D B Carpenter

Infertile Grounds

• A plane crash deep in the north woods of Maine… • A dying man’s last words… • A genius convinced she has saved the world… “Do you have kids?” A dying man’s bizarre question abruptly ends Chris Foster’s yearly north woods sabbatical and launches him on a collision course with an unimaginable destiny. Pushing his gritty determination to the limit, he doggedly pursues the violent and reclusive genius who believes she has single-handedly solved humankind’s gravest threat. What starts as a simple quest to stop a madman evolves into a soul searching odyssey as the zealot’s skewed motives become understandable, almost noble, and a decision of mind-blowing consequence awaits.

François Cérésa

Les princes de l'argot

« Chic, il y a de l'argot dans l'air ! Le latin de la racaille. Une langue parfois morte, qui renaît sans cesse de ses cendres. Une langue jamais amorphe, toujours polymorphe… ».

Écrivains, chanteurs, ils s'appellent Bruant ou Céline, Renaud ou Boudard, sans oublier le tonitruand Michel Audiard et d'autres moins connus, tel l'écrivain Albert Paraz. Ils ont servi la langue française en se jouant d'elle, en la réinventant, offrant au plus grand public l'éclat des mots populaires.

De François Villon à la série Kaamelott, François Сérésa présente ces « Princes de l'argot ». Il le fait à sa manière, avec un style incomparable, le verbe fleuri. En remontant le temps, il nous raconte l'histoire de cette langue réinventée. Les époques défilent, les orfèvres de l'argot sont célébrés, jusqu'à aujourd'hui.

Une invitation aux plaisirs de la langue française, où le lecteur se délectera des portraits et d'un florilège de citations « pas piquées des hannetons ».

Nick Cracknell

The Quiet Apocalypse [= Island Zero]

An injured man awakens in an abandoned island resort. The phones are dead. The clocks are frozen. Piles of food sit untouched… Worse still, strange visions tell him his time may be running out. With no seeming hope of rescue he desperately searches for clues. But he soon realises he’s in a terrifying race against time just to survive…

Blaize Clement

Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

A Dixie Hemingway Mystery

Dixie Hemingway knows first-hand that many things in life are worse than a dirty litter box. Once happy as a Florida sheriff's deputy, she lost everything when senseless tragedy shattered her world. Now Dixie laces up her sneakers, grabs some kitty treats, and copes with one day at a time as a pet-sitter. Her investigations deal strictly with "crimes" such as who peed on the bed . . . until she finds a dead man face down in an Abyssinian's water bowl. With the local cops stymied—including a handsome detective who catches her eye—she decides to clip a leash on a lead or two and go sleuthing herself. Dixie soon finds out that the Abyssinian's pretty owner has vanished and left behind a shocking past, a lonely cat, and a chilling reason for Dixie to start running when she's out walking the dogs.

John Cheney

City of Spies

Four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany was preparing for war. A series of exercises were conducted simulating an invasion of West Berlin. But what if one of these operations was no exercise? In 1985, Border Troop officer Hans Brandt rises to the inner circle of the East German government, where leaders have begun to fear the country’s inevitable collapse. Hans discovers Stasi colonel Karl Scharf’s audacious plan to save the GDR—actually conquer West Berlin. Wanting to prevent a war, Hans moves to stop the invasion. But when Scharf uses a mole hunt to leverage his plan, Hans is drawn into a battle of espionage that will cost him more than he can know. Using actual secret East German invasion plans and real locations, City of Spies is a historical thriller that brings modern insight into a pivotal world era. Seen through the eyes of Hans Brandt, the struggle to peacefully end the Cold War presents a precarious balance of power, escalating tension between rival factions, and ultimately a race for personal survival. Like many world events that hinge on a few actions, City of Spies shows the peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe was anything but inevitable. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, City of Spies finds startling relevance.

Elaine Cunningham

Drowova dcera

Hvězdný třpyt a stíny

Liriel, dcera arcimága Gromfa, je trnem v oku Prvnímu rodu Menzoberranzanu Baenre i ostatním. Je nepřehlédnutelná. Pořádá honosné večírky, ráda se toulá tunely, sjíždí podzemní řeky, přátelí se s dvouhlavým drakem – a má nebývalé nadání pro magii, která nemá nic společného s Pavouci královnou Lloth. A když Liriel objeví krásy Povrchu, je snaha zkrotit ji v drowské Akademii podle všeho předem ztracenou věcí. Jenže Liriel netuší, že její naivita a nenávist spolužačky Shakti Hunzrin pro ni mohou být smrtící. Návnada v podobě amuletu, jenž je schopen zachovat drowskou magii i na Povrchu, je zároveň past, která může sklapnout každou chvíli...

Elaine Cunningham

Spletité sítě

Hvězdný třpyt a stíny

Temná elfka Liriel Baenre, která se rozhodla žít na povrchu, pokračuje ve své cestě na ostrov Seveřanů, Ruathym. Tam chce dokončit splétání runy, jež jí umožní pochopit magii povrchu a zároveň pomůže jejímu příteli, bojovníku Fjodorovi ovládnout bersekrovské šílenství, které ho stále více ovládá. Liriel proto osvobodí z podzemních kobek Přístavu Lebek pirátského kapitána Hrolfa a nalodí se na jeho koráb. Netuší však, že se řítí přímo doprostřed zničující války.

Elaine Cunningham

Poutník

Hvězdný třpyt a stíny

Rašemen... tajemný domov barbara Fjodora, země, jíž vládnou wychlaran, které své nezvyklé schopnosti skrývají za propracovanými maskami.

Shakti... drowí kněžka Lloth, která číhá ve stínech Temných říší a plane nesmiřitelnou nenávistí ke všem, kdo kráčejí po povrchu Torilu.

Liriel Baenre... drowí princezna, která se nyní musí rozhodnout, jestli se s Fjodorem vrátí do jeho rodné země. Tam bude čelit největší zkoušce odvahy a na prchavý okamžik zahlédne to. co hledala po celý život – domov.

Chris Carter

Gallery of the Dead

Robert Hunter

That’s what a LAPD Lieutenant tells Detectives Hunter and Garcia of the Ultra Violent Crimes Unit as they arrive at one of the most shocking crime scenes they have ever attended.

In a completely unexpected turn of events, the detectives find themselves joining forces with the FBI to track down a serial killer whose hunting ground sees no borders; a psychopath who loves what he does because to him murder is much more than just killing — it’s an art form.

Welcome to The Gallery of the Dead.

Lauren Chater

Lace Weaver

1941, Estonia. As Stalin’s brutal Red Army crushes everything in its path, Katarina and her family survive only because their precious farm produce is needed to feed the occupying forces.

Fiercely partisan, Katarina battles to protect her grandmother’s precious legacy – the weaving of gossamer lace shawls stitched with intricate patterns that tell the stories passed down through generations.

While Katarina struggles to survive the daily oppression, another young woman is suffocating in her prison of privilege in Moscow. Yearning for freedom and to discover her beloved mother’s Baltic heritage, Lydia escapes to Estonia.

Facing the threat of invasion by Hitler’s encroaching Third Reich, Katarina and Lydia and two idealistic young soldiers, insurgents in the battle for their homeland, find themselves in a fight for life, liberty and love.

Matthew Cornachione

Dansk Bay Hotel

Kyle Ressler is a scout for travel conglomerate Touravista. His job normally takes him to the hottest destinations on the planet. Not a bad gig. But when his latest job lands him in the remote town of Dansk Bay, Alaska, Kyle questions whether his boss has found a dud. Nevertheless, dutiful Kyle investigates the hotel, a dingy concrete monolith. Odd townsfolk and an eccentric fishing mogul raise Kyle’s suspicions about this town and its hotel. He digs deeper and soon finds himself enmeshed in a world of buried secrets dating back to WWII. But overturning the past isn’t always good for ones’ health. Soon Kyle finds himself the target of a ghost intent on fulfilling an ancient mission. A mission that Kyle might not survive.

Laney Cairo

Bad Case of Loving You

Matthew is a medical student, trying to ignore his various roommates’ wild parties and get through his classes. Andrew is his instructor, a doctor at a prestigious British hospital. They’re not supposed to be attracted to each other, but they can’t deny their undeniable chemistry. They come together with a heat that surprises them both, and through doctor’s strikes, dealing with Andrew’s teenaged son, and hospital red tape, Andrew and Matthew learn to live, and love together. Is their relationship just what the doctor ordered?

Matthew Blake is near the end of his medical degree, too busy for a relationship, or even for sex, and struggling to survive his clinical placement. Andrew Maynard is his tutor, sleep-deprived and gorgeous, determined to educate his medical students and resist Matthew.

Against a background of industrial action at the hospital, they connect, and discover that Matthew, with his cock piercing and long slender hands, understands exactly what Andrew wants and knows how to give it to him.

Adrienne Celt

Invitation to a Bonfire

The seductive story of a dangerous love triangle, inspired by the infamous Nabokov marriage, with a spellbinding psychological thriller at its core. In the 1920s, Zoya Andropova, a young refugee from the Soviet Union, finds herself in the alien landscape of an elite all-girls New Jersey boarding school. Having lost her family, her home, and her sense of purpose, Zoya struggles to belong, a task made more difficult by the malice her peers heap on scholarship students and her new country’s paranoia about Russian spies. When she meets the visiting writer and fellow Russian émigré Leo Orlov—whose books Zoya has privately obsessed over for years—her luck seems to have taken a turn for the better. But she soon discovers that Leo is not the solution to her loneliness: he’s committed to his art and bound by the sinister orchestrations of his brilliant wife, Vera. As the reader unravels the mystery of Zoya, Lev, and Vera’s fate, Zoya is faced with mounting pressure to figure out who she is and what kind of life she wants to build. Grappling with class distinctions, national allegiance, and ethical fidelity—not to mention the powerful magnetism of sex—Invitation to a Bonfire investigates how one’s identity is formed, irrevocably, through a series of momentary decisions, including how to survive, who to love, and whether to pay the complicated price of happiness.

Bea Cannon

A Small Gray Dot

It is the year 2047 and twenty-five-years-old Tennessee Murray has realized his ambition to teach and his dream of publishing a book. He is preparing to marry the love of his life and things couldn’t be better. Then one morning he steps out into foggy weather and finds the world has taken a turn for the extremely bad. In a matter of minutes, half the population of Earth dies in a horrible fashion. It’s not an ultimate war or biological disaster, and no oversized meteorite hit the planet or any other such catastrophe. It is sudden, it is deadly, and it is inexplicable. Seven and a half years later, Tennessee, now a tracker in a diminished world that is limping along, sets out to find a missing young woman and makes a discovery that sheds light on the longstanding mystery. He also learns that a finale is in store for the remaining peoples of Earth. Could the fate of the world hinge on the actions of an ex-middle school English teacher?

Liv Constantine

The Last Mrs. Parrish

**"Deliciously duplicitous. . equally as twisty, spellbinding, and addictive as Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl or Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train." — ****Library Journal (starred review)** **The mesmerizing debut about a coolly manipulative woman and a wealthy "golden couple," from a stunning new voice in psychological suspense.** **Some women get everything. Some women get everything they deserve.****** Amber Patterson is fed up. She's tired of being a nobody: a plain, invisible woman who blends into the background. She deserves more — a life of money and power like the one blond-haired, blue-eyed goddess Daphne Parrish takes for granted. To everyone in the exclusive town of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut, Daphne — a socialite and philanthropist — and her real-estate mogul husband, Jackson, are a couple straight out of a fairy tale. Amber's envy could eat her alive…

Garry Charles

Body Art

Jeff has a secret he keeps from everyone, especially his wife. Jeff likes to spend time… special time… with women he meets on the streets. But Jeff’s secrets have a way of bleeding into his personal life and his sanity begins to peel as the truth insists on being confronted.

James Hadley Chase

You Must Be Kidding

The only clue that could lead to the arrest of a homicidal killer was a golf ball button, torn from the jacket the killer was wearing, and found by the horrifyingly mutillated body of a young hooker.

There were four owners of jackets with golf ball buttons living in the city. Detective Tom Lepski of the Paradise City police checks out these jackets and suspicion falls on Ken Brandon, an insurance agent. Just when Lepski is sure he has his man, two more horrifying killings occur, and he is faced with the trickiest case he has had to solve.

Here is yet another of James Hadley Chase’s non-stop reads. Not for nothing has he been called the Maestro of thriller writers.

Max Allan Collins

Nice Weekend for a Murder

Mallory

A business trip that brings Mallory from his Iowa home to New York City has been stretched to include his playing a “suspect” in a mystery weekend at Mohonk Mountain House, the rambling upstate New York resort that almost seems to have been designed as backdrop to a murder — real or fictional. In its winding halls and unexpected nooks and crannies, avid fans to try to solve a “crime” acted out by a gaggle of mystery writers, their spouses and companions. Mallory, along with his lover, Jill Forrest, is looking forward to a weekend of fun and relaxation.

Curt Clark, the crime writer who is stage-managing this annual outing, has trickily chosen the intended “victim” — mystery critic Kirk Rath, whose magazine has become influential enough to make or break a writer’s career and whose word processor is a thinly disguised dagger kept sharp on authors’ reputations.

Author Mallory’s fictional crimes have a way of being topped by real ones, and this is no exception. Or is it? On their first night there, while Jill is incommunicado in the shower, Mallory sees what he believes to be a real murder from his bedroom window. But when he and Jill brave the snow to investigate, there is no body, no blood, no evidence of foul play. Either Mallory is the victim of a prank or this is a part of the crime enactment that Curt Clark was sneakily keeping to himself.

Mallory is not convinced, however. And then he and Jill come across evidence that the murder is no joke, and that the snowstorm rapidly cutting off the mountain house from the rest of the world is quite possibly shutting in the game-players and staff with a real killer.

Wilkie Collins

Little Novels

Tham Cheng-E

Surrogate Protocol

Finalist for the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize Landon Locke is no ordinary barista. A man of many names and identities, he has lived though many lifetimes, but his memory spans only days. Danger brews as Landon struggles to piece together reality through his fog of amnesia. A mysterious organisation called CODEX bent on hunting him down, a man named John who claims to be a friend, and women from Landon’s past who have come back to haunt him. As CODEX closes in, he finds himself increasingly backed into a corner. Battling an unreliable memory, Landon is forced to make a choice: who can he trust?