Danger and violence have always been part of Sue Dalston’s East End
upbringing. Unloved by her mother, abused by her father, and brutalised
throughout her entire marriage, she smashed her husband's skull in a
final act of desperation. All that keeps her sane is knowing that she’s
done it to protect her four children. At last, they are safe from
harm. When she is celled up with murderess Matilda Enderby, their fates
become inextricably linked. And no one - least of all Sue - could have
predicted the consequences. Views: 59
Excitement abounds when the revolving door of life brings fresh faces and hilarious new developments to the residents of 44 Scotland Street.Things are looking up for seven-year-old Bertie Pollock. The arrival of his spirited grandmother and the absence of his meddlesome mother--who is currently running a book club in a Bedouin harem (don't ask)--bring unforeseen blessings: no psychotherapy, no Italian lessons, and no yoga classes. Meanwhile, surprises await Scotland Street's grown-ups. Matthew makes a discovery that could be a major windfall for his family, but also presents a worrisome dilemma. Pat learns a secret about her father's fiancée that may shake up her family, unless she can convince the perpetually narcissistic Bruce to help her out. And the Duke of Johannesburg finds himself in sudden need of an explanation--and an escape route--when accosted by a determined guest at a soirée. From the cunning schemes of the Association of Scottish Nudists... Views: 59
In the throes of the Cold War, the Soviet Union engineers the financial collapse of the West. The world financial market has become unbalanced. Nations in South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe are trillions of dollars in debt, and a default by any one of them could start a domino effect that would eventually topple the economies of America and Europe. Across the Western hemisphere, economists such as Tom Pike are devising a brilliant plan to head off the collapse. The situation is dire, but with transatlantic cooperation there should be time to stave off disaster. But something is not as it seems. Before long, Tom realizes that the economic turmoil was deliberately created. The culprits are in Moscow, where a plot is in motion to totally destabilize the Western economy. Now Tom must stop the scheme before the dollar collapses. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Brian Freemantle including rare photos from the author's personal collection. Views: 59
Detroit private investigator Amos Walker has accepted a missing-persons case. Neil Catalin, a video entrepreneur, disappeared after watching "Pitfall", a Dick Powell potboiler that features a smoldering beauty, a hormone-driven private eye, and a murderously jealous lover. For Walker, the clues will be found somewhere among those black-and-white film images--only the truth he finds will be as real and ugly as the darkest recesses of a killer's mind.Amazon.com ReviewBreak out the beer and bar snacks, because Detroit's favorite private detective--Amos Walker--is back after a seven-year hiatus. Loren Estleman personifies the term "professional writer"--he writes everything from historical novels to westerns with the same sure hand. But he's at his best getting under Walker's tough, prickly hide, using him to show what life in Detroit does to its inhabitants. This outing is a pure noir gem--a black and white movie classic in a book which in fact deals with a man obsessed with old gangster films. Previous Walkers available in paperback include City of Widows, Sugartown. From Library JournalDetroit p.i. Amos Walker returns after a lengthy hiatus. As he investigates the disappearance of a businessman obsessed with gangster movies, Amos finds movie-type suspects: a cold wife, a luscious mistress, and a deceitful business partner. Classic work.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Views: 59
Still recuperating from her father's death and her mother's recovery from alcohol addiction, geologist and amateur sleuth Emily "Em" Hansen is out of work and unhappily whiling away her time on her family's Wyoming ranch. So when her former boss, oil millionaire J.C. Menken, asks Em for help—and offers to find her a job if she does—she has no choice but to accept.J.C. wife Miriam died a mysterious death—and his teenaged daughter Cecelia was the only witness. But a traumatized Cecelia can't remember anything about the incident, and can't seem to get on with her life. J.C. wants Em to help his daughter get back on track—but will he want to hear the shocking truths that Em uncovers about his deceased wife and the real reason for her untimely death? Views: 59
Even a robot dog can sniff out trouble...USAF Lieutenant Samantha Spade is in the heat of the west Texas desert testing a dog-like robot for military use, when the device leads her and her team to a pick-up truck. The driver comes at them with a gun-and is shot in self-defense by Sam's friend. And then a gruesome discovery is made: three human heads in a cooler in the back of the truck.Because the dead man was on the FBI's most wanted list, Sam stands to get a hefty reward. Too bad the technology to keep her shady ex-husband from sniffing out cash has yet to be invented. His appearance, along with frightening issues from her boyfriend's past, make it hard to tell just who is responsible for the pipe-wielding thug who attacks her. All Sam knows is that her luck has taken a doggone turn for the worse... Views: 59
Everyone knows the Frankenstein monster was played by Boris Karloff. His portrayal is so famous that the play Arsenic and Old Lace was filled with Karloff/monster jokes—even when the part of the monstrously deformed villain was played by another actor. But before Karloff's memorable portrayal, another famous 1930s Hollywood icon, Bela Lugosi, tested for the part of the monster.The screen test footage was lost for decades, until Valentino, that never-say-die film archivist, gets a hot tip about the whereabouts of the incriminating (for really bad, heavily accented acting) footage. But it comes with a price far greater than the money he'll have to pay. Someone would kill to get that reel of film, and that makes Valentino a mortal obstacle who would rather not die for art. People have already been murdered for the film, and Val doesn’t want to push his luck—but, boy, that reel is too good to let go.Enter a crew of steampunk fans. Loving the arcane strangeness that is Valentino’s life—not to mention the completely glam prospect of seeing the original filmic Count Dracula as the Frankenstein monster—they will find a way to save Valentino and Lugosi's infamous screen test. Or if they can’t do that, have a great party anyway. Val just hopes it's not a wake. Views: 59
Brad Thor, master of suspense and #1 New York Times bestselling author is back with his highest-voltage thriller to date in which Navy SEAL turned covert Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath must race to locate an ancient secret that has the power to stop militant Islam dead in its tracks. June 632 A.D.: Deep within the Uranah Valley of Mount Arafat in Mecca, the Prophet Mohammed shares with his closest companions a final and startling revelation. Within days, he is assassinated. September 1789: U.S. Minister to France Thomas Jefferson, who is charged with forging a truce with the violent Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast, makes a shocking discovery—one that could forever impact the world’s relationship with Islam. Present day: When a car bomb explodes outside a Parisian cafÉ, Scot Harvath is thrust back into the life he has tried so desperately to leave behind. Saving the intended victim of the attack, Harvath becomes party to a perilous race to uncover a secret so powerful that militant Islam could be defeated once and for all. But as desperate as the American government is to have the information brought to light, there are powerful forces determined that Mohammed’s mysterious final revelation continue to remain hidden forever. What Jason Bourne was to the Cold War, Scot Harvath is to the War on Terror. In The Last Patriot, readers will be engrossed as Harvath once again takes them on a whirlwind tour through international cities and nail-biting suspense where the stakes are higher than they have ever been before.About the AuthorBrad Thor is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Lucerne, Path of the Assassin, State of the Union, Blowback, Takedown, and The First Commandment. He currently lives in Chicago. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1 Rome, ItalyMonday Evening The Italian Centre for Photoreproduction, Binding, and Restoration of State Archives, also known as the CFLR, was located in an unassuming postmodern office building three blocks from the Tiber River at 14 Via Costanza Baudana Vaccolini. It boasted one of the world's leading archival preservation facilities, as well as a young deputy assistant director named Alessandro Lombardi who was eager to begin his evening. "Dottore, mi scusi," said Lombardi. Dr. Marwan Khalifa, a distinguished Koranic scholar in his early sixties with a handsome face and neatly trimmed beard, looked up from the desk he was working at. "Yes, Alessandro?" The Italian adopted his most charming smile and asked, "Tonight, we finish early?" Dr. Khalifa laughed and set down his pen. "You have another date this evening?" Lombardi approached and showed the visiting scholar a picture on his mobile phone. "What happened to the blond woman?" Lombardi shrugged. "That was last week." Khalifa picked his pen back up. "I suppose I can be done in an hour." "An hour?" exclaimed Lombardi as he pressed his hands together in mock prayer. "Dottore, if I don't leave now, all of the good tables outside will be gone. Please. When the weather is this nice, Italians are not allowed to work late. It's state policy." Khalifa knew better. No matter what the weather, there were always people working late in the CFLR building -- maybe not in the Research and Preservation department, but there was almost always a light burning somewhere. "If you want to leave your keys, I'll lock up the office when I go." "And my time card?" asked Lombardi, pressing his luck. "You get paid for the time you work, my friend." "Va bene," replied the young man as he fished a set of keys for the department from his pocket and set them on the desk. "I'll see you in the morning." "Have fun," said Khalifa. Lombardi flashed him the smile once more and then made his way toward the exit, turning off any unnecessary lights along his way. Dr. Khalifa's desk was a large drafting-style table, illuminated by two adjustable lamps. His time as well as Lombardi's was being paid for by the Yemeni Antiquities Authority. In 1972, workers in Yemen had made a startling discovery. Restoring the aging Great Mosque at Sana'a, said to have been one of the first architectural projects of Islam commissioned by the prophet Mohammed himself, the workers uncovered a hidden loft between the mosque's inner and outer roofs. Inside the loft was a mound of parchments and pages of Arabic texts that at some point had been secreted away, and were now melded together through centuries of exposure to rain and dampness. In archeological circles, such a discovery was referred to as a "paper grave." Cursory examinations suggested that what the grave contained were tens of thousands of fragments from at least a thousand early parchment codices of the Koran. Access to the full breadth of the find had never been allowed. Bits and pieces had been made available to a handful of scholars over the years, but out of respect for the sanctity of the documents, no one had ever been permitted to study the entire discovery. No one that is, until Dr. Marwan Khalifa. Khalifa was one of the world's preeminent Koranic scholars and had spent the majority of his professional career building relationships with the Yemeni Antiquities Authority and politely petitioning it to allow him to review the find. Finally, there was a changing of the guard and the new president of the Antiquities Authority, a significantly younger and more progressive man, invited Khalifa to study the entirety of what the workers at Sana'a had uncovered. It didn't take long for Khalifa to realize the magnitude of the find. As Yemen didn't have the proper facilities to preserve and study the fragments and as the Yemeni government was absolutely opposed to Khalifa taking the items back to the United States, an arrangement was made for the complete contents of the grave to be transferred to the CFLR in Rome where they could be preserved and studied before being returned to Yemen. With the blessing of the new Antiquities Authority president, Khalifa oversaw the entire process, including the technical side which included such things as edge detection, document degradation, global and adaptive thresholding, color clustering, and image processing. His anticipation grew as each scrap was preserved and he was able to begin assembling the pieces of the puzzle. A significant percentage of the parchments dated back to the seventh and eighth centuries -- Islam's first two centuries. Khalifa was handling pieces of the earliest Korans known to mankind. This only made the inconsistencies he discovered from standard Koranic texts even more exciting. A billion-and-a-half Muslims worldwide believed that the Koran they worshiped today was the perfect, inviolate word of God -- an exact word-for-word, perfect copy of the original book as it exists in Paradise and just as it was transmitted, without a single error, by Allah to the Prophet Mohammed through the Angel Gabriel. As a textual historian, Khalifa was fascinated by the inconsistencies. As a moderate Muslim who loved his religion, but believed deeply that it was in need of reform, he was overjoyed. The fact that he had found, and was continuing to find, aberrations that differed from Islamic dogma meant that the case could finally be made that the Koran needed to be reexamined in a historical framework. He had always believed that the Koran had been written by man, not God. If such a thing could be proven, Muslims around the world would be able to reexamine their faith with a modern, twenty-first-century perspective, rather than the outdated, unenlightened perspective of seventh-century Arabia. And now it seemed that he had just the proof he needed. It was such a powerful discovery that Khalifa could barely sleep at night. It dovetailed so well with another project his colleague Anthony Nichols was working on back in America, that he felt as if Allah himself was steering his research, that this was His divine will. All Khalifa could think about when he wasn't at work was getting back to the CFLR facility each day to further investigate the fragments. Though on evenings like this Khalifa missed Lombardi's companionship as well as his expertise with the technical equipment, the truth was that he hardly noticed when the young Italian was gone. In fact, he was often so engrossed that he barely noticed Lombardi even when he was standing at the desk right in front of him. Turning to the voluminous collection of information he had stored on his rugged Toughbook laptop, Khalifa pulled up one of the thirty-two thousand images the CFLR had already digitally archived. While he could have crossed the room and retrieved the fragment itself, he often found it unnecessary as accessing the digital images was much easier. Khalifa was working on lining up six slivers of text written in the Hijazzi script when a shadow fell across his drafting table. "What did you forget this time, Alessandro?" the scholar asked without looking up. "I didn't forget anything," responded a deep, unfamiliar voice. "It is you who have forgotten." Dr. Khalifa looked up and saw a man in a long, black soutane with a white collar. It was a common sight throughout Rome, particularly near the Vatican. But while the CFLR did do a certain amount of work with the Holy See, Khalifa had never seen a priest inside the building. "Who are you?" "That's not important," replied the priest as he moved closer. "I would rather discuss your faith." "You must be confused, Father," said Khalifa as he sat up in his chair. "I'm not a Catholic. I'm Muslim." "I know," said the priest softly. "That's why I'm here." In an explosion of black cloth, the priest was suddenly behind Khalifa. One of his large, rough hands cupped the scholar's chin while the other gripped the side of his head. With a powerful snap, the priest broke Khalifa's neck. He stood there for a moment, the corpse clutched tightly, almost lovingly to his chest, then stepped back and let go. Khalifa's head slammed against the table before coming to rest beneath it. The priest dragged the body across the floor and positioned it at the bottom of a set of stairs which led up to a small archival library. From there, it took only moments to set the fire. Two hours later, having showered and changed, the assassin sat in his hotel room and studied Khalifa's laptop. Connecting to a remote server, he had the Koranic scholar's password program cracked within fifteen minutes. From there, one e-mail confirmed everything he needed to know. Marwan, Finally, good news! It appears we have located the book. A dealer named René Bertrand is bringing it to market in Paris at the Antiquarian Book Fair. I will be meeting him there to negotiate the purchase. As you know, my funding is limited, but I have faith that barring an all-out bidding war, the book will be ours! As planned, I will see you next Monday at 9:00 a.m. in the Middle Eastern Reading Room of the Library of Congress -- although now we'll have the book and can begin deciphering the location of the final revelation! Anthony The assassin had had Khalifa under surveillance long enough to know who the sender was and what he was referring to. It was a parallel and potentially more damaging project, which up until this point had appeared stalled. Obviously, things had changed -- and not for the better. The assassin shut down the laptop and spent the next several hours pondering the implication of what he had learned. He then started formulating a plan. When all of the angles had been considered and tested in his mind, he reactivated the computer. Attaching the relevant e-mails between Khalifa a... Views: 59
The world's balance of power is about to shift dangerously as the ultimate weapon nears completion in a secret facility in the heart of the desert. Across the globe, operatives from the great nations set a deadly game in motion, covertly maneuvering pawns and kings to achieve a frightening advantage—while terrorists and their hunters prepare for the contest's final, bloody moves. And one man—a razor-sharp master of disguise, deceit, and triple-cross—must somehow do the impossible: steal 200 tons of uranium without any of the other players discovering the theft. The clock is ticking. And the price of failure is Apocalypse. Views: 59
The “Phantom” was a musical phenomenon that Rebecca had always found enchanting. She had no idea that her life was about to mirror the play that was her obsession. When her high school drama club chooses “Phantom” as their annual production, Rebecca finds herself in the middle of an unlikely love triangle and the target of a sadistic stalker who uses the lines from the play as their calling card. Rebecca lands the lead role of Christine, the opera diva, and like her character, she is torn between her two co-stars—Tom the surfer and basketball star who plays the lovable hero, and Justyn, the strangely appealing Goth who is more than realistic in the role of the tortured artist. Almost immediately after casting, strange things start to happen both on and off the stage. Curtains fall. Mirrors are shattered. People are hurt in true phantom style. They all seem like accidents until Rebecca receives notes and phone calls that hint at something more sinister. Is Justyn bringing to life the twisted character of the phantom? Or in real life are the roles of the hero and the villain reversed? Rebecca doesn’t know who to trust, but she knows she’s running out of time as she gets closer and closer to opening night. Only when the mask is stripped away, will the twenty first century phantom finally be revealed. Views: 59
