Five different people. Five separate lives. Sixty minutes to bind them for ever.
Hassan, Jim, Shuna, Dan and Nadia come from very different worlds. If life were straightforward, their paths would never cross. But our lives are rarely that simple and, as the clock ticks away the minutes of a single hour on a July morning, fate draws all five together in a headlong rush towards disaster.
Who are the heroes and who are the villains?
Tony Salter’s latest novel leaves us guessing right up to the last page.
Bex Ellman and her friends are in hiding, sheltered by the resistance.
With her family threatened and her friendships challenged, she’s looking for a
way to fight back. Ketty Smith is in London, supporting a government she no
longer trusts. With her support network crumbling, Ketty must decide who she is
fighting for – and what she is willing risk to uncover the truth.
The Battle Ground series is set in a dystopian near-future UK, after
Brexit and Scottish independence.
Rachel Churcher was born between the last manned moon landing, and the first orbital Space Shuttle mission. She remembers watching the launch of STS-1, and falling in love with space flight, at the age of five. She fell in love with science fiction shortly after that, and in her teens she discovered dystopian fiction. In an effort to find out what she wanted to do with her life, she collected degrees and other qualifications in Geography, Science Fiction Studies, Architectural Technology, Childminding, and Writing for Radio.
She has worked as an
editor on national and in-house magazines; as an IT trainer; and as a freelance
writer and artist. She has renovated several properties, and has plenty of
horror stories to tell about dangerous electrics and nightmare plumbers. She
enjoys reading, travelling, stargazing, and eating good food with good friends
– but nothing makes her as happy as writing fiction.
Her first published short
story appeared in an anthology in 2014, and the Battle Ground series is her
first long-form work. Rachel lives in East Anglia, in a house with a large
library and a conservatory full of house plants. She would love to live on
Mars, but only if she’s allowed to bring her books.
Multi-award winning series, published in more than 10 countries, movie rights optioned!
Welcome to a world like no other!
Philip is a good boy, a really good boy, who accidentally gets sent to Hell to become the Devil’s heir. The Devil, Lucifer, is dying and desperately in need of a successor, but there’s been a mistake and Philip is the wrong boy.
Lucifer has no other choice than to begin the difficult task of training Philip in the ways of evil. Philip is terrible at being bad, but when he falls in love with the she-devil Satina and experiences the powerful forces of love and jealousy, the task becomes much easier.
Philip finds both friends and enemies in this odd, gloomy underworld–but who can he trust, when he discovers an evil-minded plot against the dark throne?
The Great Devil War is a gripping and humorous tale about good and evil seen from a different perspective, making the reader laugh and think. It’s filled with biblical and historical characters and set in a world beyond your wildest dreams. Or nightmares …
Demon’s Fire
is the third instalment in the crime thriller series featuring DS Taylor
Nicks and DC Marcus Black.
The City had barely
settled back to normal when the sky turned orange as flames licked upwards and
smoke billowed out from a quiet industrial estate in Edinburgh.
Blood-curdling
screams of those trapped within were muffled by the sound-proofed room as the
women climbed desperately over one another to try and escape, their efforts
futile against their prison walls, their captors slain where they sat, bullet
holes in their heads.
Human trafficking,
prostitution, drug dealing, kidnapping, violence and murder hidden in plain
sight in Edinburgh City Centre.
Drug dealer
Burnett’s grip on the city has no limits, and he will stop at nothing to ensure
that remains the case.
Nicks and Black
struggle to secure evidence against him within the confines of the law, but an
enemy of Burnett, hell-bent on revenge, doesn’t have to play by their rules.
A thrilling story of
crime and retribution, good versus evil, Demon’s Fire will have you on the edge
of your seat as the tentacles of despair take hold of your emotions.
Hearts are broken and others mended as the tale gathers momentum, the lives of the officers forever entwined by fate.
The prose poems in I Can See The
Lights are earthy and raw, but also incredibly sensitive. It’s pretty
much guaranteed that more than one of them will bring you to tears. Characters
are vividly brought to life, and stark but warm environments evoked in a down
to earth, yet almost painterly manner by Russ Litten’s uncompromising voice.
Tales of home, of un-belonging, of strife
at sea – of a northern city’s beating heart. Told in a mesmeric, stripped-down
tone, this collection is a work of genius.
In a house by the River Dart, schoolgirl Josephine Kennedy posts invitations to her twelfth birthday party – a party that never takes place.
Horrific violence is committed that night in the family home, leaving all of its occupants dead.
Based on a disturbing real-life crime, this compelling story explores Josephine’s fate through the prism of friends and family – the victims and survivors who unwittingly influenced the events that led up to the tragedy.
Josephine’s best friend, Susan, is haunted by the secrets of the birthday house. Can she ever find a way of making peace with the past?
Charged with drama and beauty, this memorable collection by a master storyteller weaves a magical world of possibility and power from female myths of physical renewal, creation and change. It is an extraordinary immersion into the bodies and voices, mindscapes and landscapes, of the shape-shifting women of our native folklore. We meet the Water Horse of the Isle of Lewis, the huldra, the Scandinavian supernatural forest-dweller, and Baba Yaga of Slavic folklore (but will she help you or kill you?) Here too is the Snow Queen; the wild bird-woman of the Sliabh Mis Mountains; Blodeuedd, the Welsh ‘flower-faced’ woman.
Drawing on myth and fairy tales found across Europe – from Croatia to Sweden, Ireland to Russia – Sharon Blackie brings to life women’s remarkable ability to transform themselves in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances. These stories are about coming to terms with our animal natures, exploring the ways in which we might renegotiate our fractured relationship with the natural world, and uncovering the wildness – and wilderness – within.
Winter 1917. As the First World War enters its most brutal phase, back home in England, everyone is seeking answers to the darkness that has seeped into their lives.
At Blackwater Abbey, on an island off the Devon coast, Lord Highmount has arranged a spiritualist gathering to contact his two sons who were lost in the conflict. But as his guests begin to arrive, it gradually becomes clear that each has something they would rather keep hidden. Then, when a storm descends on the island, the guests will find themselves trapped. Soon one of their number will die.
For Blackwater Abbey is haunted in more ways than one . . .
A professor of psychoacoustics is found dead in his office. It appears to be a heart attack, until a second acoustician dies a few days later in similar circumstances.
Meanwhile, there’s an outbreak of mysterious illnesses on a council estate, and outbursts of unexplained violence in a city centre nightclub. Not to mention strange noises coming from the tunnels underneath Liverpool. Can it really be a coincidence that death metal band Total Depravity are back in the city, waging their own form of sonic warfare?
Detective Inspector Darren Swift is convinced there are connections. Still grieving his fiancé’s death and sworn to revenge, he is thrown back into action on the trail of a murderer with a terrifying and undetectable weapon.
But this case cannot be solved using conventional detective work, and D.I. Swift will need to put the rulebook aside and seek the occult expertise of Dr. Helen Hope and her unlikely sidekick, guitarist Mikko Kristensen.
I thought I’d have something a bit different today, an add a cover reveal to the usual review schedule.
The Vagabond Mother
By:
Tracey Scott-Townsend
Blurb
Not every Vagabond is a Castaway…
Maya Galen’s oldest son, Jamie, left home eight years ago after a massive row with his parents and now Joe, her youngest child and apple of her eye, has cut off all contact with them too.
Called to Australia to identify the body of a young man, Maya is given her son’s journal. After a sleepless night she decides that the only thing she can do is follow in Joe’s footsteps and try to discover her most basic human self. Eschewing a monetary lifestyle, from now on she must rely on her physical and emotional strength to survive.
Following Joe’s hand-drawn maps and journal entries, she travels from Australia to Denmark and beyond, meeting many other travellers along the way and learning valuable lessons.
Eventually a crisis forces her to return home and confront the end of her marriage, but also a new understanding of what family, in the widest sense, really means.
Exploring the big questions at the heart of human existence, The Vagabond Mother shares territory with books and films such as Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, The Way, starring Martin Sheen, Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.
