A minor road accident landed county prosecutor Katie DeMaio in Westlake Hospital. That night, from her window, she thought she saw a man load a woman's body into the trunk of a car... or was it just a sleeping pill-induced nightmare?

At work the next day, Katie began investigating a suicide that looked more like murder. Initial evidence pointed elsewhere, but medical examiner Richard Carroll saw a trail leading to Dr. Edgar Highley. He suspected that the famous doctor's work "curing" infertile women was more than controversial—that it was deceitful, depraved, and often deadly.

But before Richard could tell Katie his fears, she left the office for the weekend and an appointment for routine surgery... in Dr. Highley's operating room.

It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three of the girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared. They never returned.

Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, the reader must decide for themselves. This mysterious and subtly erotic tale inspired the iconic 1975 film of the same name by Peter Weir. A beguiling landmark of Australian literature, it stands with Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides as a masterpiece of intrigue.

Titus Groan is seven years old. Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, and death. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral staircase to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder.

Gormenghast is the second volume in Mervyn Peake’s widely acclaimed trilogy, but it is much more than a sequel to Titus Groan—it is an enrichment and deepening of that book.

The Gormenghast Trilogy ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

I have noticed that sometimes I frighten people; what they really fear is themselves. They think it is I who scare them, but it is the dwarf within them, the ape-faced manlike being who sticks up his head from the depths of their souls.

Pär Lagerkvist's richly philosophical novel The Dwarf is an exploration of individual and social identity. The novel, set in a time when Italian towns feuded over the outcome of the last feud, centers on a social outcast, the court dwarf Piccoline. From his special vantage point, Piccoline comments on the court's prurience and on political intrigue as the town is gripped by a siege.

Gradually, Piccoline is drawn deeper and deeper into the conflict, and he inspires fear and hate around him as he grows to represent the fascination of the masses with violence.

La villa est magnifique, l'été brûlant, la Méditerranée toute proche. Cécile a dix-sept ans. Elle ne connaît de l'amour que des baisers, des rendez-vous, des lassitudes. Pas pour longtemps. Son père, veuf, est un adepte joyeux des liaisons passagères et sans importance. Ils s'amusent, ils n'ont besoin de personne, ils sont heureux. La visite d'une femme de cœur, intelligente et calme, vient troubler ce délicieux désordre. Comment écarter la menace ? Dans la pinède embrasée, un jeu cruel se prépare.

C'était l'été 1954. On entendait pour la première fois la voix sèche et rapide d'un « charmant petit monstre » qui allait faire scandale. la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle commençait. Elle serait à l'image de cette adolescente déchirée entre le remords et le culte du plaisir.

Elizabeth is a brilliant loner with a troubling secret she doesn't even know. As if the trauma of her mother being abducted before her eyes as a young girl wasn't enough, the small town she lives in thinks she’s crazy. That all changed when she met Michael, a mysterious and handsome man who identified with her like no one else before.

Michael’s long-time friend Vincent visits and drops the bombshell of a lifetime on Elizabeth and her world becomes completely unraveled. Vincent’s information has revealed the world for what it is; a place where the impossible is real, and myths and legends walk slyly in shadow. A world that Elizabeth will learn she too is a member.

Now, the three are caught up in a thousand-year-long conspiracy they never could have imagined. The three must rely on one another and the secret connection they all share if they have a chance to survive.

Would you help a desperate young woman knocking on your door? As a security guard, do you really have a choice?

A desperate young woman is knocking on the door of the Israeli consulate in Boston, seeking asylum, claiming that she is the only survivor of an Israeli spy network. The gate remains locked, but a security guard, who falls in love with her, is trying unsuccessfully to rescue her. He embarks on a discovery trail, meeting tough American and Israeli government agents, cynical merchants, and passionate dreamers. By the end of the trail, he discovers the woman and the truth that lies underneath her story and his own life.

Dancing Bear is a political thriller, in which the author managed to bring in his life experiences into the story and create a fast-paced read with twists and turns. The story ripples with things just under the surface, waiting to be revealed by the reader.

Lieber Herr Miggel,

Streitgenossen habe ich genossen über den 1. Mai, sehr gut wie Familienumfeld und Charakter zusammen kommen, die Rivalitäten innerhalb und zwischen den Kanzleien, die Komik der präzisen Erfassung der steuerlichen Problematik des Lösegeldes, alles um nur nicht auf den Punkt zu kommen, glaubhaft wie größte jurisitische Rationalität bemüht wird um höchste Irratonalität anzugehen.

Das steigert sich alles schön bis zur Mitte, dann treten die Streitgenossen und mit ihnen die Story auf der Stelle. Auch das überraschende Ende ist nicht ganz so überraschend, man hat irgendso eine zweite ebene erwartet, wenn auch nicht diese. Das schwächt den pay-off (Hornberger Schiessen).

Sicher gute Vorlage für einen TV Krimi/Gesellschaftsdrama, allerdings in USA eher als bei uns; ich höre die Anwaltsserien haben hier wenig Zuspruch, bin da ber kein Spezialist. Jedenfalls eine empfehlenswerte Lektüre.

Kompliment
Ihr Volker Schlöndorff

It only seems to start Theo Lindner, an internationally active law firm partner and father, an ordinary working day: In an unexpected meeting scheduled, he learns that his colleague Joachim Peters has been the victim of a kidnapping - the 20 million euro ransom to the members of the Board of their private pay.

Within the firm a thrilling tug of war starts at the adequate handling of the emergency, on the one hand, anyone can associate a potential victim of the kidnap victims to identify the other hand, see all their material well-being threatened for years to come.

The situation is alarming and, as encrypted, the second sign of life references to Peters' whereabouts, and he seems to contain Theo Lindner, with whom he privately nothing extraordinary, explicitly send out greetings.

A breathtaking, exciting thriller in the legal environment, authentic and psychologically brilliant.

Nur scheinbar beginnt für Theo Lindner, Partner einer international agierenden Anwaltskanzlei und Familienvater, ein ganz normaler Arbeitstag in Berlin: In einer unvorhergesehen anberaumten Sitzung erfährt er, dass sein Kollege Joachim Peters Opfer einer Entführung geworden ist – die 25 Millionen DM Lösegeld sollen die Mitglieder der Sozietät aus ihrem Privatvermögen berappen.

Innerhalb der Sozietät beginnt ein nervenaufreibendes Tauziehen um den adäquaten Umgang mit der Notlage, denn einerseits kann sich jeder Teilhaber als potenzielles Opfer mit dem Entführten identifizieren, andererseits empfinden alle ihr materielles Wohlergehen auf Jahre hinaus bedroht.

Die Lage spitzt sich zu, als das zweite Lebenszeichen verschlüsselte Hinweise auf Peters’ Aufenthaltsort zu enthalten scheint und er Theo Lindner, mit dem ihn privat nichts außergewöhnlich verbindet, explizit Grüße zukommen lässt …

Ein atemberaubend spannender Krimi im Juristen-Milieu, authentisch und psychologisch brillant.

Matilde Martínez es una pediatra decidida a cambiar el mundo. Eliah Al-Saud es un soldado profesional, demasiado cínico para creer que es posible cambiarlo. Sin embargo, cuando Eliah y Matilde se conocen, la atracción es innegable, y, pese a sus diferencias, caen rendidos ante la pasión que los domina.

Su romance se convertirá en una aventura peligrosa, con el conflicto palestino-israelí y una amenaza atómica como telones de fondo. Una adictiva novela contemporánea en la que dos personajes intensos y cautivadores lucharán por sus vidas y las de sus seres queridos, pero ¿conseguirán también salvar su amor?

Two people, each with a secret which could end in death; her by his hand, he in an English prison. One knows the truth, one will find out. When they meet, it will be an explosive seventeenth century, high seas, action adventure, intrigue, and romance.

Patience Douglas was to be the most shy, demur, fragile, docile creature on the face of the earth. In short, everything Patty MacDouglas (Captain Flame) was not. She would dress in the most feminine and frilly dresses, with her hair left long, and she would even use a breathless coy tone of voice to further separate the two personalities...

Terrance Bordeaux was a disappointment to his family, a fop in the truest sense of the word. Traveling at a whim, dressing in whatever the latest fashion and spending his father's wealth without concern, quite unlike the businesslike Terror of the Seas. Fate put the two together; however, could either trust enough to allow the other to see their true self?

'A thing to marvel at, a thing to be grateful for.' A rich American art-collector and his daughter Maggie buy in for themselves and to their greater glory a beautiful young wife and noble husband. They do not know that Charlotte and Prince Amerigo were formerly lovers, nor that on the eve of the Prince's marriage they had discovered, in a Bloomsbury antique shop, a golden bowl with a secret flaw. The superstitious Amerigo, fearing for his gilded future, refuses to accept it as a wedding gift from Charlotte. 'Don't you think too much of "cracks,"' she is later to say to him, 'aren't you too afraid of them? I risk the cracks...' When the golden bowl is broken, Maggie must leave the security of her childhood and try to reassemble the pieces of her shattered happiness.

In this, the last of his three great poetic masterpieces, James combined with a dazzling virtuosity elements of social comedy, of mystery, terror, and myth. The Golden Bowl is the most controversial, ambiguous, and sophisticated of James's novels.

The text of this World's Classics paperback is that of the first English edition (1905). James's Preface is included, and a new introduction, notes, and selected variant readings.

The Light Eaters is an enthralling novel that takes readers on a mysterious journey filled with intrigue and adventure. This captivating story weaves through an intricate plot, drawing readers into a world where every twist and turn keeps them on the edge of their seats.

With each page, the tension builds, and secrets are slowly unveiled, leading to a thrilling climax that will leave readers breathless. It's a tale of discovery, suspense, and the unseen forces that drive us.

Join the characters as they navigate through a landscape of mystery and excitement, where the stakes are high, and the light is both a guide and a threat.

The Tainted Cup is a gripping tale that will take you on a rollercoaster of emotions. Dive into a world of mystery and intrigue as the protagonist navigates through unexpected twists and turns.

With every page you turn, you'll find yourself deeper in a web of secrets and thrills that promise to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Join the adventure and unravel the mysteries hidden within The Tainted Cup!

Six months ago, I was happy. I was simply Naomi Carradine. One month ago, I was admitted into a psych ward.

Yesterday, Lachlan visited me. Kissed me. And told me that I’m starting to lose my mind. Hours later, Max haunted my thoughts, reminding me I’m not crazy and that he needs my help. A few minutes ago, I drifted further from reality, trying to unravel the past. And now...everyone thinks I’m insane.

But, I know he's real, and I know he needs me. Do you believe me?

Behind the walls of a mental hospital, Naomi Carradine feels her world breaking to pieces. She’s starting to believe all the voices questioning her sanity. Only visitors from the outside world keep her tethered to reality. But deep in her thoughts, Naomi is haunted by memories of a golden summer that twisted into a waking nightmare of obsessive love and fractured truths.

Just home from college, Naomi moves in with her best friend, Lana, the daughter of a Virginia senator. At a lavish party thrown by Lana’s father, Naomi meets a sexy stockbroker named Max and finds herself unable to resist his charms. One fiery kiss and she’s going back for more, beginning a terrifying descent. Having witnessed the unspeakable, Naomi has only one hope of escape: unraveling the devastating secrets of her past.