Paragon

It is 1905. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keep loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over seventy years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold they key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.

When Lisa Somers becomes a tour guide at the United Nations, she is following her desire to escape from the shadow of her father's fame as a radio commentator and find herself as an individual.

It is a find of inestimable value for Karen Holloway. The battered manuscript she holds in her hand—written in the nineteenth century and bearing the mysterious attribution "Ismene"—could prove a boon to the eager young English professor's career. But Karen's search for the author's true identity is carrying her into the gray shadows of the past, to places fraught with danger and terror. For the deeper she delves into Ismene's strange tale of gothic horror, the more she is haunted by the suspicion that the long-dead author was writing the truth . . . and that even now she is guiding Karen's investigation, leading her to terrible secrets hidden behind the cold walls of houses of stone.

This turns out to be a sequel to Isvik, which I thought was overlong and with a weak and unbelievable plot. As with Isvik, the characters are poorly drawn, and about the only interesting bit in the whole 421 pages are when our hero flies a Hercules cargo plane off an ice floe . It is Boys' Own Paper , read down the middle of the page stuff , which by and large would insult the intelligence of a 9 year old , and not worth wasting your time on, even in this peculiar post-coronavirus world we live in

Eccentric Jarvis lives in a cumbling schoolhouse overlooking the tube line, compiling his obsessive history of the Underground. A group of misfits are also drawn towards his strange house: Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper who finds his terrifying thrills on the tube; and enigmatic Axel, whose deadly secret casts a shadow over all their lives. Damaged, dispossessed, outcasts, they are brought together in violent and unforeseen ways by London's dark and dangerous underground system.

Money was tight in the farming communities around Fellburn in the 1880s, so when Hector Stewart announced to his children that he was to marry Moira, a wealthy distant relative, it was Daniel the youngest who guessed the purpose of the union.

The first novel in the beloved Fairacre series, Village School introduces the remarkable schoolmistress Miss Read and her lovable group of children, who, with a mixture of skinned knees and smiles, are just as likely to lose themselves as their mittens. This is the English village of Fairacre: a handful of thatch-roofed cottages, a church, the school, the promise of fair weather, friendly faces, and good cheer -- at least most of the time. Here everyone knows everyone else's business, and the villagers like each other anyway (even Mrs Pringle, the irascible, gloomy cleaner of Fairacre School). With a wise heart and a discerning eye, Miss Read guides us through one crisp, glistening autumn in her village and introduces us to a cast of unforgettable characters and a world of drama, romance, and humor, all within a stone's throw of the school. By the time winter comes, you'll be nestled snugly into the warmth and wit of Fairacre and won't want to leave.

Roman um die Leiden einer tiefen Liebe unddas Porträt einer wirklich nutzlosen Person, die trotz aller Schönheit nur Leid insLebenaller bringt, die sie kennen.

The Pelican Brief is a legal-suspense thriller by John Grisham, published in 1992 by Doubleday. It is his third novel after A Time to Kill and The Firm.

The Communist party is dead; the ruble is worthless. As Moscow collapses around Arkady Renko, he escapes to Germany only to find the Russian mafia already on hand, enjoying the country's good beer, driving BMWs through the Brandenburg Gate, and searching murderously for Investigator Renko.

Inspectors Hannasyde & Hemingway #8 London is the scene for a card party given by a social-climbing hostess. Suddenly, the seemingly civilized game of Duplicate Bridge is interrupted by a double murder, both victims murdered by the same sinister method, strangled with picture wire. The crimes seem identical, but were they carried out by the same hand? And, what was the connection between the first, a mysterious man of the world, and the second, an ambitious widow? Inspector Hemingway has his work cut out for him, and the odds of solving this crime are stacked up against him. Things become even more complicated when Miss Beulah Birtley, the fiancée of the inspector's young friend Timothy Kane, becomes Hemingway's prime suspect. Kane is determined to prove the lady's innocence--but when he begins digging into her past, he finds it's more than a little bit shady... That morning, Miss Beulah bought the weapon. Before supper, she had spit out her hatred for the victim in poisonous--and public--words. And at the party, she was the last to see him alive. They found him slumped in a chair-his handsome head lolling forward on his well-cut dinner jacket--his florid face hideously distorted. A horrible death, observed the Inspector. But very simple for a young lady like Beulah to arrange... Mrs. Haddington, the second victim, is found strangled in the exact same spot where one of her daughter's many suitors had also been strangled. Fortunately, the first-rate detective doesn’t miss a trick.

From Goodreads: Sid Halley, an injured jockey, becomes a private eye and carries out some work for his father-in-law, who believes a man is trying to financially ruin Seabury racecourse, so that it can be sold to property developers.

It's summer 1955 and three people who were wartime friends are appalled to find they are fellow travellers on a small, old British passenger liner on the ten-week round-Africa run. Elinor Mackenzie, widowed during the war, is now determined to make a new life for herself. Dr Paddy Brown is sailing around Africa to convalesce from the polio that has ruined both his intended marriage and his soaring medical career. George Ashden, ex-GP, is travelling to Rhodesia. Recently widowed, he is still haunted by his unhappy marriage—and the memory of Elinor in 1945. It is only in the Suez Canal that Paddy finally discovers the secret which Elinor has known since Genoa. And in the burning heat of the Red Sea his action forces the three old friends into the inescapable proximity of passengers in the same class. Swinging between dark, bombed wartime London and the brilliantly sunlit decks of the liner, The Africa Run is a memorable and evocative love story.

From Goodreads: "Round the market square the life of Caxley revolved, from horse-drawn drays to the noisy new motors and the aeroplanes which the young men of Caxley longed to fly, from the coronation of King Edward VII to the last flowering of the Empire, ending on the muddly battlefields of the Somme..For Sep it was the end of an era; for Bertie and Kathy, the beginning of happiness; and for young Edward, tasting his first glass of wine, there was a world of tomorrows."

January 1987. Alix Bowen has moved away from London and her old friends Liz and Esther to South Yorkshire. Regularly visiting a serial killer in a high-security prison, her natural curiosity in his motives and character transforms into obsession as she begins to look to the murderer for answers about human nature and herself. Meanwhile, now in their fifties, Liz, Esther and their friends come to question the society they live in more than ever as they navigate life in eighties London. The second in a trilogy following on from The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity sees Margaret Drabble return with her brilliant and dark wit in this bold, generous and incisive portrait of modern Britain.

“Life has taken Rebecca far from her humble start in a weaver's cottage in Kidderminster. But although she has found love and comfort with her husband, Francis, it has meant they are both banished from the town that raised them. Instead they must raise their family - and a new business in the bustle of the capital. But when a death finally draws them home to Worcestershire, they find the landscape unchanged, but the poverty increased. Amid the smoke of the factories and the clatter of machinery there is also the growing murmur of unrest as the workers search for a way to express their discontent. For Rebecca, Francis and their young family it means being torn between family duty and sympathy for the weavers' plight. And while they have a dream for the future, will it be strong enough to survive the turmoil ahead?” –Publisher

Inspectors Hannasyde & Hemingway #6 'Tis the season--to be dead... Resigned to spending Christmas at Lexham Manor, Mathilda Clare wasn't sure what she dreaded most--the foul temper of Nat Herriard, the filthy-rich old Scrooge who owned the place, or the sweetness-and-light of his brother, Joseph. Joseph had concocted a guest list brilliantly headed for mayhem... acid-tongued young Stephen, his sly sister Paula, and Nat's sharp-dealing partner, with a finger in some strange pies. "There'll be murder before we're through," Mathilda laughed. And she was absolutely right. But it is no ordinary Christmas, when the holiday party takes on a sinister aspect when the colorful assortment of guests discovers there is a killer in their midst. The owner of the substantial estate, that old Scrooge Nathaniel Herriard, is found stabbed in the back, and the six holiday guests find themselves the suspects of a murder enquiry. For Inspector Hemingway of Scotland Yard, 'tis the season to find whodunit. Whilst the delicate matter of inheritance could be the key to this crime, the real conundrum is how any of the suspects could have entered the locked room to commit this foul deed. The investigation is complicated by the fact that every guest is hiding something--throwing all of their testimony into question and casting suspicion far and wide. The clever and daring crime will mystify readers, yet the answer is in plain sight all along....

Her name is Orfamay Quest and she's come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas to find her missing brother Orrin - or that's what she tells PI Philip Marlowe, offering him a measly 20 bucks for the privilege. Before long he wishes he wasn't so charitable as the trail leads to luscious movie starlets, uppity gangsters, suspicious cops and corpses with ice picks jammed in their necks...

In a class by itself. Unputdownable' Sunday TimesOne of the most celebrated thrillers ever written, The Day of the Jackal is the electrifying story of an anonymous Englishman who in, the spring of 1963, was hired by Colonel Marc Rodin, Operations Chief of the O. A. S., to assassinate General de Gaulle. The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man. One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.