A passenger train hurtling through the night. An unwed teenage mother headed to Moscow to seek a new life. A cruel-hearted soldier looking furtively, forcibly, for sex. An infant disappearing without a trace.
So begins Martin Cruz Smith's masterful "Three Stations," a suspenseful, intricately constructed novel featuring Investigator Arkady Renko. For the last three decades, beginning with the trailblazing "Gorky Park," Renko (and Smith) have captivated readers with detective tales set in Russia. Renko is the ironic, brilliantly observant cop who finds solutions to heinous crimes when other lawmen refuse to even acknowledge that crimes have occurred. He uses his biting humor and intuitive leaps to fight not only wrongdoers but the corrupt state apparatus as well.
In "Three Stations," Renko's skills are put to their most severe test. Though he has been technically suspended from the prosecutor's office for once again turning up unpleasant truths, he strives to solve a last case: the death of an elegant young woman whose body is found in a construction trailer on the perimeter of Moscow's main rail hub. It looks like a simple drug overdose to everyone--except to Renko, whose examination of the crime scene turns up some inexplicable clues, most notably an invitation to Russia's premier charity ball, the billionaires' Nijinksy Fair. Thus a sordid death becomes interwoven with the lifestyles of Moscow's rich and famous, many of whom are clinging to their cash in the face of Putin's crackdown on the very oligarchs who placed him in power.
Renko uncovers a web of death, money, madness and a kidnapping that threatens the woman he is coming to love and the lives of children he is desperate to protect. In "Three Stations," Smith produces a complex and haunting vision of an emergent Russia's secret underclass of street urchins, greedy thugs and a bureaucracy still paralyzed by power and fear.
"
"

A darkly comic, boundary-pushing debut following an adrift Pakistani translator in London who attends a mysterious language school which boasts complete fluency in just ten days, but at a secret, sinister cost. Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of 'great works of literature,' but instead mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies, living off her parents' generous allowance, and discussing the 'underside of life' with her best friend, Naima. Anisa's mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, only adds to her growing sense of inadequacy with his savant-level aptitude for languages, successfully leveraging his expansive knowledge into an enviable career. But when Adam learns to speak Urdu with native fluency practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret. Adam begrudgingly tells Anisa about The Centre, an elite, invite-only program that guarantees near-instant fluency in any language. Skeptical but intrigued, Anisa enrolls-stripped of her belongings, contact with the outside world, and bodily autonomy-and emerges ten days later fluent in German. As Anisa enmeshes herself further within The Centre, seduced by all that it's made possible, she soon realizes the true cost of its services. By turns dark, funny, and surreal, and with twists page-turning and shocking, The Centre takes the reader on a journey through Karachi, London, and New Delhi, interrogating the sticky politics of language, translation, and appropriation with biting specificity, and ultimately asking: what is success really worth?

Jeffrey Archer's first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, is page-turning tale of fraud, revenge and determination as four men stop at nothing to get back what was stolen from them. One million dollars - that's what Harvey Metcalfe, lifelong king of shady deals, has pulled off with empty promises of an oil bonanza and instant riches. Overnight, four men - the heir to an earldom, a Harley Street doctor, a Bond Street art dealer and an Oxford don - find themselves penniless. But this time Harvey has swindled the wrong men. They band together and shadow him from the casinos of Monte Carlo to the high-stakes windows at Ascot and the hallowed lawns of Oxford. Their plan is simple: to sting the crook for exactly what they lost - not a penny more, not a penny less.

The No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling series set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, perfect for fans of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy and Netflix's The Crown 'Gripping' Sunday Times 'Fast-paced and entertaining' Mail on Sunday A TREASONOUS PLOT England, 1586. Giordano Bruno, heretic turned spy, passes on vital information to spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. A band of Catholic Englishmen are plotting to kill Queen Elizabeth and install Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne. A DEADLY TRAP Walsingham, already aware of the plot, is allowing it to progress. He hopes that Mary will put her support in writing - and condemn herself to a traitor's death. A QUEEN IN DANGER Bruno must go undercover, join the conspirators and stop them. A queen is destined to die; Bruno must make sure it is the right one... Praise for Execution 'A brilliantly realised fictionalisation of the Babington plot against Elizabeth 1' Observer 'Execution has an atmospheric sense of place. The plot twists and turns' The Times 'Immaculate... the depth of period detail, the all-enveloping sense of time and place, and the sheer gory drama' Metro 'Sumptuous' New York Times 'Parris's attention to the details of Elizabethan life and her ability to create characters of depth are again on display in a gripping narrative' The Sunday Times 'Fast-paced and entertaining' Mail on Sunday 'Parris is one of the stars of historical crime fiction and this, her sixth Giordano Bruno novel, is among her best'i 'Superbly plotted, shimmeringly written, it will have you on the edge of your seat' Kate Williams, author of The Storms of War 'An impressive feat' Marisa Haetzman, also writes as Ambrose Parry

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel Baker Towers in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the conflicting forces at its heart-a bold, moving drama of hope and desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families. Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn't count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother's skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling-until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives. Told through a cast of characters whose lives are increasingly bound by the opposing interests that underpin the national debate, Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Soaring and ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders' meeting to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the "strippins," haunting reminders of Pennsylvania's past energy booms. This is a dispatch from a forgotten America-a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.