Magna

Combining the genres of fiction, memoir, the familiar essay and theoretical speculation, The Rose Garden forms an unusual synthesis. The protagonist and narrator is a Canadian literary scholar on study leave in Germany. While there, her involvement with her books on the one hand and a love relationship on the other creates a surprising blend of life and fiction. Her readings in classical European texts forefront the question of a woman reader's response. Her involvement with her lover makes her wonder why there is so little difference between life and literature on the level of experience. This is an uncommon book that defies traditional rules of style and genre and provokes the question of what meaning literary works actually have in our lives.

Gold is up to 900 dollars an ounce and trouble is brewing in the park.

Hired by the Parish councilor of a small community in the Cotswold Hills to investigate the murder of a jolly widow, Agatha Raisin learns about the victim's penchant for keeping borrowed items in a case that is complicated by village secrets and a killer who would make Agatha a next target.

A hanged man would say anything to save his life. But what if his testimony is true? When Inspector Ben Ross is called to Newgate Prison by a man condemned to die by the hangman's noose he isn't expecting to give any credence to the man's testimony. But the account of a murder he witnessed over seventeen years ago is so utterly believeable that Ben can't help wondering if what he's heard is true. It's too late to save the man's life, but it's not too late to investigate a murder that has gone undetected for all these years.

The future of Spain is at stake. Germany and Italy have ensured that Republican forces are starved of weapons and a Franco victory now looks likely. Cristian Ferrar, a Spanish lawyer living in Paris, is a well-connected man. When Ferrar is approached by anti-Franco forces, he readily agrees asked to help smuggle arms into his homeland. Working with de Lyon - an enigmatic man of Slavic descent - Ferrar goes on a quest which will take him from libertine nightclubs in the City of Light to volatile bars by the docks in Gdansk, as Europe holds its breath.

Alex Morrow traces a wealthy businesswoman who's vanished from her Glasgow home to a little seaside town, where a dead body in the lake is only one of many clues that all is not as peaceful as it seems.

After the fall of France, Hazel, Irene and Carol are sent from the east end of Newcastle to the safety of a country village. Billeted in a grand house with a spinster and her niece, the three young evacuees' futures will be irrevocably changed by their new lives. When peace is declared, and Hazel and Irene return to the families they were forced to leave, they find Newcastle very different to the home they remembered. Mourning the people they loved, they try to leave the past behind and start again. But it's never easy to forget ...

No death could have been more welcome than Evan Morgan's, or more fitting for the Welcome Home celebrations in the village of Llanddewi. For Morgan had spent the war making money and enemies down in the Vale of Glamorgan with about equal facility. In fact, on the night, it seemed as if a whole posse of murderers had beaten a path to the door of the Manor House. It is left to the ingenuity of Sir Richard Cherrington, an eminent but slightly eccentric archaeologist with a penchant for amateur detection on a visit from Cambridge, to solve this intricate puzzle of motives and alibis.

Police detective Alex Morrow has met plenty of unsavory characters in her line of work, but arms dealer Mark Lynch ranks among the most brutal and damaged of the criminals she's known. Morrow is serving as a witness in Lynch's trial, where the case hinges on his fingerprints found on the guns he sells. When the investigation leads to a privileged Scottish lawyer who's expecting to be assassinated after a money laundering scheme goes bad, and a woman who's spying on the people who put her in jail, Morrow has her hands full.

One cold spring morning in County Cork, two fishermen find a bundle of rags floating in the Blackwater River: the mutilated corpse of a retired music teacher. His hands and feet are bound, and his neck bears the mark of garrotting wire. The Garda want to wrap this case up before the press get hold of it. But when a second man is found murdered, the body bears all the same marks as the first. And Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire fears this case carries the hallmark of a serial murderer ...

When the decaying body of a murdered woman is discovered in a suburban house, DI Wesley Peterson has problems establishing her identity. But as he digs deeper, he has another more disturbing case to investigate - the naked bodies of two teenagers have been found with shotgun wounds at the foot of a cliff. Both cases become stranger when Wesley realises they are linked to a sinister manhunt, mirroring events from the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Then a skeleton is found near the place where the teenagers were last seen alive and Wesley finally has to face a terrible truth ... and a hunt to the death.

A year on from the mysterious disappearance of Jenny Bercival, DI Wesley Peterson is called in when the body of a strangled woman is found floating out to sea in a dinghy. The discovery mars the festivities of the Palkin Festival, held each year to celebrate the life of John Palkin, a fourteenth-century Mayor of Tradmouth who made his fortune from trade and piracy. And now it seems as if death and mystery have returned to haunt the town. It is only by delving into the past that Wesley comes to learn the truth ... a truth that will bring mortal danger in its wake.

Grandmother Ruth Sutton writes to the man she hates more than anyone else on the planet: the man who she believes killed her daughter Lizzie in a brutal attack four years earlier. Ruth's burden of grief and hatred, has only grown heavier with the passing of time, and her avid desire for vengeance ever stronger. In writing to him Ruth hopes to exorcise the corrosive emotions that are destroying her life, to find the truth and with it release and a way forward. Whether she can ever truly forgive him is another matter - but the letters are her last, best hope.