Early one morning, on the lawns of a grand boulevard in central Delhi, a group of professionals are attending their therapeutic Laughing Club when a 20-foot apparition of the Goddess Kali appears, & strikes one of their number dead. The goddess disappears without trace, & soon news of the crime has all India agog. For the victim is celebrated sceptic & rationalist Dr Suresh Jha, enemy of all gurus & mystics, & he has been silenced in a manner calculated to unnerve even his most loyal supporters. As the media go into a frenzy, it becomes clear that the case goes to the heart of the battle between superstition & rationality in modern India. But the fact remains that a murder has been committed. & as it becomes clear that powerful forces are at play, one man is perfectly placed to investigate: the portly detective Vish Puri. In fact, the idea that he could resist getting involved in such a tantalizing murder is preposterous. There is as much chance of him going without his lunch. ...

Meet Vish Puri, India`s most private investigator. Portly, persistent & unmistakably Punjabi, he cuts a determined swathe through modern India`s swindlers, cheats & murderers. In hot & dusty Delhi, where call centres & malls are changing the ancient fabric of Indian life, Puri`s main work comes from screening prospective marriage partners, a job once the preserve of aunties & family priests. But when an honest public litigator is accused of murdering his maidservant, it takes all of Puri`s resources to investigate. How will he trace the fate of the girl, known only as Mary, in a population of more than one billion? Who is taking pot shots at him & his prize chilli plants? & why is his widowed ` Mummy-ji` attempting to play sleuth when everyone knows Mummies are not detectives? With his team of undercover operatives
- Tubelight, Flush & Facecream
- Puri ingeniously combines modern techniques with principles of detection established in India more than two thousand years ago
- long before `that Johnny-come-lately` Sherlock Holmes donned his Deerstalker. The search for Mary takes him to the desert oasis of Jaipur & the remote mines of Jharkh&. From his well-heeled Gymkhana Club to the slums where the servant classes live, Puri`s adventures reveal modern India in all its seething complexity.


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Jack Wenlock is the last of the Railway Goslings: that fabled cadre of railway detectives created at the Weeping Cross Railway Servants` Orphanage, who trod the corridors of the GWR trains in the years 1925 to 1947. Sworn to uphold the name of God`s Wonderful Railway, Jack keeps the trains free of fare dodgers & purse-stealers, bounders & confidence tricksters, German spies & ladies of the night. But now, as the clock ticks down towards the nationalisation of the railways Jack finds himself investigating a case that begins with an abducted great aunt, but soon develops into something far darker & more dangerous. It reaches up to the corridors of power & into the labyrinth of the greatest mystery in all the annals of railway lore
- the disappearance in 1915 of twenty-three nuns from the 7.25 Swindon to Bristol Temple Meads, or the case of the ` Hail Mary` Celeste. Shady government agents, drunken riverboat captains, a missing manuscript & a melancholic gorilla all collide on a journey that will take your breath away.
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Victor Frankenstein begins his anatomy experiments in a barn in the secluded village of Headington, near Oxford. The coroner`s office provides the corpses he needs
- but they have often died by violent means & are damaged & putrifying. Victor moves his coils & jars & electrical fluids to a deserted pottery manufactury in Limehouse. &, from Limehouse, makes contact with the Doomesday Men
- the resurrectionists. Victor pays better than any hospital for the bodies of the very recently dead. Even so, perfect specimens are hard to come by...until that Thames-side dawn when Victor, waiting, wrapped in his greatcoat, on his wooden jetty, hears the splashing of oars & sees in the half-light that slung into the stern of the approaching boat is the corpse of a handsome young man, one hand trailing in the water...

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The game is afoot & the world`s greatest detective needs your help. With Watson away, Holmes has four tricky cases & he needs your powers of deduction to unravel the mysteries. Explore Victorian England with Sherlock Holmes & investigate the theft of a priceless jewel in The Cherry in the Cake, solve the mysterious death of the Earl of Monthaven in The Adventure of the Cursed Cartouche, go on a ghost hunt in The Terror of Traymar House & delve into the magic of London in The Adventure of the Vanishing Lord. Will you assist Sherlock Holmes? The answer is surely elementary. ...

When Captain Haddock meets a gipsy palm reader, he dismisses a forewarning about a beautiful lady`s stolen jewels. But when the famous opera singer Bianca Castafiore suddenly descends on Marlinspike Hall, the gipsy`s prediction seems to be all too real. Can Tintin catch the emerald thief? ...

The Castle is the story of K, the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, & yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty & doubt, hope & fear, & reason & nonsense, K's struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 & it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make it feel strangely complete. ...

Sweeping American history from 1941 to the 21st century, this is this story of four men
- two white brothers from rural Alabama
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A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them & instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, & a fantastic, surreal & chaotic history of all human consciousness. ...

Lorina, a young schoolgirl, is led by a black rabbit through a wood to a magical l&. There she finds a race of green people, who are all overworked, starving & suffering from the toxic fumes billowing out of a nearby castle. She decides to gain access to the castle for the poor green people, & within its walls she meets the ”insiders”, selfish creatures who hoard all the resources & treat the outsiders as slaves. Her quest leads her to encounter the bureaurat, the superviper, the farmadillo &, eventually, the awful Piggident himself. Will she be able to save the green people from the cruelty of these ”insiders”? ...