Simon Vance

In the heat of June, all England seems to head for Epsom Downs. For months before, people have been waiting and plotting for this day. Everywhere money jingles and plans are laid. As the months pass the pace quickens and dastardly deeds are done, foxing even the stalwart police detective Captain MacTurk.

"A peaceful Welsh village is thrown into turmoil when a terrified boy stumbles on a body in a nearby river. The man appears to have fallen from the canal aqueduct spanning the valley. But there is no identification on the body, he isn't a local, and no one will admit to having seen him before. With little to go on, the village police turn to Scotland Yard for help. When Inspector Ian Rutledge is sent from London to find answers, he is given few...

This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about until his oldest friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all of this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges...

When Rob Hale wakes up in the hospital after a motorcycle crash on the Isle of Man, his first thought is for Lena, the gorgeous blonde who was on the back of his bike. But the doctors and the police insist that he was found alone at the scene and don't believe she exists. Convinced that Lena is real, Rob sets out to uncover the truth behind her disappearance.

In 1791 Stockholm, self-satisfied bureaucrat Emil Larsson is informed by a fortune teller that in order to find love and connection, he must first find eight individuals who can help him realize his vision--a search that becomes dangerous when he must pull his country back from rebellion and chaos.

Frustrated by his research efforts and depressed over the death of his brothers, Andre Banson runs into two fellow anthropologists, a married couple, in 1930s New Guinea and begins a tumultuous relationship with them.

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was "to proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed....

"Bestselling author Benjamin Black turns his eye to sixteenth century Prague and a story of murder, magic and the dark art of wielding extraordinary power Christian Stern, an ambitious young scholar and alchemist, arrives in Prague in the bitter winter of 1599, intent on making his fortune at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, the eccentric Rudolf II. The night of his arrival, drunk and lost, Christian stumbles upon the body of a young woman in...

In a perfect follow-up to his first two books, Nick Trout turns his lens inward and offers a funny, moving, and thoughtful memoir about the animals he's had all his life.

The brilliance of the Renaissance laid the foundation of the modern world. Textbooks tell us that it came about as a result of a rediscovery of the ideas and ideals of classical Greece and Rome. But now bestselling historian Gavin Menzies makes the startling argument that in the year 1434, China-then the world's most technologically advanced civilization-provided the spark that set the European Renaissance ablaze. From that date onward, Europeans...