A sweeping historical and political analysis with detailed ethnographic fieldwork of the politics of everyday life in postcolonial Africa. In post-apartheid South Africa, nearly a fifth of the urban population lives in shacks. Unable to wait any longer for government housing, people occupy land, typically seeking to fly under the state's radar. Yet in most cases, occupiers wind up in dialogue with the state. In Delivery as Dispossession, Zachary Levenson follows this journey from avoidance to incorporation, explaining how the post-apartheid Constitution shifts squatters' struggles onto the judicial register. Providing a comparative ethnographic account of two land occupations in Cape Town and highlighting occupiers' struggles, Levenson further demonstrates why it is that housing officials seek the eviction of all new occupations: they view these unsanctioned settlements as a threat to the order they believe is required for delivery. Yet in evicting occupiers, he argues, they reproduce the problem anew, with subsequent rounds of land occupation as the inevitable consequence. Offering a unique framework for thinking about local states, this book proposes a novel theory of the state that will change the way ethnographers think about politics.

Living in the shadow of state is not a dark, static and silent world. It was the world in full radiance, involving multiple process of reenactment to life, lifeways and relationship. If state and history demonized the hill people as the 'pest' and 'nuisance' to civilization, and the hill practices as the 'relics' of the 'primitive', the hillmen's narratives celebrated them as their core cultural collective. Against State, Against History is a radical reevaluation of the dominant civilizational narratives on the 'tribe' and attempts to recast their history in the light of recent historiography that presents the hillmen as state evading population. Bringing together both conventional and oral narratives, and from the counter-perspectives of the margin, the book explores the conditions in which section of valley population escaped to the hills, their migration history, how they reenact their space, society, culture and economy in the hills. Their physical dispersion in the highland terrain, choosing an independent village polity, defended by trained warriors, fortressed at the top of hills, connected by repulsive pathways, following jhum economy, and adopting a pliable social, cultural, ethnic and gender formations, are their counter cultural collective at the margins of state. They were reenacted to prevent state control and the emergence of domination relations in the hills. This process is understood as unstate involving the process of disowning state and becoming an egalitarian society where freedom of individuals was located at the core of their cultural collective.

Undoing the Revolution looks at the way rural underclasses ally with out-of-power elites to overthrow their governments-only to be shut out of power when the new regime assumes control. Vasabjit Banerjee first examines why peasants need to ally with dissenting elites in order to rebel. He then shows how conflict resolution and subsequent bargains to form new state institutions re-empower allied elites and re-marginalize peasants. Banerjee evaluates three different agrarian societies during distinct time periods spanning the twentieth century: revolutionary Mexico from 1910 to 1930; late-colonial India from 1920 until 1947; and White-dominated Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) from the mid-1960s to 1980. This comparative approach also allows examination of both the underclass need for elite participation and the variety of causes that elites use to incentivize peasant classes to participate, extending from religious-ethnic identity and common political targets to the peasants' and elites' own economic grievances. Undoing the Revolution demonstrates that both international and domestic investors in cash crops, natural resources, and finance can ally with peasant rebels; and, after threatened or actual state collapse, they can bargain with each other to select new state institutions.

A challenge to prevailing ideas about innovation and a guide to identifying the best growth strategy for your community. Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the early years of the information age, we've been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must create good education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism. But are there other models that don't rely on a flourishing high-tech industry? In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation. They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere. Breznitz proposes that communities instead focus on where they fit in the four stages in the global production process. Some are at the highest end, and that is where the Clevelands, Sheffields, and Baltimores are being pushed toward. But that is bad advice. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. As he stresses, all localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it. Leaders might think the answer lies in high-tech or high-end manufacturing, but more often than not, they're wrong. Innovation in Real Places is an essential corrective to a mythology of innovation and growth that too many places have bought into in recent years. Best of all, it has the potential to prod local leaders into pursuing realistic and regionally appropriate models for growth and innovation.

You hear a lot these days about "innovation and entrepreneurship" and about how "good jobs" in tech will save our cities. Yet these common tropes hide a stunning reality: local lives and fortunes are tied to global capital. You see this clearly in metropolises such as San Francisco and New York that have emerged as "superstar cities." In these cities, startups bloom, jobs of the future multiply, and a meritocracy trained in digital technology, backed by investors who control deep pools of capital, forms a new class: the tech-financial elite. In The Innovation Complex, the eminent urbanist Sharon Zukin shows the way these forces shape the new urban economy through a rich and illuminating account of the rise of the tech sector in New York City. Drawing from original interviews with venture capitalists, tech evangelists, and economic development officials, she shows how the ecosystem forms and reshapes the city from the ground up. Zukin explores the people and plans that have literally rooted digital technology in the city. That in turn has shaped a workforce, molded a mindset, and generated an archipelago of tech spaces, which in combination have produced a now-hegemonic "innovation" culture and geography. She begins with the subculture of hackathons and meetups, introduces startup founders and venture capitalists, and explores the transformation of the Brooklyn waterfront from industrial wasteland to "innovation coastline." She shows how, far beyond Silicon Valley, cities like New York are shaped by an influential "triple helix" of business, government, and university leaders-an alliance that joins C. Wright Mills's "power elite," real estate developers, and ambitious avatars of "academic capitalism." As a result, cities around the world are caught between the demands of the tech economy and communities' desires for growth-a massive and often-insurmountable challenge for those who hope to reap the rewards of innovation's success.

Living Off-grid in Wales examines the new policy context for off-grid rural development by contrasting the policy approach with the activist version of going off-grid. The examples examined in the book feed into much broader debates about the possibility of planning for sustainable development. This book brings clarity to the notion of off-grid by examining two main case studies (supplemented by other ethnographic data) that do off-grid very differently to each other. The policy context that is examined in the book is distinctive to Wales - it is novel to see a planning policy that not only incorporates, but insists on off-grid. The book pivots on this contradiction: if planning (as is thought) is about the spatial reproduction of society, then why should it encourage autonomy from these systems? The ethnographic case studies also comprise an ethnography of rural Wales, and the book's focus on alternative communities brings a fresh perspective to the anthropological literature on community by considering off-grid as a new form of radical social assemblage.

The South African government has prioritized a reduction of poverty and increased food security in rural parts of South Africa through agrarian transformation. As the bearers and beneficiaries of rural development initiatives, smallholder farmers, including those keeping livestock, loom large in this arena. Likewise, on international development agendas steered by bodies such as the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), smallholders are prioritized as the engines of national economies. This book, based on a pilot study of two livestock keeping communities along the Mpumalanga-Limpopo border, explores smallholder households in order to paint a picture of the challenges faced by smallholder livestock farmers, the practices and knowledge of primary animal healthcare (PAHC) among these farmers, relationships between the state and the smallholders, gendered issues, and the relationship between poor socioeconomic conditions and the keeping of livestock. This book opens up a variety of research and policy questions that encourage further exploration and study.

Throughout the world people are concerned about the demise of tropical forests and their wildlife. Hunting by forest-dwelling people has a dramatic effect on wildlife in many tropical forests, frequently driving species to local extinction, with devastating implications for other species and the health of the forests themselves. But wildlife is an important source of protein and cash for rural peoples. Can hunting be managed to conserve biological communities while meeting human needs? Are hunting rates as practiced by tropical forest peoples sustainable? If not, what are the biological, social, and cultural implications of this failure? Answering these questions is ever more important as national and international agencies seek to integrate the development of local peoples with the conservation of tropical forest systems and species.

This book presents a wide array of studies that examine the sustainability of hunting as practiced by rural peoples. Comprising work by both biological and social scientists, "Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests" provides a balanced viewpoint on the ecological and human aspects of this hunting. The first section examines the effects of hunting on wildlife in tropical forests throughout the world. The next section looks at the importance of hunting to local communities. The third section looks at institutional challenges of resource management, while the fourth draws on economic perspectives to understand both hunting and sustainability. A final section provides synthesis and summary of the factors that influence sustainability and the implications for management.

Drawing on examples from Ecuador to Congo-Zaire to Sulawesi, "Hunting for Sustainability in Tropical Forests" will be a valuable resource to policymakers, conservation organizations, and students and scholars of biology, ecology, and anthropology.

Revelatory, lyrical and immersive, this is an extraordinary book that takes you deep into these ordinary women's worlds... Their stories are urgent and forcefully articulated - and this book gives us the chance to hear them. On an island at the eastern edge of India, rural, remote and dense with jungle, is a Muslim village. In an ever-shifting landscape of mangroves and rivers, the women here dwell among contradictions, constrictions and change in a place where one's neighbours are often too close for comfort. Nine Paths follows the lives of nine of these women, and their families, over the course of a year - from one monsoon season to another. There are weddings to celebrate and deaths to mourn, difficult marriages to navigate and tragedies to overcome, as we observe the everyday drudgery and unexpected turmoil, and the dreams of something better. Revelatory, lyrical and immersive, this is an extraordinary book that takes you deep into these ordinary women's worlds. Anthropologist Lexi Stadlen spent sixteen months in this village, talking, listening, and getting to know these women, who were willing to share their complicated, fascinating lives. Their stories are urgent and forcefully articulated - and this book gives us the chance to hear them.

At the outset of the twentieth century, the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island were a small population of fishermen under Russian dominion and an Asian cultural sway. The turbulence of the decades that followed would transform them dramatically. While Russian missionaries hounded them for their pagan ways, Lenin praised them; while Stalin routed them in purges, Khrushchev gave them respite; and while Brezhnev organized complex resettlement campaigns, Gorbachev pronounced that they were free to resume a traditional life. But what is tradition after seven decades of building a Soviet world?

Based on years of research in the former Soviet Union, Bruce Grant's book draws upon Nivkh interviews, newly opened archives, and rarely translated Soviet ethnographic texts to examine the effects of this remarkable state venture in the construction of identity. With a keen sensitivity, Grant explores the often paradoxical participation by Nivkhi in these shifting waves of Sovietization and poses questions about how cultural identity is constituted and reconstituted, restructured and dismantled.

Part chronicle of modernization, part saga of memory and forgetting, "In the Soviet House of Culture" is an interpretive ethnography of one people's attempts to recapture the past as they look toward the future. This is a book that will appeal to anthropologists and historians alike, as well as to anyone who is interested in the people and politics of the former Soviet Union.

The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia-still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.

A TELEGRAPH AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE 'Impressive . . . tender, unflinching' Guardian 'This is poetry in the grand tradition of annihiliation by desire. It's what the young are always learning, and the old, if they are wise, never forget' Anne Boyer, author of The Undying 'Brilliant . . . heralds the arrival of a frank and vital poetic voice' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti 'Frank and alert . . . an important voice in British poetry' Eley Williams, author of The Liar's Dictionary 'Direct and heart-breaking' Alex Dimitrov, author of Love and Other Poems 'A rare thing . . . razor-sharp' Julia Copus, author of This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew In Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb turns poetry to an examination of the textures of class, youth, adulthood and death in the working communities of the West Country, from mobile home parks, boyish factory workers and saleswomen kept on the road for days at a time, to the yearnings of young love and the complexities of masculinity. Alongside individual poems, three sequences predominate: a series of 'Love Stories', charting a course through the dreams, lies and salt-baked limbs of multiple relationships; 'Diagnostics', which tells the story of the death from cancer of the poet's father; and 'Treetops', a virtuosic long poem weaving together grief and mental health struggles in an attempt to come to terms with the overwhelming data of a life. The world of these poems is close, dangerous, lustrous and difficult: a world in which whole existences are lived in the spin of almost-inescapable fates. In searching for the light within it, this prodigious debut collection announces the arrival of a major new voice in British poetry.

In Downeast, Gigi Georges follows five girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard. Their stories reveal surprising truths about rural America and offer hope for its future. "It's almost impossible not to care about these fierce young women and cheer for their hard-won successes" (Kirkus) in this "heartfelt portrait" and "worthy tribute" (Publishers Weekly). Nestled in Maine's far northeast corner, Washington County sits an hour's drive from the heart of famed and bustling Acadia National Park. Yet it's a world away. For Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie-five teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote region-it is home. Downeast follows their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times, creating a nuanced and unique portrait of rural America with women at its center. Willow lives in the shadow of an abusive, drug-addicted father and searches for stability through photography and love. Vivian, a gifted writer, feels stifled by her church and town, and struggles to break free without severing family ties. Mckenna is a softball pitching phenom whose passion is the lobster-fishing she learned at her father's knee. Audrey is a beloved high school basketball star who earns a coveted college scholarship but questions her chosen path. Josie, a Yale-bound valedictorian, is determined to take the world by storm. All five girls know the pain and joy of life in a region whose rugged beauty and stoicism mask dwindling populations, vanishing job opportunities, and pervasive opioid addiction. As the girls reach adulthood, they discover that despite significant challenges, there is much to celebrate in "the valley of the overlooked." Their stories remind us of the value of timeless ideals: strength of family and community, reverence for nature's rule, dignity in cracked hands and muddied shoes, and the enduring power of home. Revealed through the eyes of Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie, Downeast is based on four years of intimate reporting. The result is a beautifully rendered, emotionally startling, and vital book. Downeast will break readers' hearts yet offer them hope, providing answers to what the future may hold for rural America.

Private investigator Kate Weller knows her co-workers are in serious trouble when she is unable to reach them in the third enthralling Marked for Retribution mystery. Kate Weller's boss, Nate Price, has some exciting news: Julian Frazier, a friend of one of the agency's wealthy clients, has invited the Nate Price Investigations team and their partners on a trip of a lifetime to his home on Elysian Island, an exclusive retreat off the Georgian coast. But there's a catch. Frazier has written his own murder mystery script, and the PIs must work out whodunnit. As they're about to discover, though, the murder Frazier wants them to solve is a real cold case, and there's a killer twist that isn't in the script . . . Unable to reach Elysian Island and her co-workers, Kate is sure that someone wants her to stay away. Can she stop a ruthless killer and uncover the truth behind a deadly game?

Mobilizing for Development tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia's political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s-1970s), South Korea (1950s-1970s), and China (1980s-2000s), Kristen E. Looney shows that different types of development outcomes-improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment-were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. She argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization. Looney's research is based on several years of fieldwork in Asia and makes a unique contribution by systematically comparing China's development experience with other countries. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian Studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.

Across the Blue Ridge Mountains stretches a world both charming and complicated. Jeremy Jones and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior. He takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school and sets out on a search to understand how this ancient land has shaped its people-how it shaped him. His search sends him burrowing in the past-hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accents and immigrant populations, tracing both Walmart sidewalks and carved-out mountains-and pondering the future. He meshes narrative and myth, geology and genealogy, fiddle tunes and local color in his exploration of the briskly changing and oft-stigmatized world of his native southern Appalachians and particularly the mystical Bearwallow Mountain, a peak suddenly in flux.

As she struggles to find her feet with her work, new problems emerge... Meg Turner is finally doing the job she loves, but life as a sheep farmer proves tougher than she anticipated. She is a woman trying to prove herself in a man's world against the backdrop of a brutal war. With her faith being tested in her work, she also fears that the man she loves will betray her again. Meg struggles to allow herself to love baby Lissa when her mother may return to claim her at any moment. Meanwhile, Kath faces new challenges in the WAAF, but cannot stop thinking about her child. Can she ever get over the guilt of leaving her child behind? A heartwarming story of love and loyalty, perfect for fans of Anna Jacobs and Rosie Harris.

The popular culture of urban and rural tsarist Russia revealed a dynamic and troubled world. Stephen Frank and Mark Steinberg have gathered here a diverse collection of essays by Western and Russian scholars who question conventional interpretations and recall neglected stories about popular behavior, politics, and culture. What emerges is a new picture of lower-class life, in which traditions and innovations intermingled and social boundaries and identities were battered and reconstructed.

The authors vividly convey the vitality as well as the contradictions of social life in old regime Russia, while also confronting problems of interpretation, methodology, and cultural theory. They tell of peasant death rites and religious beliefs, family relationships and brutalities, defiant peasant women, folk songs, urban amusement parks, expressions of popular patriotism, the penny press, workers' notions of the self, street hooliganism, and attempts by educated Russians to transform popular festivities. Together, the authors portray popular culture not as a static, separate world, but as the dynamic means through which lower-class Russians engaged the world around them.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Daniel R. Brower, Barbara Alpern Engel, Hubertus F. Jahn, Al'bin M. Konechnyi, Boris N. Mironov, Joan Neuberger, Robert A. Rothstein, and Christine D. Worobec.

Laurence Wylie's remarkably warm and human account of life in the rural French village he calls Peyrane vividly depicts the villagers themselves within the framework of a systematic description of their culture. Since 1950, when Wylie began his study of Peyrane, to which he has returned on many occasions since, France has become a primarily industrial nation--and French village life has changed in many ways. The third edition of this book includes a fascinating new chapter based on Wylie's observations of Peyrane since 1970, with discussions of the Peyranais' gradual assimilation into the outside world they once staunchly resisted, the flux of the village population, and the general transformation in the character of French rural communities.

Welcome to Halesmere House, where romance might be just around the corner...After years of living in the past, Ella is ready to start building a future. The perfect opportunity presents itself when she is offered a short-term role at Halesmere House in the Lake District, and tasked with kick-starting its artists' residence. She can't wait to start and explore a new career in an inspiring location. But when Ella arrives at Halesmere, she wonders if she's made a huge mistake after she clashes with Max, the new owner. Max has his own reasons to be unsettled by her presence, but despite his misgivings it seems everyone else loves having Ella around. As a single dad, it's his children's attachment to her that bothers him most. Who will pick up the pieces when Ella leaves? What Max doesn't know is that Ella is falling for more than just the Lake District and the community around her. Can her temporary job lead to a permanent happy ending? A tender and uplifting Christmas romance for fans of Heidi Swain, Karen Swan and Sue Moorcroft. Praise for Snowfall Over Halesmere House 'Warmth, community and romance all wrapped up in a sumptuous setting - this is everything I want from a Christmas book!' Donna Ashcroft 'Suzanne's writing flows beautifully and her characters are real and vibrant. I thoroughly enjoyed the story carrying me along until was quite desperate for Ella and Max to find a way to be together.' Sue Moorcroft

At the turn of the nineteenth century, when the word "capital" first found its way into the vocabulary of mid-Hudson Valley residents, the term irrevocably marked the profound change that had transformed the region from an inward-looking, rural community into a participant in an emerging market economy. In "Farm, Shop, Landing" Martin Bruegel turns his attention to the daily lives of merchants, artisans, and farmers who lived and worked along the Hudson River in the decades following the American Revolution to explain how the seeds of capitalism were spread on rural U.S. soil.
Combining theoretical rigor with extensive archival research, Bruegel's account diverges from other historiographies of nineteenth-century economic development. It challenges the assumption that the coexistence of long-distance trade, private property, and entrepreneurial activity lead to one inescapable outcome: a market economy either wholeheartedly embraced or entirely rejected by its members. When Bruegel tells the story of farmer William Coventry struggling in the face of bad harvests, widow Mary Livingston battling her tenants, blacksmith Samuel Fowks perfecting the cast-iron plough, and Hannah Bushnell sending her butter to market, Bruegel shows that the social conventions of a particular community, and the real struggles and hopes of individuals, actively mold the evolving economic order. Ultimately, then, "Farm, Shop, Landing" suggests that the process of modernization must be understood as the result of the simultaneous and often contentious interplay of social and economic spheres.

Based on 18 months of fieldwork, this book investigates the everyday mechanisms of co-existence and continual creations of individual and social identities within the village of La Brumaire and its surrounding hamlets.

DI Clare Mackay is about to face a test of her loyalty...When a report comes in that a van containing two prison officers and a convicted jewel thief is missing, the police in St Andrews work quickly to locate the vehicle. Their efforts prove in vain when no trace is found and they realise the wives of both officers also appear to have left the area. Is this a case of corrupt guards springing a felon, or innocent people caught in the crossfire? DI Clare Mackay leads the team but has to do without her right hand man; DS Chris West is a cousin to one of the missing prison officers and must not be involved in the case. With a new sergeant at her side plus a previously unencountered DCI, Clare's people skills are pushed to the limit. Especially once she realises her boss is keeping her on the sidelines. Just what is it that Clare doesn't know? And if she has to choose between keeping secrets from a friend, or letting slip something that could see a culprit go free, which path will she take? A compelling addition to the bestselling series by a much-loved Scottish crime author, perfect for fans of Caro Ramsay, Lin Anderson and Alex Gray. Praise for Old Bones Lie'This is an absolute cracker of a book. An authentic, twisty and compelling detective novel written by a new star of Tartan Noir.' Neil Lancaster, author of The Blood Tide 'Old Bones Lie is a fine example of the police procedural. Tightly plotted, cogently told with an ensemble of characters following the clues and navigating various twists like the professionals they are to reach a solution that is neither pat nor unbelievable. A hugely enjoyable read indeed.' Douglas Skelton, author of An Honourable Thief 'A combination of razor-sharp plotting, wholly believable characters and rock-solid writing - another excellent instalment to the DI Clare Mackay series.' Alison Belsham, author of Death in Kabul 'Old Bones Lie is Marion Todd at her very best - forensically intriguing and a bloody good read... literally.' Jonathan Whitelaw, author of The Bingo Hall Detectives 'It's impossible to escape Marion's grip on you in this captivating, compelling hunt for lost souls, buried truth and a heartless killer.' Morgan Cry, author of Six Wounds 'Brilliant storytelling, tense and riveting with the reassuring presence of the wonderful DI Clare Mackay, I loved Old Bones Lie!' G.R. Halliday, author of Dark Waters 'Marion Todd has excelled herself this time! 5 stars.' Andrew James Greig, author of Whirligig 'Gripping and complex. This is Marion Todd's best yet. Her writing deepens and matures with each new book.' Allan Martin, author of the Inspector Angus Blue novels 'Another brilliant instalment to the DI Clare Mackay series. I couldn't stop reading. Plenty of twists and turns along the way, and just when you think you have it figured - you don't!' Reader review 'Marion Todd is one of my favourite authors and this book in the DI Mackay series doesn't disappoint with twists and turns from start to finish. Great read, couldn't put it down.' Reader review 'The story starts with a bang and carries the reader with both great writing and a very good story. For me, Marion Todd is now sitting comfortably alongside Caro Ramsay as the two best crime writers in Scotland today.' Reader review 'Old Bones Lie starts at a really fast pace and remains unrelenting as the story unfolds...The depth of research is plain to see, but the skill is in the storytelling, and I honestly believe that this is her best yet... ' Reader review

There's more to life than being fabulous... but it's a startRoz and Jamie have moved to leafy Suffolk from London in search of a quiet life, so it's a shock to find the village embarking on its riotous annual drag competition. Fuelled by large quantities of alcohol and boisterous community spirit, they are soon caught up in a battle for the identity of the village itself against those who'd prefer to stay stuck in the past. Meanwhile in San Francisco, Drew is facing his own challenge to save his drag club and the livelihoods of his closest friends. When he finds out about a small English village putting on a drag competition, inspiration strikes - and worlds collide. Appearances are not everything and sometimes human connections can surprise us, but will these realisations be too late to save the village and Drew's club? A gorgeously fun, heartwarming and tender story of unexpected friendships and acceptance. 'This is like an edgy Jilly Cooper - lots of eccentric characters and a lot of fun!' Katie Fforde 'Truly terrific...I love this book' Judy Astley 'High jinks and high heels... Imagine The Archers in drag, with a huge heart and lots of laughs' Veronica Henry