Simon Prebble

It's rare for a young woman to die from a stroke and when three such deaths occur in short order it starts to look like an epidemic. Then a sharp pathologist notices traces of benzodiazepine in one of the victim's blood samples and just traceable damage to the ligaments in her neck, and their cause of death is changed from 'natural' to murder. The police aren't making much progress in their hunt for the killer until he appears to make a mistake: Alison...

Best-selling author Minette Walters writes thrillers that wed classic mystery conventions with contemporary sophistication. In The Ice House-winner of Britain's John Creasey Award for best first crime novel-she serves up a chilling story of love, loyalty, and deadly intrigue. A small British village has long suspected that the three women living in a local manor house are witches-or even worse. So when an unidentifiable body is found in the home's...

A cult classic in the UK since its first publication there in the 1970s, Don't Point that Thing at Me is the hilarious and dark humored crime thriller featuring the Honorable Charlie Mortdecai: degenerate aristocrat, amoral art dealer, seasoned epicurean, unwilling assassin, and general knave-about-Piccadilly. With his thuggish manservant Jock, Mortdecai endures all manner of nastiness involving secret police, angry foreign governments, stolen paintings,...

The grand adventure continues in George Mann's Newbury & Hobbes steampunk mystery series, as a Victorian special agent races across a continent to save his beloved's life on board The Revenant Express. Sir Maurice Newbury is bereft as his trusty assistant Veronica Hobbes lies dying with a wounded heart. Newbury and Veronica's sister Amelia must take a sleeper train across Europe to St. Petersberg to claim a clockwork heart that Newbury has commissioned...

In the 1840s, Charles Dickens wrote 5 short stories with strong social and moral messages. The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home, is the third of these stories. Following the home life of John Peerybingle, the story introduces the many people in John's family and life along with a cricket that acts as the guardian angel of the family. Like its predecessors, this story also contains heavy social and moral implications. However, it differs...

As Charlotte drew closer to the looming grey edifice that was to become her temporary home, she could not help but notice the secretive shuttered windows. Then she noticed the milkweeds... Even a proper vicar's daughter can make a mistake--and now Charlotte Lamb must pay a high price for her fall. To avoid the prying eyes of all who know her, she hides herself away in London's forbidding "Milkweed Manor," a place of mystery and lore, of old secrets...

After being told that his father was an assassin for a criminal organization, fourteen-year-old Alex goes to Italy to find out more and becomes involved in a plan to kill thousands of English schoolchildren.

After a chance encounter with assassin Yassen Gregorovich in the South of France, teenage spy Alex Rider investigates international pop star and philanthropist Damian Cray whose new video game venture hides sinister motives involving Air Force One, nuclear missiles, and the international drug trade.

Utopia, by Sir Thomas More, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary...

Winner of the Booker Prize. Four men gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive towards the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Braiding these men's voices, and that of Jack's widow, into a choir of sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Swift...