British Literature

The Bahamas, 1941. Newly widowed Leonora “Lulu” Randolph arrives in Nassau to investigate the governor and his wife for a New York society magazine. After all, American readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the duke and duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier. What more intriguing backdrop for their romance than a wartime Caribbean paradise, a colonial playground for kingpins of ill-gotten empires? Or so Lulu imagines.

Max Tudor has adapted well to his post as vicar of St. Edwold's in the idyllic village of Nether Monkslip. The quiet village seems the perfect home for Max, who has fled a harrowing past as an MI5 agent. But this new-found serenity is quickly shattered when the highly vocal and unpopular president of the Women's Institute turns up dead at the Harvest Fayre. The death looks like an accident, but Max's training as a former agent kicks in, and before long he suspects foul play.

What's playing at the Calliope Club may draw a furtive crowd, but as far as the CID's Andrew Dalziel can tell it's all perfectly legal. His partner, Peter Pascoe, begs to differ. From what he hears, an actress's violent ordeal on film looked all too real. When she turns up unharmed, it appears his suspicions were wrong . . . if Andrew and Peter can trust what they see. Because if this dirty business is well and good, why has the film in question vanished? Why has the theater been set ablaze? And why has its proprietor been beaten to death?

In a windswept British seaside town, single mum Alice Lake finds a man sitting on the beach outside her house. He has no name and no idea how he got there. Against her better judgment, she invites him inside. Meanwhile, in a suburb of London, 21-year-old Lily Monrose has only been married for three weeks. When her husband fails to come home from work one night, she is left alone in a place where she knows no one and with the police telling her that her husband never existed.

The Rise is a gleaming residential tower, newly constructed from steel and blackened glass, that stands on some of London’s most prestigious real estate. Looming imposingly over Hyde Park, only multi-millionaires need apply for one of its sumptuous apartments. But when the young night concierge is found murdered in the building’s lobby, the elite residents quickly find their gilded lifestyles under unwelcome police scrutiny.

Alan Duncan met Maddy Mills at a party. They fell in love and moved in together. What led to Alan’s murder as he went on his weekly run four years later? In Wiltshire, England, the Crime Review Team was formed to investigate cold cases. Headed by Gus Freeman, the team has several successful cold-case investigations behind them. Gus Freeman suspects that both Alan and Maddy were hiding from someone. The facts of Alan’s murder lead to an intriguing and complex cold case that will take all of Gus’s skills to unravel.

Fourteen-year-old Rachel Marsh is nanny to John and Abigail Adams' children and witnesses firsthand how tension builds in the feisty New England town in the two years before it erupts in the Boston Massacre. Friends become foes and families divide as British troops arrive in 1768 to force the outspoken Bostonians to toe the line and obey the British government.

After the bliss of their honeymoon, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet are thrown into chaos when Elizabeth's family arrives at Pemberley uninvited and refuses to leave. As Elizabeth struggles to maintain her duties as a hostess, tensions rise and threaten to tear apart the deep love she and Mr. Darcy share.

The last thing DS Stephanie Johnson and DS Andy Carter expected during their much-needed canal holiday was a murder. When retired folk musician Annie Shipton is found stabbed through the neck at the helm of her barge, the couple can’t help investigating the seemingly impossible crime. Nobody else boarded Annie’s boat—so how was she killed from behind?

In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out.

Don't imagine for one moment that I'm not watching you.... The Metropole Hotel, Brighton. After a heady New Year's Eve ball, a woman is brutally raped as she returns to her room. A week later, another woman is attacked. Both victims' shoes are taken by the offender.... Detective Superintendent Roy Grace soon realises that these new cases bear remarkable similarities to an unsolved series of crimes in the city back in 1997.

In her gripping debut novel, Lucy Atkins takes us on one woman's journey to the beautiful and rugged Pacific Northwest to discover the dark secrets of her family's past so she can understand and accept herself. Kal McKenzie was never close to her mother, Elena, whose coldness toward her spoiled any chance of a good relationship. When Elena dies of cancer, Kal feels forlorn: How do you mourn a mother who, inexplicably, just didn't seem to love you?

"Red beef and strong beer" was how C. S. Lewis described his education under one of his early tutors. It was, in other words, a substantial education that engaged deeply with the intellectual tradition and challenged him to grow. Gary Selby sees Lewis' expression as an indication of the kind of transformation that is both possible and necessary for the Christian faith, and he contends that spiritual formation comes about not by retreating from the physical world, but through deeper engagement with it.

A magical imagining of the fate of a fictional boy whose life is shaped forever when he loses out on the role of Harry Potter.

The mission of Commander George Krause of the United States Navy is to protect a convoy of 37 merchant ships making their way across the icy North Atlantic from America to England. There, they will deliver desperately needed supplies, but only if they can make it through the wolf pack of German submarines that awaits and outnumbers them in the perilous seas. For 48 hours, Krause will play a desperate cat-and-mouse game against the submarines, combating exhaustion, hunger, and thirst to protect 50 million dollars worth of cargo and the lives of 3,000 men.

World War Two vet Art Kenning is the alcoholic first-aid man in an isolated sawmill village in the interior of BC, where he dreads the sound of the five whistles that summon him to the mill floor whenever a worker is hurt. Traumatized by an incident in Holland, when he stood by while members of his unit committed a horrific act, he loses himself in drink, and in memories of the love affair he had with a woman in wartime Paris. Then one of the most powerful men at the mill arrives at his door late one evening to ask for his help.

“We have a secret the Devil and I.” These are the chilling words on the back of an old photograph that Sister Joan uncovers while cleaning out the attic storerooms. What she discovers among the dusty antiques leads to her most dangerous case yet. Joan has the strangest feeling that she's being followed. But the person she thinks she saw died over a year ago . . . Or did he? Then a young secretary turns up dead. She's been strangled. Another body is found and Sister Joan must get to the bottom of things before the murderer strikes again.

May, 1941. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter streams up the Tagus River to dock at the port of Lisbon. She is the Santa Rosa; she flies the flag of neutral Spain and is in Lisbon to load cork oak, tinned sardines, and drums of cooking oil bound for the Baltic port of Malmo.

Seventy-five-year-old Sylvia Perkins was found battered to death in her home in 2010. The murder weapon was suspected to be a fire poker and it seems she was quite popular with older gentlemen. Her grandson Robbie inherited everything, but he can't be placed at the scene of the crime. Who killed this harmless old woman and why? And what secrets was she hiding?

Recent college graduate Lauren Charleston heads to London for a prestigious media graduate internship that is part of a well-laid plan for career success. Falling for a playboy billionaire with the nickname of Icky Ollie? Not part of said plan. Tech developer Oliver Pratt makes tabloid headlines for his wild ways, seen with a myriad of women - including a princess. He's exactly the type of man Lauren detests - especially in light of her past with men. But Lauren might find exactly what she needs in Oliver if she can see beyond the surface - and face her own past, too.