Soon after she returns to Bleak House, Esther decides to go to London to see Mr. Guppy. First, she visits Caddy and Prince Turveydrop. Taken aback by Esther's scarred face, Guppy emphatically retracts his former marriage proposal to Esther. Esther obtains from him a promise to "relinquish all idea of . . . serving me." She no longer needs Guppy's assistance in helping her learn her real identity, and Guppy's presence could possibly endanger her attempt to be secret about what she has learned from Lady Dedlock

“Let me tell you who I am, on the chance that these scribblings do survive... I am Murgen, standardbearer of the Black Company, though I bear the shame of having lost that standard in battle. I am keeping these annals because Croaker is dead, One-Eye won’t, and hardly anyone else can read or write. I will be your guide for however long it takes the Shadowlanders to force our present predicament to its inevitable end... I expect these writings to blow away on a dark wind, never to be touched by another eye. Or they might become the tinder Shadowspinner uses to light the pyre under the last man he murders after taking Dejagore...”

She's standing at the front door. Covered in blood. Is she the victim of a crime? Or the perpetrator? A teenage girl--Sienna, a troubled friend of his daughter--comes to Joe O'Loughlin's door one night. She is terrorized, incoherent-and covered in blood. The police find Sienna's father, a celebrated former cop, murdered in the home he shared with Sienna. Tests confirm that it's his blood on Sienna. She says she remembers nothing. Joe O'Loughlin is a psychologist with troubles of his own. His marriage is coming to an end and his daughter will barely speak to him. He tries to help Sienna, hoping that if he succeeds it will win back his daughter's affection. But Sienna is unreachable, unable to mourn her father's death or to explain it. Investigators take aim at Sienna. O'Loughlin senses something different is happening, something subterranean and terrifying to Sienna. It may be something in her mind. Or it may be something real. Someone real. Someone capable of the most grim and gruesome murder, and willing to kill again if anyone gets too close. His newest thriller is further evidence that Michael Robotham is, as David Baldacci has said, "the real deal - we only hope he will write faster." All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

Based on the hit TV Series Scott and Bailey The Journey's Inn, Lark's Estate, Manchester. Three bodies have been found, stabbed to death in their beds. The husband and father of two of the victims has fled. The police are in a race against time to find him – especially when they discover his two young sons are also missing… Manchester Metropolitan police station. Having survived a near-fatal attack, DC Janet Scott is quietly falling apart. And her best friend and colleague DC Rachel Bailey is reeling from a love affair gone bad. DCI Gill Murray is trying to keep the team on track, but her own family problems are threatening tip her over the edge. Finding the desperate man is their top priority. But none of them knows where he is going or what he intends to do next. Or what will they have to do to stop him…

A simple case of blackmail gets lethally complicated when “Nameless,” Bill Pronzini’s seasoned private-eye, exposes a nasty scam that involves junior accounts executive Jay Cohalan, his unhappy wife, and a mistress with a serious drug problem. It’s the kind of case “Nameless” likes, because bleeders — the blackmailers, extortionists, small-time grifters, and other opportunists who prey on the weak and gullible — sit near the top of his most-worthless-human-beings list. So he contemplates with pleasure the prospect of putting another one or two of these parasites out of commission, and then returning the $75,000 in cash to its rightful owner. “Nameless” discovers, though, that he is not going to be able so easily to close his Cohalan file — not when he finds his client face down in the middle of a four-poster bed with a bloody, powder-scorched hole behind the right ear. And only by a hair’s breadth does “Nameless” himself escape a similar fate. Aggrieved, cut to the psychological quick by his close brush with death, “Nameless” embarks on a relentless hunt for his unknown assailant in San Francisco’s shadowy underworld. There he encounters bleeders of every ilk — like the loan shark Nick Kinsella, drug dealer Jackie Spoons, punch-drunk boxer Zeke Mayjack, and crankhead Charlie Bright — before he tracks down his quarry. At a deserted backcountry road stop “Nameless,” packing his long-unused .38, attends to the last of a bad business and, in a climax as powerful as it is unexpected, finally confronts his own demons. He maybe even conquers them

Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left. Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. Who wants to know?

Andrew Taylor has written over 25 crime novels, and won many awards for his books. His best selling historical crime novel THE AMERICAN BOY was selected by Richard and Judy's book club. This new story is set in Bleeding Heart Square in the 1930s. In case you were wondering, there is no 'Bleeding Heart Square' in London, but there is a 'Bleeding Heart Yard'. It is apparently named after Elizabeth Hatton, a 17th century society beauty who was murdered one night in 1626 after a ball, and her body found in the Yard torn limb from limb and with her heart still bleeding on the cobblestones, a story that is used in this book to describe the origins of Bleeding Heart Square. At the start of the book, Lydia has a violent argument with her husband, Marcus. She decides to leave him and her life of privilege to take refuge with her father in his rooms at 7 Bleeding Heart Square, to live in much reduced circumstances. She does not know her father well, as her mother divorced him when she was young. But she is determined to stay with him, and not to give in to her mother (re-married and now Lady Cassington) and return to live with Marcus, to keep up appearances. The current owner of the house is a shady character called Serridge. Narton, a policeman, suspects Serridge of murdering the previous owner, Phillipa Penhow, about four years ago. Ms Penhow, a rich spinster, had become smitten with Serridge. He persuaded her to buy a remote farmhouse in Essex, and to move there to live with him, until she disappeared shortly afterwards. When questioned, Serridge claimed that she met an old boyfriend and moved away to America with him, but no-one has heard from her since. Narton recruits Rory, a young man he sees hanging about the square, to help him find evidence that Serridge is to blame. Rory wants to find out what happened to Ms Penhow, because she is the aunt of his girlfriend Fenella. It also turns out that Lydia's father is somehow connected to Serridge, not only through their time together in the army during the First World War, but also because he used to own the farm in Essex that Serridge persuaded Ms Penhow to buy. The main mystery to be solved in the book is whether Serridge murdered Ms Penhow for her money, or whether she really did move to America. However, in true Dickensian fashion, there is a whole host of characters, and many subplots that contribute to the main story. Ms Penhow's infatuation with Serridge, and the consequences of that, are gradually revealed through excerpts from her diary, read by an unknown person, who has somehow acquired the diary. These convey her initial optimism and subsequent slide into despair, and raise the hope that perhaps she did just run away after all. Meanwhile, with the help of Narton, Rory starts to find out what really happened to Ms Penhow, while gradually realising that Fenella no longer wants to marry him, and struggling to find himself a job as a journalist. A third subplot describes how Lydia starts to make a new life for herself, her growing friendship with Rory after he also moves into 7 Bleeding Heart Square, and her own part in discovering what happened to Ms Penhow. The book evokes the period partly through its descriptions of the British Fascist movement, and Marcus's involvement in it, and through the stark differences between the lives of the wealthy and those of the poor. It is a hugely enjoyable book, in which the many different threads, and rich detail, are skilfully woven together. It was an exciting read, and I had to restrain myself from turning to the ending to find out what happened before finishing the book. But, I'm afraid when I finally did get there, I was a bit underwhelmed by the final unveiling of the fate of Ms Penhow, and I don't think this was just because I hadn't been paying enough attention to the clues dotted through the story. Despite this, and because the story of Ms Penhow is in some ways almost incidental, mostly serving as a means to throw the various characters together, one can just about forgive the ending, and simply enjoy the rest of the book. One to recommend, but I don't think it's going to make my top five of the year

Michael Weston is an assassin with a problem. His latest job has been carried out with customary precision. Yet it has led the police straight to him. Has he been set up? Why? And by Whom? To answer these questions he must first track down his paymasters. The suspects multiply like a particularly vicious virus. When Weston’s bullet hit home, the diplomat and a British junior minister, both with target. But the victim had enemies too, personal and professional. Weston knows his own reputation is at stake. He made a mistake once before and is still paying for it. Now he must become a different kind of hunter, working through his victim’s past towards the answers. The trail will take him from Europe to North America, charting a grand conspiracy and the involvement of a pernicious religious cult. And all the time the hunter is also the hunted. Hoffer is an ex-cop with an obsession, hired to find the assassin and enact a dreadful revenge. But Hoffer has only one advantage over the rest... he knows the assassin’s weakness that could prove all too fatal. What happens when the killer becomes a target? When he takes more risks than he should? If he’s not careful, someone is going to bleed Michael Weston dry

Mick is on his way to the Smoke from the provinces. He's got six guys to find with only their names to go on and no more help than the phone book and an A-Z. Stuart is determined to walk each of the capital's roads, streets and alleyways. But what will he do when there's nothing left of his A-Z but blacked out pages? Judy is set on creating her own unique map of each of the metropolis' boroughs…an A-Z of sex in the city. Three strangers in search of London's heart and soul, mapping out their stories from Acton to Hackney, Chelsea Harbour to Woolwich, in a comic dance of sex and death

The new series from the author of The Silence of the Library and Murder Past Due... New York Times bestselling author Miranda James returns to Athena, Mississippi, with an all-new mystery featuring Miss An’gel and Miss Dickce Ducote, two snoopy sisters who are always ready to lend a helping hand. But when a stressed socialite brings murder right to their doorstep, even they have trouble maintaining their Southern hospitality… With the Mississippi sun beating down, An’gel and Dickce are taking a break to cool off and pet sit their friend Charlie Harris’s cat, Diesel, when their former sorority sister, Rosabelle Sultan, shows up at their door unexpectedly, with her ne’er-do-well adult children not far behind. Rosabelle’s selfish offspring are desperate to discover what’s in her will, and it soon becomes clear that one of them would kill to get their hands on the inheritance. Suddenly caught up in a deadly tangle of duplicitous suspects and deep-fried motives, it will take all of the sisters’ Southern charm to catch a decidedly ill-mannered killer…

Historical Mysteries Collection #1 Perfect for fans of CJ Sansom, SW Perry, SJ Parris and SG Maclean … “With skill, the reader is inserted into the sights, sounds, smells and streets of Richard III’s medieval England.” He's a spy for the king… In 1483 London, Andrew works as a spy for the king’s brother Richard. Through necessity, he has lived life in the shadows. But when tragedy points to regicide, Andrew delves deeper into a maze of dangerous duplicity. She's a fighter who barely survived a treacherous relationship… When young Tyballis discovers her husband arrested for murder, she is delighted. As a young orphan, coerced to marry her abusive neighbour, she was horribly used. Now is her chance to be rid of him for good and find the confidence she never had. Can they try their hand at uncovering one of England's biggest conspiracies? When Tyballis joins forces with the motley network of Andrew’s informers and thieves, they are lured into the dark and dangerous world of medieval London’s political intrigue and back alley slums. It’s not long before Tyballis is accused of murder herself… A thought-provoking mystery that fuses fact and fiction to stunning effect and explores what it means to be human