The various Red Data Books prepared by the IUCN and ICBP have set the standards for recognizing birds close to or at risk of extinction worldwide.This book, by focusing on vulnerable species living in or visiting Britain, sets out to define the British situation and to clearly establish both the importance of British populations and our own responsibilities for contributing to bird conservation.Compiled by an editorial team drawn from the Nature Conservancy...

Cause a "poker face" ain't just a song by Lady Gaga.Crang is a criminal lawyer. He loves jazz, old movies, Polish vodka, his Volkswagen convertible, and his girlfriend Annie, not necessarily in that order. A wise-cracking WASP with a moral code that owes little to the Law Society of Upper Canada, Crang is equally quick with his lip and fists, but he can tell a fish fork from a pair of brass knuckles when he has to.The clients who come to Crang's second-floor walk-up office ...

Mystery-solving criminal lawyer Crang returns to investigate the disappearance of two rare books.Fletcher Marshall is a Toronto antiquarian book dealer, internationally respected in the business. One night, someone blows the safe in his office and makes off with the contents, which include an infamous forged first edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese that is in itself a collector’s item. Fletcher, who was still in the process...

Classic Batten -- on the rocks.Jazz. Cocaine. Vietnamese triads. Dope-dealing yuppie lawyers. Jack Batten's got them all in his second mystery novel starring Crang, the unconventional criminal lawyer with a taste for straight vodka and a nose for trouble. This time out Crang is hired by his buddy Dave Goddard, a sax player whose playing style is from the fifties, but whose unwitting involvement in a complex coke-smuggling ring is pure eighties.Crang's friendly offer to help...

When his popular hip-hop artist client is blackmailed, Crang stumbles on a porn operation and an unexpected case of murder.Crang is a smart-talking criminal lawyer who doesn’t mind chasing down unorthodox cases. That makes him just the guy to represent a famous hip-hop performer who’s on the wrong end of a blackmail scheme. It doesn’t strike Crang as a confounding case, but in no time, he finds himself confronting an organized gang that deals in porn, stock swindle...

At a time when gay communities were hidden worlds, Crang needs to root out a killer and do his best to right a grave wrong.At the height of the AIDS crisis in the early nineties, a close friend of Crang’s, Alex Corcoran, loses his partner, Ian, to the disease. After Ian’s death, Crang is enlisted by Alex to find the man who infected Ian. Crang searches for the man to prevent Alex from getting himself in trouble. However, when Alex is murdered, Crang owes it to his ...

This special three-book bundle contains all three novel’s in Jack Batten’s Crang series. Acclaimed Jack Batten is one of Canada’s foremost crime fiction experts, and it shows in this entertaining and relentlessly witty series about the exploits of a hard-living, vodka- and jazz-loving criminal lawyer who deals with both the lives of the rich and the down-and-out on the streets and in the mansions of Canada’s largest city.IncludesCrang Plays the Ac...

‘Oh my goodness – another girl Mrs Swain!’Clara’s normal iron composure broke and she screamed, ‘No! That’s not the bloody deal!’And that is how my nanna, Bertha Swain, entered the world.When Helen Batten’s marriage breaks down, she starts on a journey of discovery into her family’s past and the mysteries surrounding her enigmatic nanna’s early life.What she unearths is a tale of five feisty red heads struggling to climb out of poverty and fi...

Called the "Maharaja of the keyboard" by Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson released over 200 recordings, won seven Grammy Awards, received the Order of Canada and is considered to have been one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time. This new biography from award-winning author Jack Batten, promises to tell Oscar Peterson's story in acomplete, compelling and sympathetic way. This is first biography of Oscar Peterson for young people.This book is the story of a black kid from a Mont...

Tom Longboat was a hero. A member of the Onondaga Nation, he was born on the Six Nations reserve in Oshwegen, near Brantford, Ontario. Despite poverty, poor training, and prejudice, Longboat went on to become one of the world’s best runners. In 1907, at the height of his fame, he won the Boston Marathon and ran in the 1908 Olympic Marathon. Longboat was one of the best-known people of his day, and certainly the most prominent member of the Six Nations. Throughout his career he had to race ...

‘Oh my goodness – another girl Mrs Swain!’Clara’s normal iron composure broke and she screamed, ‘No! That’s not the bloody deal!’And that is how my nanna, Bertha Swain, entered the world.When Helen Batten’s marriage breaks down, she starts on a journey of discovery into her family’s past and the mysteries surrounding her enigmatic nanna’s early life.What she unearths is a tale of five feisty red heads struggling to climb out of poverty and fi...

The smart-talking, wise-cracking, jazz-loving criminal lawyer has got a taste for straight vodka and a nose for trouble. No one could ever accuse Crang of being a superhero, but with his usual mixture of innate cool and naive enthusiasm he brings the villains to justice.This 6-book bundle includes:Crang Plays the Ace Crang Mystery #1Straight No Chaser Crang Mystery #2Riviera Blues Crang Mystery #3Blood Coun...