Showing results by narrator "Steven Crossley" in All Categories

In this blistering polemic, veteran journalist Mick Hume presents an uncompromising defence of freedom of expression, which he argues is threatened in the West not by jackbooted censorship but by a creeping culture of conformism and you-can't-say-that. The cold-blooded murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in January 2015 brought a deadly focus to the issue of free speech. Leaders of the free-thinking world united in condemning the killings, proclaiming ‘Je suis Charlie'.

When the wealthy and powerful Ludovic Degroof’s jewelry store is broken into, nothing is stolen, but the jewels have been dissolved in jars of aqua regia, an acid so strong it can even melt gold. In the empty safe is a scrap of paper on which a strange square has been drawn. At first, Inspector Van In pays little attention to the paper. But when Degroof’s offspring also receive letters with this same square, Van In and the beautiful new DA Hannelore Martens find themselves unraveling a complex web.

Doug Perkins doesn't dislike cats - he just isn't especially interested in them. But the struggling young London public relations firm Perkins and Tate can't afford to be choosy about the jobs they take. So when Doug is asked to do the PR for a glorified feline extravaganza called Cats Through the Ages, he doesn't hesitate. But it isn't long before he wishes he had hesitated. There are some very valuable cats on exhibit - even a few feline celebrities.

A tense, mesmerizing novel about memory, privacy, fear, and what happens when our past catches up with us. After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life...

Life has been difficult for 10-year-old Colley Trevelyan ever since he lost his mother and father in a fatal carriage accident. Most of the servants have been dismissed, and the house feels empty. To make matters worse, soon he will be living with his aunt and uncle who have never liked him. One night he suddenly wakes up wrapped tightly in a rough blanket. As he struggles to free himself, a strange man carries him to a waiting carriage.

Wisecracking PI Kemal Kayankaya cares more about sausage and beer than politics, but when he's hired to defend four eco-terrorists charged with murdering a chemical plant owner, he finds himself stuck in the middle of Germany's culture wars. It doesn't take long for Kayankaya to realize that the whole situation stinks and that both the Left and the Right have blood on their hands. And is the fiery journalist Carla Reedermann dogging his steps because she smells a story, or is she after something more? A hardboiled noir in the Chandler tradition....

Secret agent Mr. Adolph Verloc operates from a seedy Soho shop, where he deals in pornography and espionage. Idle, treacherous, and self-righteous, he makes the life of his wife, Winnie, one of silent misery. When Verloc is assigned to plant a bomb at Greenwich Observatory, his plans go terribly awry, and his family has to deal with the tragic repercussions of his actions. Joseph Conrad's dark satire on English society, while rooted in the Edwardian period, remains strikingly contemporary.

Cambridge, October 1933. Inside the old All Hallows Church on All Hallows' Eve, Dr. Adelaide Hartest witnesses the final moments of a dying stranger. Despite the dagger plunged into the stranger's chest and his last-minute confession, the death is ruled a suicide. The victim, it is revealed, is known to Scotland Yard, and Assistant Commissioner Joe Sandilands is sent up from London to investigate.

The Reign of Terror has ended, and Napoleon Bonaparte has seized power, but shifting political loyalties still tear apart families and lovers. On Christmas Eve 1800, a bomb explodes along Bonaparte's route, narrowly missing him but striking dozens of bystanders. Chief Inspector Roch Miquel, a young policeman with a bright future and a beautiful mistress, must arrest the assassins before they attack again.

Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later - in a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Not only have his fellow Londoners forgotten most of what humankind used to know, before civilization collapsed, but they don't particularly care to re-learn any of it. Though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, Tuft eventually decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful.

In The Last of All Possible Worlds, royalty, bankers, lovers, and wives intertwine to create a vivid portrait of Europe in the early 1900s. We meet wise and worldly Prince Sobieski, Vienna's ambassador in London, his enchanting wife, her English lover, and her enigmatic lifelong companion, Josefa. When Sobieski's illegitimate daughter makes a demand of her influential father, the unspoken rules of the family are challenged.

Long ago, in a land by the sea, 12-year-old Aaron lives with his mother in the wooded countryside. Because the boy is mute, he depends on his mother completely. But when a sudden blizzard strands his mother in a distant town, Aaron finds himself alone for the first time in his life. Setting out in the snow to look for his mother, the boy embarks on a perilous, silent journey that will carry him to the eerie Half-a-Moon Inn. There, held captive by the sharp-eyed Miss Grackle, Aaron will discover her wicked powers.

For the first time in the history of our planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - is now living in cities. City is the ultimate guidebook to our urban centers - the signature unit of human civilization. With erudite prose, this unique work of metatourism explores what cities are and how they work. It covers history, customs and language, districts, transport, money, work, shops and markets, and tourist sites, creating a fantastically detailed portrait of the city through history and into the future.

Naomi Stride was a wealthy woman, and her death has left several people richer - none more so than her 26-year-old son Theo, with whom she had long had bitter differences over money. She was also a controversial woman, a writer whose novels had been banned in South Africa. But was it for money, politics, or some other unknown reason that she was killed? And why was her naked corpse strewn with flowers and herbs? These are the questions South African Lieutenant Kramer and his partner must answer.

Double trouble surprise! Julia hasn’t seen her husband Max for almost a year, but he’s just walked through the door of their home looking as breathtaking as ever. Max has come to make things right with his beloved Julia. However, a lot can happen in a year and Max hasn’t bargained on meeting two surprise little twin girls. Now, Max has two weeks to prove he can be a wonderful husband and father.

A trip to London turns deadly...until a cat helps foil a nearly purrfect crime. Larkin's Luxury Tours Number 79 is a traveler's nightmare. The problems started in Zurich, when one of the group died under mysterious circumstances. Now the remaining tour members have landed in London, tight lipped, fearful, and ready to ask for their money back. It's up to Doug Perkins of PR firm Perkins and Tate to restore their spirits.

Charles Marlow is a steamboat captain on the River Thames near Gravesend, England. He and his crew work for an ivory trading company. One day he recounts to his fellow crew the story of his life and how he became a captain for the steamboat company. The focus of his story involves the journey Marlow undertook to the outer reaches of the company's operations. Here he tells of his wild encounters with Mr. Kurtz, a man with a great reputation for bringing in the most ivory for the company.

Bill Buford spends a wild night in the park; Jonathan Safran Foer envisions it as a tiny, transplanted piece of a mythical Sixth Borough; and Marie Winn answers definitively Holden Caulfield's question of where the ducks go when the park's ponds freeze over. There are bird sightings and fish sightings; Jackie Kennedy and James Brown sightings; and pieces by Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, and Francine Prose. This vibrant collection presents Central Park in all its many-faceted glory, a 51-block swath of special magic.

Love is never easy - especially when your girlfriend is an illegal Thai prostitute who has been kidnapped (again) by a gang of sex traffickers. Fortunately for the hapless fiancé, wisecracking gumshoe Kemal Kayankaya is on the case. The son of a Turkish garbage collector, he knows a thing or two about living in the ethnic fringes of the ugliest German city of them all: Frankfurt. Kayankaya plunges into the city's underbelly, where the police don't care if you live or die, and the powerful view an illegal alien as just another paycheck.

Six days into their search for a man who put a .32-caliber bullet into a South African antique dealer, neither Kramer of the Murder Squad nor his Bantu assistant, Zondi, has a single lead in the case. On the seventh day, Mrs. Digby-Smith opens the trunk of her car and discovers the hideous, tied-up corpse of her younger brother. Two violent crimes - seemingly unconnected. But as Kramer and Zondi pursue their investigation, startling connections turn up in the sordid underworld of Terkkersburg and in the secret, unresolved enmities of World War II.