A New Portway Book

When Alf picked up the hitch-hiker, he seemed perfect as a stand-in for the horrific crime Alf was about to commit. But by luck William is saved from Alf's plan and someone else is killed in his place, this leads to a tangle of mistaken identity and an unsolved bank robbery from many years ago.

When Josef Vadassy arrives at the Hotel de la Reserve at the end of his Riviera holiday, he is simply looking forward to a few more days of relaxation before returning to Paris. But in St. Gatien, on the eve of World War II, everyone is suspect–the American brother and sister, the expatriate Brits, and the German gentleman traveling under at least one assumed name. When the film he drops off at the chemist reveals photographs he has not taken, Vadassy finds himself the object of intense suspicion. The result is anything but the rest he had been hoping for.

World-famous opera singer Maggie Tressider wakes up in a hospital after an accident, haunted by the certainty that she has committed a murder. Her doctor suggests that, with the help of a psychiatrist, she may be able to lay the nameless specter to rest. But Maggie chooses a very different expert to help her unearth the secrets of her past. Her commission launches private investigator Francis Killian on a hunt across Europe in search of a grave. But the trail also leads him to one Bunty Felse, a former colleague of Maggie’s, and the wife of Inspector Felse. The successful end of Killian’s search is only the beginning of a long pilgrimage—a journey that leads not only back into the past, but also to a remote corner of the Austrian Alps where death awaits.

"Edith Piaf's life is almost as famous as her work. From her birth (which she liked to tell people was in the Parisian streets, her mother shielded by two gendarmes) to her death (when her husband allegedly drove her corpse from the Cannes hospital where she died to her flat, lest her fans think that she had abandoned Paris) her life story was a rags-to-riches tale like no other." "A street singer discovered by the nightclub owner who gave her the stage name Piaf (Sparrow), she rose to become a national heroine. Friends with Charlie Chaplin, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich, she was also at various times chief suspect for the murder of her mentor, an alcoholic and a drug addict. But she always seemed to embody, and still does, something of the spirit of Paris. Following her death in 1963, forty thousand people descended on Pere Lachaise Cemetery for her funeral, and, forty years on, millions remain fans of her music."--BOOK JACKET.

Is Paris Burning? Is a 1965 book by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre telling the story of the Liberation of Paris during the Second World War. The book examines the military and political actions surrounding the events of late August 1944 around Paris and how these events unfolded. The title is taken from the question reportedly asked by Adolf Hitler following his order to destroy the city rather than let it be re-captured by the Allies. The story was adapted into a feature film by the same name in 1966. (Source: Wikipedia)

A race apart - joys and tragedies of a Jewish family.

During the Victorian era, Sally Scart, a young orphan, enters the service of an earl and falls in love with her son. But when she becomes pregnant, the social prejudices separate the couple.

Relates the joys and frustrations of life on a poultry farm in the mountains of Washington.

Peter Savage,a cold natured, lonely man marries Emily Fenton a wealthy, strong-willed woman,who strives to change his attitude of indifference and destructive effects on those who become close to him and whom he uses at first as ladders to his ambitions.An absolutely thrilling account of mountaineering and the personality struggles between himself and his fellow climbers as they attempt to challenge each other to be the first to conquer Mount Meru. Set during and just after the first world war Peter Savage tries his will and his friends to breaking point. A thrilling well written story describing his involvement in India's restless throes of its early nationalism and his final belief in people as individuals instead of rivals book