes Humph has his money; as a result, the spectators at Batch Hall are in for more of a show than they bargained for…

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Welcome to Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And often does... Sir Humphrey has offered to play Father Christmas at the local hospital, but disaster strikes when he realises he won’t be able to buy the sack of toys he’d promised the children. Rupert, a gentleman of the road, is found asleep in an old car in the Hall’s coach house. He is scrubbed up and given a room at the Hall, where two guests are already staying: a businessman and his rather young female companion. When money goes missing from their bedroom, Rupert is accused, and Miss Wyndham, the village’s amateur sleuth, decides to investigate the matter. Meanwhile, local author Phineas Cook has come up with the idea of a resident ghost at the Hall to attract paying guests. All goes smoothly until the ghostly actors spend too long in the pub one evening and their performance descends into sword-wielding chaos. As always in Batch Magna, events somehow manage to turn out all right in the end – but in the most unexpected manner…

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In space, no one can hear you clean… When Darren’s charge-cart gets knocked off the Earth-to-Mars highway and lost in space forever, he thinks his day can’t get any worse. When Kelly sees Darren accidentally short-circuit a talking lamppost, and its camera captures her face as it expires, she thinks her day can’t get any worse. When Pamasonic Teffal, a sentient breadmaker, is sent on a top-secret mission into the depths of the internet and betrayed by her boss, a power-crazed smartphone, she knows this is only the beginning of a day that isn’t going to get any better. Join Darren, Kelly and Pam in an anarchic comic adventure that takes them from the shining skyscrapers of Singulopolis to the sewers of the Dolestar Discovery, and find out what happens when a person puts down their mop and bucket and says ‘No.’ Battlestar Suburbia will be loved by fans of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde, as well as anyone who’s ever wondered just how long someone can stay under one of those old-fashioned hairdryers.* *The answer is: a really very, very long time.

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For fans of Ed Yong, Brian Cox and Carl Zimmer: a dazzling scientific and cultural adventure through our ideas about extraterrestrial life.

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In his classic autobiography A. A. Milne, with his characteristic self-deprecating humour, recalls a blissfully happy childhood in the company of his brothers, and writes with touching affection about the father he adored. From Westminster School he won a scholarship to Cambridge University where he edited the university magazine, before going out into the world, determined to be a writer. He was assistant editor at Punch and went on to enjoy great success with his novels, plays and stories. And of course he is best remembered for his children's novels and verses featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin. This is both an account of how a writer was formed and a charming period piece on literary life - Milne met countless famous authors including H. G. Wells, J.M Barrie and Rudyard Kipling.

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Dancer, singer, gang member, cocaine addict and artist’s favourite: Betty May – aka the Tiger Woman – was a woman like no other. Born into abject poverty in Limehouse, Betty May used her striking looks and fierce street nous to become an unlikely bohemian celebrity sensation between the wars. A model and muse for artists and writers including Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Jacob Kramer and David Garnett, May elbowed her way to the top of London’s social scene in a succession of outrageous and dramatic fights, flights, marriages and misadventures that also took her to France, Italy, Canada and the USA. Tiger Woman is her incredible story in her own words, as vivid and extraordinary as the day it was first told.

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One of the most potent questions we ask about the cosmos is: are we alone? From astrobiology to exoplanets in the 'Goldilocks Zone', Jaime Green traces our understanding of what and where life in the universe could be, drawing on the long tradition of scientists, writers and artists who have stimulated research by extrapolating worlds. Bringing together expert interviews, cutting-edge astronomy, philosophical inquiry and pop culture touchstones ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Star Trek, The Possibility of Life delves into our evolving conception of the cosmos to wonder what we might find... out there.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE 2023 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2023 SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS’ CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2023 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILBUR SMITH PRIZE 2023 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NOTA BENE PRIZE 2023 –––––––––––– Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect barricades, splitting the diverse city into ethnic enclaves; each morning, the residents – whether Muslim, Croat or Serb – push the makeshift barriers aside. When violence finally spills over, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety with her daughter in England. Reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a handful of weeks, she stays behind while the city falls under siege. As the assault deepens and everything they love is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops, Zora and her friends are forced to rebuild themselves, over and over. Theirs is a breathtaking story of disintegration, resilience and hope.

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Ray Kurzweil, one of the world's leading AI researchers, innovators and futurists, offers a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilisation: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.

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Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author's grandparents – the critically acclaimed biography with never-before-seen letters detailing the affair. For readers who were swept up in Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey and Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting. A death in the family delivers Julia Parry a box of letters. Dusty with age, they reveal a secret love affair between the celebrated novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the academic Humphry House – Julia’s grandfather. So begins a life-changing quest to understand the affair, which had profound repercussions for Julia’s family, not least her grandmother, Madeline. Julia traces these three very different characters through 1930s Oxford and Ireland, Texas, Calcutta in the last days of Empire, and on into World War II. With a supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf, The Shadowy Third opens up a world with complex attitudes to love and sex, duty and ambition, and to writing itself.

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Alethea Hawthorne will not allow Measham Hall to fall into the hands of lesser men... 1665. It is five years since King Charles II returned from exile, the scars of the English Civil Wars are yet to heal and now the Great Plague engulfs the land. Alethea Hawthorne is safe inside the walls of the Calverton household as a lady's companion waiting in anticipation of the day she can return to her ancestral home of Measham Hall. But when Alethea suddenly finds herself cast out on the plague-ridden streets of London, a long road to Derbyshire lies ahead. Militias have closed their boroughs off to outsiders for fear of contamination. Fortune smiles on her when Jack appears, an unlikely travelling companion who helps this determined girl to navigate a perilous new world of religious dissenters, charlatans and a pestilence that afflicts peasants and lords alike. The Master of Measham Hall is the first book in a page-turning historical series. In lyrical prose, Anna Abney portrays the religious divides at the heart of Restoration England in a timeless novel about survival, love, and family loyalty.

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In 1993, aged twenty, Carmel Mc Mahon left Ireland for New York, carrying two suitcases and a ton of unseen baggage. It took years, and a bitter struggle with alcohol addiction, to unpick the intricate traumas of her past and present. Candid yet lyrical, In Ordinary Time mines the ways that trauma reverberates through time and through individual lives, drawing connections to the events and rhythms of Ireland’s long Celtic, early Christian and Catholic history. From tragically lost siblings to the broader social scars of the Famine and the Magdalene Laundries, Mc Mahon sketches the evolution of a consciousness – from her conservative 1970s upbringing to 1990s New York, and back to the much-changed Ireland of today.

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Did you know there are 17 possible types of symmetric wallpaper pattern? Do you know what ‘casting out the nines’ is? Or why 88 is the fourth ‘untouchable’ number? Or how 7 is used to test for the onset of dementia. Number fanatic Derrick Niederman has a mission to bring numbers to life. He explores the unique properties of the most exciting numbers from 1 to 200, wherever they may crop up: from mathematics to sport, from history to the natural world, from language to pop culture. Packed with illustrations, amusing facts, puzzles, brainteasers and anecdotes, this is an enthralling and thought-provoking numerical voyage through the history of mathematics, investigating problems of logic, geometry and arithmetic along the way.

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Reveals the mind boggling neuroscience connecting brain, body, mind, and society, by examining a range of brain disorders, in the tradition of Oliver Sacks. Identifying what makes up the nature of the human mind has long been neuroscience's greatest challenge - a mystery perhaps never to be fully understood. Award-winning author and master of science journalism Anil Ananthaswamy smartly explores the concept of self by way of several mental conditions that alter patients’ identities, showing how we learn a lot about being human from people with a fragmented or altered sense of self. He travels the world to meet those who suffer from “maladies of the self” interviewing patients, psychiatrists, philosophers and neuroscientists along the way. He charts how the self is affected by Asperger’s, autism, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, schizophrenia, among many other mental conditions, revealing how the brain constructs our sense of self. Each chapter is anchored with stories of people who experience themselves differently from the norm. The Man Who Wasn’t There is a magical mystery tour of scientific analysis and philosophical pondering, now utterly transformed by recent advances in cutting-edge neuroscience.

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A scientific and globetrotting exploration of the physics experiments changing the ways we understand our universe. Why is the universe expanding? What is the nature of dark matter? Do other universes exist? In this timely and original book, science writer Anil Ananthaswamy embarks on a global journey to some of the world’s most inhospitable and dramatic research sites to witness first-hand the audacious physics experiments conducted to answer profound questions about the nature of the universe. From the Atacama Desert in the Chilean Andes to the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope on Mount Paranal to deep inside an abandoned iron mine in Minnesota and to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, Ananthaswamy weaves together stories about the people and places at the heart of this cosmological research. While explaining the immense questions that scientists are trying to answer, Ananthaswamy provides an accessible and unique portrait of the universe and our quest to understand it. An atmospheric, engaging and illuminating read, The Edge of Physics depicts science as a human process and brings cosmology with all its rarefied concepts down to earth.

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Why would a good person commit a terrible act? Fifteen years ago, Jeannie’s relationship with a close friend ended in rape. With the rise of the #MeToo movement, recurring nightmares of the event that plagued her as a girl have returned. To process her conflicted feelings of betrayal and take back control, she resolves to face her trauma head-on by interviewing her rapist. Through their transcribed conversations and discussions with her closest friends, Jeannie's compelling memoir explores how the incident impacted both of their lives, while examining the culture and language surrounding sexual assault and rape. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is a necessary contribution to the wider conversation around sexual violence from a brave, new voice.

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We underestimate the importance of luck in our lives. We think too highly of the golfer who wins the British Open and, if he loses the next tournament, we speculate that he slacked off. Although the winner is surely an excellent golfer, good luck in how the ball bounced and how it rolled afterwards outside of the golfer's control also played an important role. An insufficient appreciation of chance can wreak all kinds of mischief not only in sports, but also education, medicine, business, politics and elsewhere. Perfectly natural, random variation can lead us to attach meaning to the meaningless. Freakonomics showed how economic calculations can explain seemingly counter-intuitive decision-making. Thinking, Fast and Slow, helped readers identify a host of small cognitive errors that can lead to miscalculations and irrational thought. In What the Luck? statistician and author, Gary Smith, sets himself a similar goal, and explains - in clear, understandable, and witty prose - how a statistical understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every aspect of our lives.

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The product of a lifetimes reflection, The Last Escaper is Peter Tunstall's unforgettable memoir of his days in the RAF and as one of the most celebrated of all British POWs. Tunstall was an infamous tormentor of his German captors dubbed the cooler king (on account of his long spells in solitary), but also a highly skilled pilot, loyal friend and trusted colleague. Without false pride or bitterness, Tunstall recounts the high jinks of training to be a pilot, terrifying bombing raids in his Hampden and of elaborate escape attempts at once hilarious and deadly serious all part of a poignant and human war story superbly told by a natural raconteur. The Last Escaper is a charming and hugely informative last testament written by the last man standing from the Colditz generation who risked their lives in the Second World War. It will take its place as one of the classic first-hand accounts of that momentous conflict.

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It is January 1941, and the Blitz is devastating England. Food supplies are low and tube stations have become bomb shelters. As the U.S. maintains its sceptical isolationist position, Winston Churchill knows that Britain is doomed without the aid of its powerful ally. As bombs rain down over London a weary Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt's most trusted advisor, is sent to London as his emissary and comes face to face with the Prime Minister himself and an attractive and determined young female driver who may not be what she seems. In Sleep in Peace Tonight, a tale of loyalty, love, and the sacrifices made in the name of each, James MacManus conjures to life not only Blitz-era London and the behind the scenes at the White House, but also the poignant lives of personalities that shaped the course of history during Britain's darkest hour.

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When journalist Jake Wolsey stumbles upon a declassified file showing Winston Churchill's interest in the ancient Etruscan civilisation his curiosity brings peril in its wake. He soon attracts the unlikely attention of alluring archaeologist Florence Chung - and that of MI6. As the two are pursued across Europe and Africa in search of the Etruscans' sacred text, danger closes in and more questions than answers arise. Are there powers in the sky modern science has yet to understand? Could the ancients predict the future? And what really explains the rise of Rome, that of Nazi Germany, the ebb and flow of history itself? In a thrilling race against time and enemies known and unknown, Wolsey fears the very survival of the West may depend on his ability to stay one step ahead of his adversaries.

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In nineteenth century Paris, the young bohemian Charles Baudelaire roams the streets. Dressed impeccably - thanks to an inheritance that is quickly vanishing - and lost in the decadences of alcohol and opium, he is about to meet one woman destined to change his life forever: the beautiful Haitian cabaret singer, Jeanne Duval. Inspiring Baudelaire's most infamous poems - leading to the banning of his masterwork, Les Fleurs du Mal, and a scandalous public trial for obscenity - Duval becomes Baudelaire's muse, the catalyst for a legacy spanning centuries. Their volatile and passionate affair explodes through the Parisian literary scene but, as the ever-more fractious world catches up with them, the strength of their love will be tested to the end. Unfolding among the bars and salons during revolutionary times, Black Venus is an intoxicating story of love and betrayal in which drugs, absinthe and lust prove the making, and the destruction, of a great poet.

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The scandalous love triangle at the heart of the Victorian art world. Effie Gray, a Scottish beauty, was the heroine of a great Victorian love story. Married at nineteen to John Ruskin, she found herself trapped in a loveless and unconsummated union. When her husband invited his protégé John Everett Millais away on holiday, she and Millais fell in love. Effie would inspire some of Millais's most haunting images, and embody Victorian society's fears about female sexuality. Effie risked everything by leaving Ruskin. She hoped to find fulfilment as Millais's wife, becoming a society hostess and manager of his studio, but controversy and tragedy continued to stalk her. Suzanne Fagence Cooper has gained exclusive access to Effie's family letters and diaries to reveal the reality behind the scandalous love-triangle. She shows the rise and fall of the Pre-Raphaelite circle from a new perspective, through the eyes of a woman who was intimately involved in the private and public lives of its two greatest figures. Effie's charm and ambition helped to shape the careers of both her husbands. Effie is a compelling portrait of the extraordinary woman behind some of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

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'Fascinating.' Telegraph Birdie Bowers is a woman with a dead man's name. Her parents had been fascinated by Henry 'Birdie' Bowers, one of Captain Scott's companions on his ill-fated polar expedition. A hundred years after the death of Bowers and Scott, she sets out to discover what really happened to them... The discovery of Captain Scott's body in the Antarctic in November 1912 started a global obsession with him as a man and an explorer. But one mystery remains - why did he and his companions spend their last ten days in a tent only 11 miles from the safety of a depot that promised food and shelter? Dead Men tells the story of two paths. One is a tragic journey of exploration on the world's coldest continent, the other charts a present-day relationship and the redemptive power of love.

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Magic is forbidden in Myrsina, along with various other abominations, such as girls doing maths. This is bad news for Gretel Mudd, who doesn’t perform magic, but does know a lot of maths. When the sinister masked Huntsmen accuse Gretel of witchcraft, she is forced to flee into the neighbouring Darkwood, where witches and monsters dwell. There, she happens upon Buttercup, a witch who can’t help turning things into gingerbread, Jack Trott, who can make plants grow at will, the White Knight with her band of dwarves and a talking spider called Trevor. These aren’t the terrifying villains she’s been warned about all her life. They’re actually quite nice. Well… most of them. With the Huntsmen on the warpath, Gretel must act fast to save both the Darkwood and her home village, while unravelling the rhetoric and lies that have demonised magical beings for far too long. Take a journey into the Darkwood in this modern fairy tale that will bewitch adults and younger readers alike.

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All is not what it seems... In the murky London gloom, a knife-wielding gentleman named Jack prowls the midnight streets with his faithful watchdog Snuff – gathering together the grisly ingredients they will need for an ancient and unearthly rite. For soon after the death of the moon, black magic will summon the Elder Gods back into the world. And all manner of Players, both human and undead, are preparing to participate. Some have come to open the gates. Some have come to slam them shut. And now the dread night approaches – so let the Game begin.

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Crisis hits Richard's rural French B&B when his redoubtable housekeeper is accused of murder. With Valérie d'Orçay at his side, their investigation leads them to a deadly scenario more tangled than knotweed.

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A crew is staying at Richard's B&B while filming at a nearby chateau. But when a beloved actor suddenly dies, Richard and Valerie go undercover to discover whether his death was really an accident.

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The first complete collection of A. A. Milne's short fiction for grown-ups, including several newly discovered stories

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After the events in Coldbay where they sealed the hell hole, Lucy is trying to learn more about it and how to save Murzzzz from eternal damnation. Yes, he’s a demon and all, but he’s also a part of the family. Lucy’s turned to her diocese for guidance but they’ve gone strangely quiet so she persuades the Rooks to drive there so they can sort this out. On the way, they realise something is incredibly wrong with a motorway service station - it’s empty except for lingering, sad ghosts and… oh no, another hell hole has opened up and sucked in a load of people. They know they need to stay until they can rescue them and close it down, but not before they’ve done everything in their collective power to rescue Murzzzz. After all, one man’s hellhole is a family of ghost-hunter’s opportunity to save their demon friend. That’s the expression, right?

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From the bestselling author of Death and Croissants and Death and Fromage comes a murder mystery perfect for fans of Richard Osman, Julia Chapman, or MC Beaton Richard Ainsworth's French B&B has been taken over by a production company shooting a historical film at the Château de Valençay. But everything grinds to a halt with the sudden passing of an actor under suspicious circumstances. To get to the bottom of things, Valérie d'Orçay and Richard offer catering services to the hastily resumed production. There they discover that the vanity, duplicity and murder of an 18th century French court is nothing compared to that of a 21st century film set, with more heads yet to roll.

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When the celebrated crime writer Agatha Crispy engages Hettie and Tilly in the search for a stolen manuscript, our feline detective duo is plunged into a world of Dickensian thieves and murderers. Does the ghost of Jake the Nipper prowl the London Streets of Kitzrovia? Will Madame Two Paws’s exhibition wax or wane? And will the secrets in the crypt of the church of St Mavis and Cucumber finally be revealed? Join Hettie and Tilly as they attempt to unravel yet another darkly humorous case for The No. 2 Feline Detective Agency.

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If you go down to the woods today, be sure of a big surprise. The Battle of Nearby Village is over, and deep in the Darkwood, Gretel and her friends journey into the hostile mountains of the north, seeking new allies in their fight against the huntsmen. There they find Gilde the Bear Witch, along with a Werewolf named Scarlett and a winged man named Hex. Meanwhile, Hansel and Daisy set off on a dangerous trip of their own to the Citadel, where they end up in the middle of a political battle for the future of the whole country. Can Gretel and her friends persuade Gilde to join forces, or at least stop fighting them at every step? Can Hansel find a way to heal the land’s divisions and make the huntsmen change their ways before disaster strikes them all? And how did Trevor the spider get hold of a wig? Discover the answers to all these questions and more in Such Big Teeth. Venture into the Darkwood in this modern fairy tale that will bewitch adults and younger readers alike.

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What strange passions seethe beneath the prosperous surface of Flaxborough town? Affable but diligent Detective Inspector Purbright is tasked with uncovering the darker underbelly of greed, corruption and crime. A classic British series of police mysteries, laced with wry humour. "Watson has an unforgivably sharp eye for the ridiculous." - New York Times "Flaxborough is Colin Watson's quiet English town whose outward respectability masks a seething pottage of greed, crime and vice ... Mr Watson wields a delightfully witty pen dripped in acid." - Daily Telegraph In the respectable seaside town of Flaxborough, the equally respectable councillor Harold Carobleat is laid to rest. Cause of death: pneumonia. But he is scarcely cold in his coffin before Detective Inspector Purbright, affable and annoyingly polite, must turn out again to examine the death of Carobleat's neighbour, Marcus Gwill, former prop. of the local rag, the Citizen. This time it looks like foul play, unless a surfeit of marshmallows had led the late and rather unlamented Mr Gwill to commit suicide by electrocution. ('Power without responsibility', murmurs Purbright.) How were the dead men connected, both to each other and to a small but select band of other town worthies? Purbright becomes intrigued by a stream of advertisements Gwill was putting in the Citizen, for some very oddly named antique items ... Witty and a little wicked, Colin Watson's tales offer a mordantly entertaining cast of characters and laugh-out-loud wordplay. AUTHOR: Colin Watson was born in 1920 in Croydon in south London. At age 17 he was appointed cub reporter on the Boston Guardian, a regional newspaper. His years as a journalist in the Lincolnshire market town proved formative, and he collected there much of the material that provided the basis for the Flaxborough novels. He won two CWA Silver Dagger awards, and the Flaxborough series was adapted for television by the BBC under the title Murder Most English. Watson died in 1983.

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