Winter, 1980. The Yorkshire Ripper has just claimed his thirteenth victim. Ripper thirteen, police nil. As public anger against the police mounts, Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter is sent to take over the investigation. The Strafford Shootings remain unsolved, & the murders of the Jubilee summer of 1977 are still attributed to the Ripper. But Hunter soon realises that all is not as it seems
- & that the police are more heavily implicated in the killings than anyone could have imagined. Jack Whitehead, alone & mad in a mental institution after trying to exorcise the demons from his head with hammer & nail, appears to hold the key. What is the connection between the Ripper & this fresh spate of violence? & what will happen when these men's separate hells collide?
...

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience & controls him through the all-seeing telescreens & the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth & liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal. ...

May 1983. John Pigott, an overweight lawyer as noble in his intentions as he is a slave to his desires, finds that the man convicted for Clare Kemplay's murder might be innocent
- & that all the people who could answer his questions are dead. June 1977. BJ the rent boy's life is in danger for what he knows, plagued by the horrors he has witnessed. Soon he must confront the possibility that the man purporting to be his saviour is the devil himself. December 1974. Maurice Jobson, the senior policeman known as The Owl, is sucked into a morass of corruption where murder & cruelty present themselves as the only tools for survival. Nineteen Eighty Three is a dark, disturbing & intense finale to The Red Riding Quartet, one of the finest series in contemporary British crime writing.
...

Christmas bombs & Lucky Lucan on the run, Leeds United & the Bay City Rollers, The Exorcist & It Ain't Half Hot Mum. Yorkshire, Christmas 1974. Edward Dunford, North of England Crime Correspondent, has been sent to cover the case of the missing girl Clare Kemplay. He's convinced she's been murdered. When the little girl turns up dead in a ditch with swan's wings stitched into her back, Eddie's instincts prove right. But standing between him & the truth is a society riddled with corruption & brutality. Getting answers will mean a toss-up between his sanity & his life. Winter 1974's looking like a real season in hell. ...

The atlas of the mid 1800's was covered in blank spaces. In the mid 19th century, people decided to discover what lay at the top of the world. Ninety Degrees North chronicles this race for the North Pole & examines what it was that people expected to discover when they got there. Fleming expertly details the eclectic mix of characters that sailed, walked, skied, sledged & ballooned their way towards this polar grail. Legandary figures such as Kane, Hayes, Hall, the Duke of Abruzzi, Cook & Peary are brought to life animatedly. Accounts of their quests are playfully & incisively related as they battle storms, scurvy, the interminable arctic winter, accidents & the regular loss of fingers & toes, guaranteeing that the book is elevated above simply being a list of extraodinary expeditions. ...

In 1932 Evelyn Waugh left the salons of Mayfair for the savannah & rainforest of what was then British Guiana. The result: classic travel-writing. Even Waugh`s comic imagination could not have invented the characters he met in South America, but only he could have described them so perfectly. A cattle-rancher who claimed to be a close friend of the Virgin Mary, a Jesuit missionary with a pet toad that ate burning cigarette ends, a gold-prospector who believed he was guided through the jungle by speaking parrots & many others live on in Waugh`s mordant prose, as do his descriptions of Guyana`s extraordinary landscapes. The author`s journey — on foot, horseback & by boat — was extremely arduous, but he remained an unfailingly astute observer, offering a fascinating picture of the Amerindian peoples through whose lands he travelled. In the afterword to this edition, award-winning novelist Pauline Melville explores the connections between Waugh`s experiences in the region of Guyana from which her own family hails & A Handful of Dust, one of Waugh`s greatest novels, giving a fascinating insight into the creative process & the mind of the man himself. ...

At a hot-dog-eating contest or at a demolition derby, in line at the pharmacy counter waiting for a shingles vaccination, living in a cave with a colony of bats: the Almighty appears in ever-more mysterious ways in Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Joy Williams` surreal, sublime new collection of very short short stories. Each less than a page long, each packing a punch belied by its size, every one of these ninety-nine stories tells of everyday human interaction with an increasingly elusive & arbitrary deity. Haunted by an array of extraordinary historical figures, from Kafka & Tolstoy to O. J. Simpson & Philip K. Dick, but populated by anonymous ordinary people just like you & me, the stories pool seemingly random moments into something deep, dazzling & disconcerting. Bleak & funny, ironic & lyrical, enigmatic & aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God breaks down the barriers between the everyday & the divine & takes Williams` writing into territories strange & new. ...

Street plan of Niort, part of an extensive series covering French cities & towns from Blay-Foldex, the country’s largest, oldest & most experienced publisher of urban mapping. Blay plans include outer suburbs &, where appropriate, adjoining localities forming part of the urban agglomeration & provide brief descriptions of the town’s main sights, contact details for hotels & other places of interest, etc. The plans show one way streets, car parks & pedestrian zones. Important public buildings are clearly marked & identified. Blay street maps are usually double-sided & include an enlargement for the town centre & a street index with separate lists of “edifices publics”: main public buildings, places of worship, schools, sport facilities, stations, etc. Each of the outer suburbs or the adjoining localities, identified with its postcode, has a separate index. Many titles also provide a road map of the environs. All the text is in French only.PLEASE NOTE: to see the list of Blay-Foldex street plans of French towns & cities please click on the series link – the series description also

Includes:: a comparison between Blay & IGN street plans.

...

Topographic survey of France at 1:25, 000 in IGN`s excellent TOP25 / Série Bleue series. All the maps are GPS compatible, with a 1km UTM grid plus latitude & longitude lines at 5’ intervals. Contours are at 5m intervals except for mountainous areas where the maps have contours at 10m intervals, vividly enhanced by hill shading & graphics for rocky terrain. Colouring with graphics indicates different types of vegetation or land use (deciduous or coniferous forests, moors, orchards, vineyards, etc). PLEASE NOTE: coverage of France at this scale is currently being revised – the format & the presentation of each title are indicated by the letters at the end of its Sheet Reference number (e.g. 0416ET, 3531ETR, 1923SB, etc.)MAPS WITH FULL TOURIST OVERPRINT & AN ENGLISH MAP LEGEND: all TOP25 maps & the SB editions of Série Bleue have an overprint highlighting waymarked walking trails including long-distance GR routes &, where appropriate, ski routes. Symbols indicate campsites, gîtes d’etape, refuges, equestrian centres & other recreational facilities or sites, tourist information centres, cultural heritage, etc. Towns & locations of particular interest are highlighted.- ET or OT = single-sided TOP25 map covering approx. 29x 21 km / 18x 13 miles.- ETR or OTR = waterproof & tear resistant TOP25 map covering the same area as the corresponding ET or OT number, but double-sided, printed on a smaller size sheet with a good overlap between the sides.- SB = Série Bleue map with full tourist overprint; these maps, first introduced in summer 2014, each cover approx. 29x 24km / 18x 15 miles.SÉRIE BLEUE maps with numbers ending in E (Est) or O (Ouest): most editions now indicate the GR routes, but do not show any other tourist information. Map legend is in French only. Each map covers approx. 14x 20km / 9x 12 miles. ...