Showing results for "Killing" in Historical

Alex Parkinson is in love with his writing tutor, Siobhan. He has never loved anyone like this, but how can he convince Siobhan that they are meant to be together? So Alex stalks her on Facebook and finds out where she lives, buys her presents using her own credit card and sends her messages telling her exactly what he wants to do to her. He breaks into her house, reads her diary and secretly listens to her while she takes a bath. Isn't that what all lovers do?

Autumn 1942. Hitler's legions have swept across Europe; France has fallen; Churchill and the English stand isolated on their island. In North Africa, Rommel and his Panzers have routed the British Eighth Army and stand poised to overrun Egypt, Suez, and the oil fields of the Middle East.

Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the Channel Islands’ endangered native creatures from invasive species like rats and feral pigs, which, in her view, must be eliminated. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a dreadlocked local businessman who, along with his lover, the folksinger Anise Reed, is fiercely opposed to the killing of any species whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert the plans of Alma and her colleagues.

L.D. Cade thought the war was behind him. Drifting west with a worn coat and a faster draw, he lands in 1870s San Francisco—a city of gilded mansions, backroom deals, and blood in the gutters. A job guarding a smooth-talking real estate tycoon looks like a lucky break. But nothing in this city is what it seems. Beneath the champagne and smoke, something darker is at work. As Cade moves through the Barbary Coast’s chaos, Russian Hill’s velvet facades, and Chinatown’s guarded alleyways, he’s pulled into a web of power, lies, and violence.

Breathless and painstakingly researched, this is a stunning debut mystery in which Sherlock Holmes unmasks Jack the Ripper. Lyndsay Faye perfectly captures all the color and syntax of Conan Doyle’s distinctive nineteenth-century London.

A beautiful nineteen-year-old named Gilda becomes the mistress of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. She dreams of becoming his wife. The narrator, in love with Gilda, follows clues about her death two years after the affair. During an assassination attempt on the Shah, he gets shot on the steps of the Marble Palace. As he puts it, "I took a bullet for my king up the ass and got a jester's seat, the best seat, to watch the fall of the Persian Empire."

Freya Miller, funny and tenacious with a taste for vodka, escapes a recent tragedy by answering an advertisement for a nursing job that promises “Light Duties. Large Pay. No Questions Asked or Answered.” Her new employer is the infamous, eccentric, and stupendously rich Vincetti family, heads of the Halcyon Corporation. Her task will be to care for their adored heir, Elijah, who is currently lying in a coma amidst an armada of premium machinery. The Vincettis claim this golden boy is everything from a saint to a genius, but they refuse to reveal how he entered a comatose state.

Western Ocean, 1942... From the bridge of HMS Gladiator, Lieutenant-Commander David Howard’s orders were chillingly clear. There could be no mercy. To the men who fought to protect the vital, threatened Merchant Navy convoys in the Western Approaches, the Battle of the Atlantic was a full-scale war. A relentless, savage war against an ever-present enemy and a violent sea - in an arena known only to its embittered survivors as the killing ground. HMS Gladiator was part of that war.

Sending his human resources manager on a reconnaissance mission to the great Jin city of Rhizun seemed like a good idea to Genghis Khan at the time, until a serendipitous scroll appears with revelations of a secret heir to the khanate. To save his legacy, Genghis sends his Mongol horde into Jin lands with nothing more than the fiercest army the world has ever known and several hundred of Captain Kupcayk’s famous buns. Unfortunately for Genghis, his successor is on the wrong side of the city walls.

January, 1145. Godfrey Bowyer, the best but least likeable bow maker in Worcester, dies an agonising death by poisoning. Although similarly struck down after the same meal, his wife, Blanche, survives. The number of people who could have administered the poison should mean a very short investigation for the sheriff’s men, Hugh Bradecote, Serjeant Catchpoll and Underserjeant Walkelin, but perhaps someone was pulling the strings, and that widens the net considerably.

Duff MacCallister has just returned from a trip back to his native Scotland - more determined than ever to build a new future in Chugwater Valley, Wyoming. But Duff will do it his way, buying up a herd of rare Scottish black angus from the Kansas City market. He can’t know that his dream is threatened by a man driven by one desire: to take other people’s money and other people’s lives.

To lose one husband may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like murder. In New South Wales in 1888, Louisa Collins was sentenced to hang after being tried multiple times for the alleged murders of her two husbands. The testimony of her young daughter helped to decide her fate. This clever and compelling novel recreates Louisa’s time in her Darlinghurst prison cell as she reflects on her life and on the grief and loss that delivered her to this place.

A family holiday to the seaside takes a dramatic turn when Lady Ottilia Fanshawe's young son Luke accidentally stumbles on a body in a cave. Lady Fan and her husband Francis quickly rush to the scene and find the corpse bound and blindfolded with a bullet hole in his head. It appears the man was executed, and with smugglers well-known to operate in the area, the local sergeant suggests it was a quarrel amongst the reprobates.

In Killing a Messiah, New Testament scholar Adam Winn weaves together stories of historical and fictional characters in a fresh reimagining of the events leading up to Jesus's execution. Based on what we know of the first-century context, Winn's narrative offers compelling explanations for gaps in the Gospel accounts. The social, political, and religious realities of Jesus's world come to life and shed new light on our reading of the biblical texts. In a city full of political entanglements, espionage, and competing interests, the blame for the crucifixion is complex.

On a damp July morning in 1946, two schoolboys find a woman’s body in a bomb site in north London. The woman is identified as Lillian Frobisher, a wife and mother who lived in a war-damaged terrace a few streets away. The police assume that Lil must have been the victim of a vicious sexual assault; but the autopsy finds no evidence of rape, and Divisional Detective Inspector Jim Cooper turns his attention to her private life. How did Lil come to be in the bomb site – a well-known lovers’ haunt? If she had consensual sex, why was she strangled?

With the tourist season well and truly over in South Devon, Detective Inspector Wesley Peterson is looking forward to a quieter month in the CID. But when a man is shot dead on Bonfire Night, he finds he has a disturbing and complex murder case on his hands. The body of Patrick North was found in woodland connected to Nesbaraton Hall, a grand estate dating back to the eighteenth century. North worked for the Smithson family who now own the estate.

After travelling to the notoriously haunted Crowswood Castle to recover from illness, Cambridge student Vita Carew finds herself at the centre of a ghostly unsolved mystery. As renovations on the ancient castle near completion, old secrets emerge, and Vita must decipher the meaning of a hidden message in an old painting of the deceased previous mistress of the house. When workmen unearth human remains in the castle grounds, Vita finds herself piecing together the clues to a chilling decades-old mystery.

Quarry, star of 13 previous novels, a comic book, and the acclaimed Cinemax TV series, returns in an all-new assignment that takes the hitman's hitman into uncharted territory, when he finds out that for the first time someone has taken out a hit on him. And is the mysterious killer assigned to hit the hitman someone from Quarry's past? Maybe even a past lover?

Baron Herbert’s return from crusade should have been a joyous occasion. Instead, he grows increasingly morose, withdraws from his family, and refuses to share his wife’s bed. When his sons begin to die in strange accidents, some ask whether Herbert harbors a dark sin for which God has cursed him. Or perhaps there is a malign presence at this stormblasted castle, oddly named Doux et Dur.

The year is 1967 and the Vietnam War is raging. Lieutenant Ben Kinkaid of the US military police is patrolling the chaotic streets of Saigon after curfew when he crosses paths with US Army clerk Tommy Banks and his girlfriend, Grace Waverly. Grace says she’s a peace tourist, but she’s also a member of RAW—an anti-war group bent on stopping the war by any means necessary.