Windsor Selection Series

When his sexton finds a corpse in the wrong grave, the rector of Fenchurch St Paul asks Lord Peter Wimsey to find out who the dead man was and how he came to be there. The lore of bell-ringing and a brilliantly-evoked village in the remote fens of East Anglia are the unforgettable background to a story of an old unsolved crime and its violent unravelling twenty years later.

With The Longings of Women, Marge Piercy gives us her most involving, heartbreaking, and ultimately life-affirming novel yet. Through her three unforgettable female characters - women whom we recognize in ourselves, our friends, and our chance acquaintances - Piercy reveals a deep, often secret, part of a woman's life: the need for a place in the world that cannot be lost to the vagaries of relationships, work, or the economy. Leila Landsman has long known that her theater-director husband has affairs with young actresses he casts. But it takes the death of her best and oldest friend for Leila to confront how little is left of her marriage. Adrift with this new knowledge, she decides to investigate a subject that, as an academic expert on abused women, she might consider too sensational: the notorious case of Becky Burgess and her teenage lover, who are accused of murdering her husband. Becky Burgess grew up longing to escape the overcrowded, shabby house where her fisherman father and gentle mother raised seven children in undisguised poverty. She studies the women she sees on television: the way they speak, dress, act. She knows she's every bit as smart and pretty as they are. Once she makes the rest of the world notice, the rewards will come her way, rewards she will never, ever, willingly give up. A Becky Sharp of the malls, she seeks a way up and into the light of the media. Mary Burke does well by her ladies. As a cleaning woman to the affluent of the Boston area, she never fails to be on time, meticulous, respectful. What none of her clients know, and must never guess, is that at sixty-one, Mary is homeless. Once she lived as they do, until her husband "traded her in" and her children made lives that don't include her. To outward appearances so different, Leila, Becky, and Mary share the same longings: to be seen for who they are, to be valued, loved, but most of all, to have a physical and emotional home that can't be taken away. And as their dramas unfold, Marge Piercy probes their minds and hearts, sharing the frustration, rage, determination, and joy that thread through every woman's life. Leila, Becky, and Mary are a triumph - characters who keep us turning the pages, and linger in our minds long after their stories are told.

Disclosure is a novel by Michael Crichton, his ninth under his own name and nineteenth overall, and published in 1994. The novel is set at a fictional computer hardware manufacturing company. The plot concerns protagonist Tom Sanders and his struggle to prove that he was sexually harassed by his female employer.

Emma Litton couldn't get on with her life until she found out just what place she'd had in her fathers heart. She'd been going to school in Europe since she was fourteen, then found a job in Paris, always wondering what her famous artist father was doing in Japan or America m at their cottage in Cornwall. Even after she met Robert Morrow, the handsome gallery owner, and rediscovered her stepbrother, Christo, she still felt compelled to probe into the truth about her past. But Emma might learn too late that it was the truth about herself she had to find and that letting go is the first step to keeping love.

A drawing room comedy featuring Richard Vaisey, an English expert on Russian literature, who falls for a Russian poetess. He is reluctant to leave his wife because she has lots of money and when he finally takes the plunge he discovers, to his regret, she also has lots of imagination--for revenge.

American diplomat Payton Pleydell and his wife Sylvia are the most respected couple in Washington. Then the unexpected arrival of a Czech official threatens to bring the facade crashing down. Even after six years apart, Sylvia has not forgotten Jan Brovic, with whom she was once deeply in love. But former allies have become bitter enemies, and Sylvia must decide whether to risk everything to be with the man she loves.

From the streets of 19th-century Boston to the harsh frontier--she wove a web of deception to ensnare her man! Lovely, fiery-tempered Anna Reardon was forced to lie to get out of the street urchin's life that shamed her ... to become Karl Lindstrom's mail-order bride in the beautiful, treacherous Minnesota wilderness. Karl forgave Anna for her deceptions--but there was still one shameful, burning secret that she had to hide from him, knowing its revelation would destroy the love that had become her very life!

Rachel is an intelligent, attractive young woman trying to get continue with her life. She feels her plate is full: she is estranged from her family, has a carefully hidden and humiliating crush on her new patroness' husband, and, having thrown out a manipulating, verbally abusive boyfriend, she has a job, a really good new friend, and time to work on her dissertation: that traditionally, women worked superstition and magic into their sewing and other cloth work. Now helping in vintage clothing, an intruder brings her a perfect subject: breathtaking antique quilts, one of them deeply unusual. Unfortunately, Rachel discovers far too late that the quilt not only helps her dissertation, but has brought a determined passenger, something she had never truly believed could be real. The passenger is already acting, endangering everyone anywhere near her. Soon it is a terror, as she's faced by threats she never dreamed existed, might be used as a tool by something she cooly knew was impossible...and is occasionally interrupted and threatened during her frantic struggle by her cruel ex and the search for the original, dangerous intruder. Rachel finds true friends she hadn't realized she had rallying around her, the most constant and annoying is the exasperating, calm, apparent bear who turns out to be a friend of the family. But the her biggest horror is time, time from whenever the "intruder" is connected to, time that seems to give...it...strength, and the terribly short time, days, hours, from when her friend's children come home and get added to the crossfire...

Fearing for the safety of her missing brother, lawyer Diana Reed will do anything to get to the truth. Taking a job as a landscape architect at the last place Brad was seen — the sprawling estate where he worked as a caretaker — she prowls the strange old house determined to unlock its secrets. But each mystery Diana uncovers is more unsettling than the last, as odd visions, scents, and sounds pervade an atmosphere of dread and barely suppressed violence. And in her zealous search for answers, she may have inadvertently opened a door to something frightening and deadly that can never be closed again.

TILL DEATH DO US JOIN...Ever since they ran with the same London teenage gang Guy Curran has loved Leonora Chisholm passionately. He was a slum kid, and her parents lived in tasteful Kensington; she went to university while he made his jet-set fortune dealing drugs and sentimental, mass-produced art--but he's always been good enough for her, and once they were lovers. Of course she'll marry him in the end--he's been calling her every day for years and buying her lunch every Saturday. Then Leonora tells him she's engaged to some pasty-faced intellectual. But Guy knows she's being brainwashed by her family and friends--from her snobbish brother and her mother with pointy silver fingernails to her so-superior feminist roommate. Leonora and he belong together...If he can't have her, he'll die--or someone else will.

Again demonstrating her mastery of the romance genre, the prolific Holt ( The Captive ) depicts another heroine in distress. Davina Glentyre's cozy world rapidly distintegrates when her father, a wealthy, straight-laced Edinburgh banker, marries her new governess, the previous instructor having been accused of stealing a valuable bracelet. When Glentyre dies under suspicious circumstances, Davina is arrested for murder. The jury of Scots brings in a verdict of "not proven," leaving Davina's reputation severely damaged. Though she changes her name, Davina lives in constant fear of recognition, and decides to rejoin her dismissed governess, whose innocence she never doubted. Traveling to South Africa to reopen a school in the town of Kimberley, the two women make the journey with diamond merchant Roger Lestrange and his bride. When the latter falls ill, more than Davina's reputation is in jeopardy. Although Holt's heroine possesses the usual weakness, namely a naivete that borders on a learning disability, she is appealing, and the story, mixing danger and sentiment, should please Holt's many fans

In a British post office, injustice arrives in the guise of modernization. The mild-mannered assistant, Martin Sproale, an admirer of Hemingway must decide whether to accept it passively, or fight for what he believes, like his hero would.

The diamond industry explodes into anarchy when a mine of rare and beautiful gems is discovered in Russia, a powerful jeweler prepares to sign an exclusive rights agreement, and the international governing board seeks to establish their control.