The Taxidermists’ Daughter
by Kate Mosse
THE CLOCK strikes midnight. Beneath the wind and the remorseless tolling of the bell, no-one can hear the scream… It’s 1912 in a Sussex churchyard. Villagers gather on the night when the ghosts of those who will not survive the coming year are thought to walk. And in the shadows, a woman lies dead. As the flood waters rise, Connie Gifford is marooned in a decaying house with her increasingly tormented father. He drinks to escape the past, but an accident has robbed her of the most significant childhood memories. Until the disturbance at the church awakens fragments of those vanished years.
The Janson Option
by Robert Ludlum
REFORMED from his days of covert operations, Paul Janson has set a new mission for himself. Working in partnership with champion sharpshooter Jessica Kincaid, he rehabilitates disenchanted agents and helps them create new lives outside of the violent intelligence sector. He also takes on independent assignments – for a fee, he’ll use his skills to resolve international crises. But only those that he believes contribute to the greater good. When oil executive Kingsman Helms begs Janson to rescue his wife, Allegra, from Somali pirates, Janson and Kincaid seize the opportunity. At last they can derail American Synergy Corporation’s scheme to subvert sovereign nations into wholly-owned subsidiaries. But the pirates are the least lethal threat in the violent chaos of oil-rich East Africa. When Janson and Kincaid stumble into a bewildering storm of plots and counterplots, they begin to fear that the only way to escape would be to abandon the innocent Allegra.
The Well
by Catherine Chan
A MARKEDLY-ASSURED new voice… a novel of increasing psychological suspense… its story and narrative will put many readers under a deliciously shivery spell. Sometimes the very thing you wish for is the worst thing that can happen… A drought-ridden, riot-threatened country’s sinister religious cult, a child’s unsolved murder, and a culture of surveillance. Catherine Chanter’s first novel has the ingredients of dystopian nightmare yet it’s more a straightforward thriller, albeit a sensuously written one. A strong literary page-turner.
A Spool of Blue Thread
by Anne Tyler
IT WAS a beautiful, breezy yellow-and-green afternoon… That’s how Abby Whitshand always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer’s day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. From the porch we spool back through the generations, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded moments that have come to define the family. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Fred’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the 21st century – four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly-worn Baltimore house that has always been their home…