When Hedge is presented with a covert message informing him that Kolotechin, the head of the Russian security police, the KGB, is about to defect, Hedge is sceptical. Kolotechin wouldn’t defect … or would he? And matters take a different turn when several witnesses claim to have seen a man resembling Hedge lurking outside the toilet where the informer was found dead... Detective Chief Superintendent of the Yard, Simon Shard, takes great pleasure in informing Hedge of the witness statements. As leader of the Special Branch attached to the Foreign Office, Shard is well respected. Providing asylum to Kolotechin could have non-favourable repercussions, but he would be a big prize for Britain. And there was no better man to take on Kolotechin in Naples but Hedge, much to his intense dislike. He considered field work too dangerous and preferred his comfortable office job, but the Head of Security had other ideas. With Hedge on his own mission, Shard finds himself dispatched to Moscow to bring home a British scientist who was imprisoned there. As Shard and Hugh-Jones find themselves in a a battle to save their lives, the pieces of the puzzle fall together. No one could have known how the destinies of Kolotechin and Hugh-Jones would entwine… Philip McCutchan began writing in 1956. Prior to this, he joined the Royal Navy on the outbreak of World War Two as an Ordinary Signalman and ended the war as a lieutenant, having served in destroyers, aircraft carriers, cruisers, a battleships battlecruiser, an armed trawler, and an ocean boarding vessel. For three years after the war he sailed in Orient Liners on the Australian run and then for a time became an assistant master in a preparatory school. **

Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. (p. 20) Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground-breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a highly polished and self-aware lens focused on the era of one of the most mythologized anti-heroes of the American West. This revolutionary collage of poetry and prose, layered with photos, illustrations and “clippings,” astounded Canada and the world when it was first published in 1969. It earned then-little-known Ondaatje his first of several Governor General’s Awards and brazenly challenged the world’s notions of history and literature. Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid (aka William H. Bonney / Henry McCarty / Henry Antrim) is not the clichéd dimestore comicbook gunslinger later parodied within the pages of this book. Instead, he is a beautiful and dangerous chimera with a voice: driven and kinetic, he also yearns for blankness and rest. A poet and lover, possessing intelligence and sensory discernment far beyond his life’s 21 year allotment, he is also a resolute killer. His friend and nemesis is Sheriff Pat Garrett, who will go on to his own fame (or infamy) for Billy’s execution. Himself a web of contradictions, Ondaatje’s Garrett is “a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane” (p. 29) who has taught himself a language he’ll never use and has trained himself to be immune to intoxication. As the hero and anti-hero engage in the counterpoint that will lead to Billy’s predetermined death, they are joined by figures both real and imagined, including the homesteaders John and Sallie Chisum, Billy’s lover Angela D, and a passel of outlaws and lawmakers. The voices and images meld, joined by Ondaatje’s own, in a magnificent polyphonic dream of what it means to feel and think and freely act, knowing this breath is your last and you are about to be trapped by history. I am here with the range for everything corpuscle muscle hair hands that need the rub of metal those senses that that want to crash things with an axe that listen to deep buried veins in our palms those who move in dreams over your women night near you, every paw, the invisible hooves the mind’s invisible blackout the intricate never the body’s waiting rut. (p. 72) From the Trade Paperback edition.

Epub Can a man win a war when he is his enemy’s strongest weapon?Can a soldier put down a weapon once he has taken it up—even if it seeks his own life?Can a machine of death prove a match for a man who intends to live—at any price?Can a mercenary jaded by combat recognize the one thing that is worth fighting to save?Sixteen of the top writers in the science fiction field explore the tragedy and the glory of war among the stars in COMBAT SF

From beloved mother-daughter duo Mary Higgins Clark, America's Queen of Suspense, and Carol Higgins Clark, author of the hugely popular Regan Reilly mystery series, comesDashing Through the Snow, a holiday treat you won't want to miss.In the picturesque village of Branscombe, New Hampshire, the townsfolk are all pitching in to prepare for the first (and many hope annual) Festival of Joy. The night before the festival begins, a group of employees at the local market learn that they have won $160 million in the lottery. One of their co-workers, Duncan, decided at the last minute, on the advice of a pair of crooks masquerading as financial advisers, not to play. Then he goes missing. A second winning lottery ticket was purchased in the next town, but the winner hasn't come forward. Could Duncan have secretly bought it?The Clarks' endearing heroes -- Alvirah Meehan, the amateur sleuth, and private investigator Regan Reilly -- have arrived in Branscombe for the festival. They are just the people to find out what is amiss. As they dig beneath the surface, they find that life in Branscombe is not as tranquil as it appears. So much for an old-fashioned weekend in the country. This fast-paced holiday caper will keep you dashing through the pages!

Set against the backdrop of post–World War II America, this sweeping novel follows three very different families as they search for love and fulfillment in Long Island’s fabled gilded ghetto, the Five Towns In 1950, the Five Towns are a burgeoning suburban destination for those in search of a better life. Arthur Freundlich is one of those pioneers. With the recent influx of Jews to Long Island, the former GI has relocated his mother, pregnant wife, and three-year-old daughter from a tiny apartment in Queens to a split-level house in Cedarhurst—a world apart from the cramped quarters of Brooklyn and Queens that Arthur knew.   In his wealthy, insulated corner of this formerly WASP-y small-town community, Harvard-educated John Dodge lives with his wife and their son Christopher, who causes a scandal when he falls in love with beautiful, Jewish Melanie Miller.   A black woman struggling to raise her family in turbulent...

The iconic start to the timeless, Newbery-winning series from Cynthia Voigt. “It’s still true.” That’s the first thing James Tillerman says to his older sister, Dicey, every morning. It’s still true that their mother has abandoned the four Tillermans in a mall parking lot somewhere in the middle of Connecticut. It’s still true that they have to find their own way to Great-aunt Cilla’s house in Bridgeport. It’s still true that they need to spend as little as possible on food and seek shelter anywhere that is out of view of the authorities. It’s still true that the only way they can hope to all stay together is to just keep moving forward. Deep down, Dicey hopes they can find someone to trust, someone who will take them in and love them. But she’s afraid it’s just too much to hope for....

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin return to the seas where they first sailed as shipmates. But Jack is now a senior Captain commanding a line-of-battle ship, and this is a longer, harder war than the dashing frigate actions of his early days.

    A deposed South American dictator has hidden his entire fortune of cash, stocks and jewellery inside twelve stones of a castle. A fiery revolutionary and a British master criminal are both after the fortune but neither knows which stones contains the valuables.

This edition of Michael Wood's groundbreaking first book explores the fascinating and mysterious centuries between the Romans and the Norman Conquest of 1066. In Search of the Dark Ages vividly conjures up some of the most famous names in British history, such as Queen Boadicea, leader of a terrible war of resistance against the Romans, and King Arthur, the 'once and future king', for whose riddle Wood proposes a new and surprising solution. Here too, warts and all, are the Saxon, Viking and Norman kings who laid the political foundations of England - Offa of Mercia, Alfred the Great, Athelstan, and William the Conqueror, whose victory at Hastings in 1066 marked the end of Anglo-Saxon England. Reflecting recent historical, textual and archaeological research, this revised edition of Michael Wood's classic book overturns preconceptions of the Dark Ages as a shadowy and brutal era, showing them to be a richly exciting and formative period in the...

In James Ellroy’s first novel, a PI investigates a deadly conspiracy at one of Los Angeles’s most exclusive country clubs It would be a stretch to call Fritz Brown a detective. A PI in name only, he washed out of the police force at twenty-five, and makes a cash living doing under-the-table repo work for a sleazy used-car dealer. It’s an ugly job, but Fritz is not one to say no to easy money. That doesn’t mean he won’t take a case now and then. A caddy visits his office, asking Fritz to dig up dirt on the golf-nut who’s dating his sister. Convinced by the caddy’s suspiciously fat wad of bills, Fritz agrees to investigate, hoping for a chance to meet the girl. Instead he finds himself embroiled in a tangled world of country club intrigue, where wealth can buy innocence and murder is not half as rare as a hole-in-one.

This classic and controversial biography of Scotland's National Bard offers an unvarnished chronicle of the 18th century poet's life.First published in 1930 to an unprecedented storm of protest, Catherine Carswell's The Life of Robert Burns remains the standard work on its subject. Widely revered as Scotland's greatest poet, Burns's devotees were so upset by its contents that Carswell famously received a bullet in the mail, with instructions for its use. Carswell deliberately shakes the image of Burns as a romantic hero, exposing the sexual transgressions, drinking bouts and waywardness that other biographies chose to overlook. But Carswell's real achievement is to bring alive the personality of a great man: passionate, hard-living, generous, melancholic, morbid and, above all, a brilliant and inspired artist."Catherine Carswell's The Life of Robert Burns is still, apart from Burns' own account, the best."—Alasdair Gray, The...

This New York Times best seller by Helen Hooven Santmyer recounts the lives of a group of women who start a study club in a small town in southwestern Ohio in 1868. Over the years, the club evolves into an influential community service organization in the town. Numerous characters are introduced in the course of the novel but primary are Anne Gordon and Sally Rausch who, as the book begins, are new graduates of the Waynesboro Female Seminary. The novel covers decades of their lives—chronicling the two women's marriages and those of their children and grandchildren. Santmyer focuses not just on the lives of the women in the club, but also their families and friends and the politics and developments in their small town and the larger world.In this longest and most ambitious of Santmyer's books, there is—as with all of her previous work—a poignant sense of a past made present again through an acute sensibility, of human life and experience as somehow...