Gossip columnist Ethel Lambston knew everything about everybody who was somebody, and her forthcoming book is about to expose the leading figures in the fashion world. So there are more than enough suspects when she is found murdered, her throat slashed. For Neeve Kearny, the owner of an exclusive New York boutique, the killing of one of her best customers...

Woven through all these tales are the unique histories and mythologies of the regions of Southern Italy, encompassing Sicily, Calabria, Cantania, Basilicata, Apulia and Campania. Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid evoke a Sicily populated by Cyclopes and sea monsters, while in an excerpt from The Smile of the Unknown Mariner Vincenzo Consolo depicts the island in 1860, on the frontline in...

Three bestselling Detective Chief Inspector Wexford murder mysteries in one volume: FROM DOON WITH DEATH Margaret Parsons was a predictable, ordinary woman, but now she had met a mysterious death of passion and violence for which there seemed no motive or clue... 'One of the best' - SUN A NEW LEASE OF DEATH There was no doubt in Chief Inspector...

Contains: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep ...

A cracking collection of comicmonologues, written and read by leading comedians Recorded in front of a live audience at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this fantastic anthology features a host of diverse short stories, composed and performed by a veritable Who's Who of stand-up comedians. By turns hilarious and irreverent, poignant and bittersweet, together they make up a superb selection box...

In Rendell's evocative portrayal of West London, the slums of Notting Hill Gate and the mews houses of Holland Park are not streets, but worlds, apart. When these two worlds collide, the repercussions are fatal. Guy and Leonora were childhood sweethearts, and belonged to the same criminal gang. But as the wealthy Leonora grew older, they grew apart, and Guy's...

Somewhere out there is a murderer with over twenty killings to his name - each an apparently random slaying of a woman, over a twenty-year period and all unconnnected on the police files. But Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins begins to see a pattern: he senses connections between this string of seemingly motiveless, pointless and unsolved killings. Then the murderer emerges...

Two years ago he had been a promising young novelist. Now he survived - you could hardly call it living - in a near derelict cottage with only an unhooked telephone and his own obsessive thoughts for company. Two years of loving Drusilla - the bored, rich, unstable girl with everything she needed, and a husband she wanted dead. The...

Discover the classic mystery from Dick Francis, one of the greatest thriller writers of all time 'Suspense, intrigue, what more could you want? Dick Francis at his best' 5***** Reader Review 'A dazzlingly good read. Francis writes heroes who are truly heroic, and villains so truly villainous that each encounter with them raises your temperature' 5***** Reader Review ______ Steeplechase...

A celebratory 20th anniversary edition of A landmark collection from black writers across the literary spectrum 'The fact that IC3, the police identity for Black, is the only collective term that relates to our situation here as residents ('Black British' is political and refers to Africans, Asians, West Indians, Americans and sometimes even Chinese) is a sad fact of life...

The Copper Peacock: a hideous bookmark given to Bernard, a writer, by his attractive cleaning lady, Judy. She had brought order to a hitherto chaotic life, but now the bookmark destroys all this, shattering his razor sharp sensibilities. If only she had given herself, then she might have lived... In this, and eight other landmark short stories, including the Wexford...

Perhaps more than any other book The Thirty-Nine Steps has set the pattern for the story of the chase for a wanted man. And, of the many writers who have attempted this kind of thing since Buchan, only a very few, like Graham Greene, have managed to sustain the tension in the same way. The main character is Buchan's familiar...

Erin and Darcy, answering personal ads as research for a TV show, discover a whole new New York sub-culture - adulterers, con men, the shy and frankly weird, all looking for love. And one man looking for something darker . . . A serial killer who has just got away with murder for fifteen years, and has promised himself just...

The winter before he was sixteen, amateur magician Pup made a Faustian pact and sold his soul to the devil. He wasn't quite sure what he was going to get in exchange. Pup's older sister, Dolly, is manically obsessed with her birthmark, believing it is responsible for her status as a social outcast. She becomes pathologically transfixed by Pup's dabbling...

Someone, somewhere is killing young women. And scalping them. Appointed head of the task force to catch the serial killer, tough DA Kathryn Mackay is soon caught up in the crossfire between press, TV and the police- and reporter Ricardo Sanchez who seems to know more than he should. Soon the killer is on her case too-sending cryptic taunting note;...