British Fiction

Samuel Pickwick, founder and chairman of the Pickwick Club, engages three fellow members to accompany him on a journey. By coach they’ll travel to the outreaches of London to explore, observe, and report back on the quaint wonders of the English countryside. What transpires is a picaresque romp of misadventures, hair-raising challenges, and romantic follies entangling the fates of a riot of colorful characters - a passel of villains, spinsters, poets, and sportsmen - and the unworldly Pickwick himself, who has much to learn about life outside his gentleman’s club.

In the ancient kingdom of Dumnonia, there is old magic to be found in the whisper of the wind, the roots of the trees, the curl of the grass. King Cador knew this once, but now the land has turned from him, calling instead to his three children. Riva can cure others, but can’t seem to heal her own deep scars. Keyne battles to be accepted for who he truly is—the king’s son. And Sinne dreams of seeing the world, of finding adventure.

World War II rages on across Europe, but Maggie Hope has finally found a moment of rest on the pastoral coast of western Scotland. Home from an undercover mission in Berlin, she settles down to teach at her old spy training camp, and to heal from scars on both her body and heart. Yet instead of enjoying the quieter pace of life, Maggie is quickly drawn into another web of danger and intrigue.

It's New Year's Eve in Bombay, 1913, and Madeline Bright, new to the sweltering heat of colonial India, is yearning for all she has left behind in England. Then, at the stroke of midnight, Maddy meets Luke Devereaux, and as the year changes, so do both their lives. Bold and charismatic, Luke opens her eyes to the wonders of Bombay, while Maddy's beauty and vivacity captures his heart. Only her mother disapproves, preferring the devoted Guy Bowen as a match for her daughter.

As bogus corruption charges loom over her, DS Kat Ballantyne finds herself deskbound and stuck with cold cases. Her hated boss, DI Carver, has given her just one week to explain how £50,000 found its way into her bank account. If she can’t, she’ll be lucky to have a desk at all. Then a close friend calls her from a murder scene, claiming to have strangled a local gangster’s wife. Kat has no choice but to disobey orders and investigate. Despite overwhelming forensic evidence supporting her friend’s confession, something still doesn’t add up…

Niall and Eden Paternoster start their Sunday the same way they always do - with a long drive, a visit to a country house and a quick stop at the local supermarket on the way home. But this Sunday ends differently - because while Niall waits and waits in the car park for Eden to pick up supplies, Eden never returns. She’s not waiting for him at home, and none of their family or friends have heard from her. Gone without a trace, Niall is arrested on suspicion of her murder.

Returning to the Broads after nearly two years at sea, John Tanner moors up next to a boat to find the body of a man whose five-year-old daughter is nowhere to be seen. As a torrent of unwanted memories begins flooding through his mind, an attractive Broads Ranger arrives at the scene with a disturbing tale; one of children being taken by a ghostly figure, standing at the helm of an old wooden boat.

Commander Torin Gray is known among the Bruce's most elite Highland warriors as Shadow because of his prowess at infiltrating any English stronghold and discovering its weaknesses before bringing the king's army to its doors. After watching the English massacre his family when he was a boy, he vowed revenge on them all, one stronghold at a time. For him, the Scottish War of Independence is personal and he will not be stopped. But nothing could have prepared him for the beautiful outlaw he's about to face, or how bravely she draws him out of the shadows and into the light.

A man’s body washes up on a beach on the North Yorkshire coast with a single gunshot wound to the chest. The only clue to the victim’s identity is a ring engraved with two names. DCI Tom Raven is back in his hometown of Scarborough for the first time in over 30 years. When offered the chance to lead the murder investigation, he takes it. Raven quickly discovers that the prime suspect is his once-teenage friend, now a wealthy but shady businessman. He finds an ally in Detective Sergeant Becca Shawcross, but not everyone in the team is on his side.

Former Detective Hillary Greene and her cold case team are taking a fresh look at the unsolved murder of Michael Beck, found bludgeoned over the head and dead in a river near his home in 2012. Just twenty-two at the time, he'd recently finished a history degree and had his whole life ahead of him. Everyone said he was a pleasant sort of lad with a passion for the past, quietly living with his parents until he could afford a place of his own. But it quickly turned out that there were at least two people who might have wanted him dead.

When Alice TodHunter Moon was five years old, she saw a beautiful golden Dragon Boat fly over her PathFinder village. She knew at once that the boat was Magykal. That was years ago, before her mother died, her father disappeared at sea, and the Garmin took her best friend, Ferdie. Now it's up to Tod and Ferdie's brother Oskar to rescue Ferdie from the Garmins' keeper, the malevolent Lady.

Once known to all in her village as the rector's daughter, Lucy is now a mother herself - to a wonderful 18-month-old son, Ned. Upon discovering that she is expecting a second child, Lucy and Robert are delighted. In anticipation of the new arrival, Lucy is set on expanding her nursery staff. When Agnes, her current nurse, recommends her cousin, it seems like the perfect solution. But trouble arrives along with the new nursery maid from London. When a farmer finds her lifeless body in a drainage ditch, Lucy and Robert fear foul play.

The Metropole Hotel, Brighton. After a heady New Year's Eve ball, a woman is attacked as she returns to her room. A week later, another woman is assaulted. Both victims' shoes are taken by the offender . . . Roy Grace soon realizes that these new cases bear remarkable similarities to an unsolved series of crimes in the city back in 1997. Dubbed 'Shoe Man', the perpetrator was believed to have attacked five women before murdering his sixth victim and vanishing. Could this be a copycat, or has Shoe Man resurfaced?

Two young girls plot a murder by witchcraft. Soon afterwards, a government clerk dies painfully in mysterious circumstances. His colleague James Marwood is asked to investigate—but the task brings unexpected dangers. Meanwhile, architect Cat Hakesby is working for a merchant who lives on Slaughter Street, where the air smells of blood and a captive Barbary lion prowls the stables. Then a prestigious new commission arrives. Cat must design a Poultry House for the woman that the king loves most in all the world.

It was supposed to be the perfect reunion: six university friends together again after twenty years. Host Ali finally has the life she always wanted, a career she can be proud of and a wonderful family with her college boyfriend, now husband. But that night her best friend makes an accusation so shocking that nothing will ever be the same again.

In June of 1893, the future Nicholas II travels to London for a royal wedding, bringing with him his private security force and his ballerina mistress, Mathilde Kchessinska. Rumored to be the target of a professional assassin known only as La Sylphide, and the subject of conspiracies against his life by his own family who covet his future throne, Nicholas is protected by not only private security, but the professional forces of both England and Russia.

William Fawkes, a controversial detective known as The Wolf, has just been reinstated to his post after he was suspended for assaulting a vindicated suspect. Still under psychological evaluation, Fawkes returns to the force eager for a big case. When his former partner and friend, detective Emily Baxter, calls him to a crime scene, he's sure this is it: the body is made of the dismembered parts of six victims, sewn together like a puppet - a corpse that becomes known as "The Ragdoll".

When homeless man Bobby Stover insists his friend’s suicide was really murder, DI Sheridan Holler is sceptical—until she uncovers a series of deaths, all of them in Liverpool, all ruled as suicides, that suddenly look like anything but. The killings span years, each one chillingly staged, the truth buried beneath an illusion of despair. This murderer is following a mysterious pattern—and there seems to be no end in sight.

With London's streets deserted, a young flower girl is murdered. But why was she out so late on the foggiest night of the year? Inspector Witherspoon of Scotland Yard has nowhere to even begin looking for a suspect. However, Mrs. Jeffries, his housekeeper, is even more accomplished at detection than she is at household management. A policeman's widow herself, her quick wits allow her to nudge the inspector in the right direction to solve the mystery.

Looking back to the Vienna of Klimt and Freud and forward to the shadow that is starting to fall over Europe, Sebastian Faulks' new novel is an intensely personal story that focuses on Lena, a spirited girl born with nothing, and Anton, a man of passion and self-doubt. Lena was born with nothing but her own strength of character to an alcoholic mother in a small town in southern Austria in 1906. Anton is the restless son of a bourgeois family who sets out to make his fortune in pre-First World War Vienna.