James Langton
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It's 1973, and David Leveraux has landed his dream job as a Flavorist-in-Training, working in the secretive industry where chemists create the flavors for everything from the cherry in your can of soda to the butter on your popcorn. While testing a new artificial sweetener — "Sweetness #9" — he notices unusual side-effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a generalized dissatisfaction with life. David tries...
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"Spellbinding, terrifying, deeply moving" — an unflinching portrait of a family's silent grief, and the tragic death of a brother not spoken about for forty years (Joanna Rakoff).
On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and his younger brother Nicholas are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. One moment he's there, the next he's gone.
Richard and his other brothers don't attend the funeral,...
On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and his younger brother Nicholas are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. One moment he's there, the next he's gone.
Richard and his other brothers don't attend the funeral,...
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"In the sequel to the "captivating"* Zig Zag Girl, DI Edgar Stephens and the magician Max Mephisto hunt for a killer after two children are murdered in a tragic tableau of a very grim fairy tale. *Wall Street Journal It's Christmastime in Brighton, and the city is abuzz about a local production of Aladdin, starring the marvelous Max Mephisto. But the holiday cheer is lost on DI Edgar Stephens. He's investigating the murder of two children, Annie...
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"In this nail-biting transatlantic mystery, threat of mass violence looms over Elizabeth II's coronation--can Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens and the magician Max Mephisto crack the case and save the crown?"--
As Elizabeth II's coronation looms, DI Edgar Stephens is busy investigating the death of a local fortuneteller and his old pal, the magician Max Mephisto, is rehearsing for his television debut, a Coronation Day variety show. Upon hearing...
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"Morton tells the story of the feckless Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, his American wife Wallis Simpson, the bizarre wartime Nazi plot to make him a puppet king after the invasion of Britain, and the attempted cover-up by Churchill, General Eisenhower, and King George VI of the Duke's relations with Hitler. From the alleged affair between Simpson and the German foreign minister to the discovery of top secret correspondence about the man dubbed...
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At the doors of a charming country church, an unspeakable act destroys a wedding party. A huge manhunt ensues. The culprit is captured. The story is over. Except it isn't. For Alan Banks, there is something unresolved about this case. Reteaming with profiler Jenny Fuller, the detective digs deeper into the crime, deep enough to unearth long-buried secrets that reshape everything Banks though he knew about the events outside the chapel. When...
8) Showstopper
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"Since the start of the hit TV show Swift in 2013, its cast and crew have been plagued by misfortune. First, a star actress pulls out of the show before it begins-and by 2019, there have been multiple injuries by fall, fire, or drowning; two deaths; and two missing persons cases. The popular media around Bath, England, quickly decides it's a curse, but is it as simple as that? Is someone behind these fishy incidents? Peter Diamond, Chief Superintendent...
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Elliot Kane novels volume 1
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"There is a dark side to MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane -- volatile, inquisitive, free-floating -- in the field. They take them and put two years and over £100k into their training, showing them how to steal cars, strip weapons, and hack bank accounts. There are courses on the use of blackmail and improvised explosives, and entire workshops solely dedicated to navigating by the stars. But no one tells them how to go home. Kane has spent fifteen...
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A dedicated man a former university professor, wealthy historian, and archaeologist who loved his adopted village is dead in the wild outdoors. It is a particularly heinous slaying, considering the esteem in which the victim, Harry Steadman, was held by his neighbours and colleagues by everyone, it seems, except the one person who bludgeoned the life out of the respected scholar and left him half-buried in a farmer's field. Detective Chief Inspector...
12) A burial at sea
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In March 1873 aristocratic sleuth Charles Lenox undertakes a delicate espionage mission to Egypt, where five British agents have been killed, apparently by the French. But soon after Charles's ship sets sail, the captain calls on him to dust off his deductive skills when a crew member is murdered and left eviscerated on the deck.
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"Fleeing the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in Ooty, a hill station in South India. There he finds solace in life's simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla have taken Hilary under their wing. The Padre is concerned for Priscilla's future, and as Hilary's...
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"The world's leading expert on Osama bin Laden delivers for the first time the definitive biography of a man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century, and whose ideological heirs we continue to battle today"--
Bergen sheds light on bin Laden's many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire, yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, depending on two of his wives, both of whom had PhDs,...
16) ASTRAY
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A collection of short stories featuring a cross-section of society including runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys, and slaves from Puritan Massachusetts and revolutionary New Jersey to antebellum Louisiana.
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"In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Mount Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceives his own crazy, beautiful plan: he will fly a plane from England to Everest, crash-land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit--all utterly alone. Wilson doesn't know how to climb. He barely knows how to fly. But he has the right plane, the right equipment, and...
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FDR at War volume 1
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"Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR's masterful--and underappreciated--command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes readers inside FDR's White House Oval Study--his personal command center--and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals...
19) Glow: a novel
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"From one of England's most accomplished young writers: a taut, riveting, compulsively readable novel in which a young man (with a bizarre sleep disorder) uncovers the connections between foxes behaving oddly in London, Burmese people going missing, and glow, the newest recreational drug. South London, May 2010: twenty-two-year-old Raf spends his days looking after Rose, a bull terrier who guards the transmitters for a pirate radio station, and his...
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"A unique and fascinating look at Victorian society through the remarkable lives of an enlightened and philanthropic aristocratic couple, the Marquess and Marchioness of Aberdeen, who exhausted their vast fortune buying homes around the globe where they entertained the rich and famous while also campaigning for the poor and disadvantaged. As the Marquess and Marchioness of Aberdeen, John and Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon enjoyed wealth and privilege that...