"Quite simply one of the best books of the year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington PostBen Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at eighteen and went to live in Egypt. There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, ...

"I wanted this story to ease anyone who was concern or worry about their name or anything else about themselves, as most of the names in this story are real. Take my name Crump, sounds like a paper bag collapsing. Let's all smile and enjoy our differences, I take no offence at you smiling at mine - Enjoy!Martin Crump"

A Transatlantic Adventure Fueled by Tea and Hedgerow FruitWhen American Claire Craig Evans married a charming British man, there was a cost for the snappy banter and countless offers of tea: she had to uproot life as she knew it and relocate to the UK. Who wouldn’t want to move to an enchanted island where mysterious women with dewy complexions made jam in thatched cottages with millennia-old lichen attached?Sure, experienced American expats offered nuggets...

The first in the explosive and bestselling Dewey Andreas series.The largest oil-platform in the Western Hemisphere and a major hydroelectric dam are destroyed in a coordinated terrorist attack. The West's energy supplies risk total failure.But when the terrorists strike a rig off the coast of Colombia, slaughtering the crew and destroying the oil field, there's one factor they don't take into account: former special forces operative Dewey Andreas....

Real-life all too rarely offers stories that are quite as satisfying as fiction. Bringing Down the House is one of the exceptions. Cheating in casinos is illegal; card-counting - making a record of what cards have so far been dealt to enable the player to make some prediction of what cards remain in the deck - is not. But casinos understandably dislike the practice and make every effort to keep card-counters out of their premises.Bringing Down the House tells the ...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House—the sources for the film The Social Network and 21—comes the larger-than-life rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world.Based on extensive insider intervi...

Introducing a major new thriller writer—in the vein of Vince Flynn and Brad Thor—and an electrifying character, Dewey Andreas.A major North American hydroelectric dam is blown up and the largest off-shore oil field in this hemisphere is destroyed in a brutal, coordinated terrorist attack. But there was one factor that the terrorists didn't take into account when they struck the Capitana platform off the coast of Colombia—slaughtering much of the crew and b...

In most of Ben's experiences, the humble Southern chefs share their long protected family recipes but it's not an adventure if everyone cooperates. Some of these institutions guard their recipes like members of the family.To the untrained eater, the secret ingredients it takes to create such an iconic dish would remain a bewitching mystery without the original formula. However, Ben's journey and mission is to deliver the most amazing 100 Southern recipes in Sou...

The Fifth Ben Schroeder NovelApril 1971. When DI Webb and DS Raymond respond to a 999 call at Harpur Mews in Bloomsbury, a horrific scene awaits them.Susan Lang is lying on the ground, bleeding to death. Her husband Henry is sitting nearby, holding a large, blood-stained knife.In shock, Henry claims to have no memory of the events that led to his wife's death, leaving his barrister, Ben Schroeder, little with which to defend a poten...

When A'Lelia Walker died in 1931 after a midnight snack of lobster and chocolate cake washed down with champagne, it marked the end of one of the most striking social careers in New York's history. The daughter of rags-to-riches multi-millionaire Madame C.J. Walker (the washerwoman who marketed the most successful straightening technique for African American hair), A'Lelia was America's first black poor little rich girl, using her inheritance to throw elaborate, celebrity-packed parties in...

1983 was a supremely dangerous year - even more dangerous than 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the US, President Reagan massively increased defence spending, described the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire' and announced his 'Star Wars' programme, calling for a shield in space to defend the US from incoming missiles.Yuri Andropov, the paranoid Soviet leader, saw all this as signs of American aggression and convinced himself that the US really meant to attack the Soviet...

Charlie Lewis goes on a roller coaster ride of risk, math, and gaming in this middle grade novel that parallels the New York Times bestselling Bringing Down the House, which inspired the movie 21.Charlie Lewis is a nerd. All he’s ever been good at is math—and he’s really good at math. So good that he’s recruited by a group of kids determined to game the system at the biggest theme park in the world—and win the grand prize. Soon Charlie is caught up in the excitement and thrill of u...