Once rumored to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny, Vera Atkins climbed her way to the top in the Special Operations Executive, or SOE: Britain’s secret service created to help build up, organize, and arm the resistance in the Nazi-occupied countries. Throughout the war, Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored the agents for the SOE’s French Section, which sent more than four hundred young men and women into occupied France—at least one hundred of whom never returned and were reported “Missing Presumed Dead” after the war. Twelve of these were women and among Atkins’s most cherished spies. When the war ended in 1945, she made it her personal mission to find out what happened to them and the other agents lost behind enemy lines, tracing rigorously their horrific final journeys. But as the woman who carried out this astonishing search appeared quintessentially English, Atkins was nothing of the sort. As we follow her through the devastation of postwar Germany, we learn Atkins herself covered her life in mystery so that even her closest family knew almost nothing of her past.

In A Life in Secrets Sarah Helm has stripped away Vera Atkins’s many veils. Drawing on recently released sixty-year-old government files and her unprecedented access to the private papers of the Atkins family, Helm vividly reconstructs a complex and extraordinary life.

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Castaways between the stars...

Trapped in the confines of their fragile lifeship, a tiny band of aliens and humans faces the awesome challenge of survival after the mysterious explosion of a giant spaceship.

Giles Steel, a member of Earth's master race, assumes responsibility for erupting tempers, the dwindling food supply...and the saboteur whose ugly work has already begun!

About the Author

Harry Harrison is the author of "Deathworld," "Make Room! Make Room!" (filmed as "Soylent Green"), the popular Stainless Steel Rat books, and many other famous works of SF.

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Roger Cortland came to the Orbital Complex to continue his life's work in virtual reality, Marissa Correa to observe this Utopian society up close, and Jhana Meniskos to student the "Orbital Park," the station's biodiversity preserve. But no utopia is safe—from corruption, from sabotage, from corporate greed. And when this "perfect" world begins to unravel, all three will have to fight to protect their work—and their lives! Writer Michael Bishop says: "An exhilarating intellectual tour of both an amazing orbital habitat and a dizzying complex of ideas."<

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Lesbian: Paranormal The Illusionist Series - Book III - Yemaya, the Illusionist, and her journalist partner, Dakota, find themselves embroiled in a search for the person responsible for the rape and torture of a young Carpi woman attending a university in the States. When they decide to visit a local nightclub for "women only", they find the owner and her employees unusual. Dakota feels mysteriously attracted to one of the clientele while Yemaya recognizes a kindred spirit in Lilith, the club's owner. Spiritual ancestors, missing whores, a sadistic exporter and new acquaintances lead the two lovers into an adventure of biblical proportion. Lilith! She was a demoness, as old as humanity itself. Now, the owner of a "women's only" nightclub and part owner of the Sisterhood, a small group of whores who have banned together to create a better life for themselves, it was her job to protect the women who were putting so much trust in her. When a local pimp decides to eliminate his competition Lilith and her two demon partners want revenge and no one knows better how to exact it than demons. This is a revelation of the past, the present and the events that forever changed the course of human history.

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Romance/Suspense/Thriller. 71388 words long.<

SUMMARY: When cleaning lady Lily Bard discovers the dead body of her nosy landlord, her plan of starting a quiet new life may end in her death.<

SUMMARY: When Lily stumbles upon the well-built corpse of a local body builder-his neck broken by a barbell-the town's underlying racial tension begins to boil over. The white victim was somehow connected to two unsolved murders of black residents of Shakespeare-and a dogged policeman is determined to stop the killing. But it is Lily herself who may have to decide whether to stay and fight for justice, or run away one more time.<

SUMMARY: Determined to move beyonde her violent past, Lily heads to her hometown of Bartley for her estranged sister's Christmas Eve wedding. But there is something in the air besides holiday cheer - murder. The town's doctor and nurse have been bludgeoned to death - and Lily's detective boyfriend has followed an eight-year-old kidnapping case straight to Bartley. It just might have something to do with the murders. And her sister's widower fiancé. With only three days before the wedding, Lily must work fast to clean up the messy case before her sister promises to love, honor, and obey a killer.<

SUMMARY: Shakespeare, Arkansas, is home to endless back roads, historic buildings, colorful residents--and the occasional murder. It is also home to Lily Bard, the local karate expert/cleaning woman with a particular knack for finding skeletons in closets. But when the local woman of ill repute is found murdered, being familiar with her dirty laundry could make Lily the next Shakespearean to die.<

SUMMARY: Cleaning woman and karate expert Lily Bard is a woman with a complicated past. Trying her best to cope with her terrifying memories and horrible nightmares, she decides to join a weekly group therapy session in her hometown of Shakespeare, Arkansas. At first, Lily can hardly believe the number of her fellow Shakespeareans that share her life experiences. As it turns out, the group members' feelings aren't the only things that need sorting out -- they assemble for a session and find a woman dead, killed in bone-chilling fashion and deliberately left on display to send a twisted message. Who would commit such horrendous crime, and who is the intended recipient of the message?Before long, Lily becomes embroiled in this disturbing murder and its aftermath, one in which the brutal killer's motives are entirely unclear. The truth is, the situation has dredged up more than a few of her own terrible secrets, and she may not be able to rest until she can untangle the who and why of this terrible crime. But can she accomplish this before the killer strikes again, and before her nightmares send her over the edge? Shakespeare's Counselor is the most complex and absorbing installment yet in Charlaine Harris's engaging, original, and more than slightly dark mystery series.<

From School Library Journal

Grade 7–10—For as long as she can remember, Rachel has lived a quiet life on The Property. Following her father's disappearance and assumed death in a war, her mother has been working as a live-in domestic for Ms. Moore, an orchid grower. But now that she's older, Rachel is consumed with questions about the Line, an invisible border that runs near the greenhouse at the back of The Property, separating the Unified States from Away. It is only when she receives a mysterious message from beyond the border that she begins to learn about her country's true history and the parts her parents played during the War. Hall's first novel gets off to a slow start, and the somewhat convoluted plot and two-dimensional protagonists may lose readers at the beginning. The writing relies heavily on overly long descriptive passages rather than allowing character development and dialogue to move the plot forward. For more engaging dystopian novels, suggest Lois Lowry's The Giver (Houghton, 1993) and Michael Grant's Gone (HarperTeen, 2008).—Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK
(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From Booklist

In this futuristic debut, Rachel lives with her widowed mother, who is a housekeeper on the Property, an estate that borders the Line, a protective barrier that runs along the U.S. border. After a hostile force, the Korusal, blasted the area with atomic bombs, the Line has been rigidly maintained to keep out the Others: people who were trapped in the bombs’ fallout. Rachel is intensely curious about what life is like in the Away, beyond the Line, and when she finds a message from an Other pleading for help, she jumps into action. Her efforts trigger a series of events that not only compromise everyone on the Property but also reveal dangerous secrets. Hall nicely embeds the history of this repressive future world in a tense narrative that will leave readers intrigued with the mysterious Away. Rachel is an appealing character, and her young voice and the straightforward language make this a good choice for introducing young readers to the science-fiction genre. The abrupt cliff-hanger ending will create demand for the next book in the series. Grades 5-8. --Lynn Rutan

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Self-reflective mirrors looking for their own reflections. Towns that migrate to the moon. Prisoners of elaborate dungeons and gigantic miniature solar systems. Robots, ghosts, rascals, explorers, troubadours, apemen and yetis. All are present in the multiverse of inversion and invention that is Link Arms with Toads! Rhys Hughes is a unique figure in contemporary fiction whose speculative whimsicality is not so much balanced as trampolined by tensile prose and puckish pensiveness. Link Arms with Toads! forms the ideal introduction to his work.

About the Author

Rhys Hughes was born in 1966 in Cardiff but grew up in the seaside town of Porthcawl. He began writing at an early age but his first publications were chess problems and mathematical puzzles for newspapers. He sold his first short story in 1992 and his first book, Worming the Harpy, was published in 1995. Since then he has embarked on a mammoth project of writing exactly 1000 linked 'items' of fiction, including novels, to form a gigantic story cycle. Many of these 'items' have appeared in journals and anthologies around the world, and his books have been translated into Spanish, French, Greek, Portuguese, Russian and Serbian. His work has attracted attention for its originality of ideas, ingenuity of plotting and rich playfulness of his language.

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From the war torn steppes of Russia, from the slopes of Monte Cassino, the stunned, bloody remnants of Hitler's armies were gathered to fight the last battle of the German Reich - the battle of the Western Front. And as the Allies advanced upon Paris, the war erupted into its most ruthless, most savage and cruel phase. Across the scarred, corpse-strewn landscape of northern France, the men of the Panzer tank corps retreated - fighting a suicide action as they went

About the Author

Born in 1917 in Fredensborg, Denmark, Sven Hassel joined the merchant navy at the age of 14. He did his compulsory year's military service in the Danish forces in 1936 and then, facing unemployment, joined the German army. He served throughout World War II on all fronts except North Africa. Wounded eight times, he ended the war in a Russian prison camp. He wrote LEGION OF THE DAMNED while being transferred between American, British and Danish prisons before making a new life for himself in Spain.

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