A razor-sharp analysis of the increasing – and terrifying – parallels between Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia, from the former BBC Moscow Correspondent and Sunday Times bestselling author Martin Sixsmith.Long Live the King.Since his re-election as US president, Donald Trump has made good on things he only dreamed of accomplishing in his first term. He has smashed constitutional constraints, trampled on free speech, suborned the ...

Meet maverick British detective DI Skelgill... "mad, bad and just a little bit cozy."WHEN A HIGH-FLYING ADMAN is stabbed to death on a company weekend in the English Lake District, local detective Daniel Skelgill finds himself wrenched from his rural Cumbrian comfort zone.As the investigation unfolds, DI Skelgill is led a merry dance between London and Edinburgh, at every turn confronted by uncooperative suspects – colleagues, wife and lovers of the deceased – each of whom ...

It is December 1888. Jack the Ripper has not killed for over a month and London is beginning to relax as Christmas approaches. When Katherine Kramer cuts herself on a strange book at a dinner party, she quickly falls ill. Her husband Richard is a professor of medicine, but even his efforts are futile as the mysterious illness blazes through her. As Katherine dies, she gives birth to something nightmarish. Something which should not exist. Something which spurs Richard to embark on a terrif...

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey’s wonderfully witty and Wildean quartet of biographies, stands out as one of the most radical and groundbreaking works of its genre. With relentless precision, Strachey explores the lives of four exemplars of the Victorian age: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, irreverently bringing to light the flaws, strengths, ambitions and hypocrisies of these treasured legends. The combination of thrilling and imaginative narr...

Winner of the "Best Novel" and "Best Historical Fiction" categories at "The 2019 International Royal Dragonfly Book Awards."Abel de Santiago is a man on the run. Once a famous sniper, Abel finds himself a survivor of the Spanish Armada shipwrecks in 16th-C Ireland. Following his capture by a brutal sheriff, Abel flees torture and death with a priceless emerald ring. Dozens of English troopers hunt the Spaniard across the Irish wilds, beating every last bus...

A trail of secrets. A dangerous discovery. A deadly turn.Police officer Sebastian Clifford never planned on becoming a private investigator. But when a scandal leads to the disbandment of his London based special squad, he finds himself out of a job. That is, until his cousin calls on him to investigate her husband's high-profile death, and prove that it wasn't a suicide.Clifford's reluctant to get involved, but the more he digs, the more evidence he finds....

Oliver Twist is a poor orphan in a cruel society. Maltreated from birth, he escapes only to become an accidental member of a gang of pickpockets and robbers. Briefly rescued, he is then kidnapped as part of a plot to defraud him of his inheritance, and his prospects seem as bleak as his surroundings. But one member of the gang won’t let hope die whatever the cost. Charles Dickens transformed this dark fable on the Poor Laws into one of the bestloved books in English, filling it with brilli...

1935: Cal Jardine is a soldier of fortune. Forced to leave Hamburg, he is recruited by a secretive British committee to smuggle guns to Abyssinia. But first Jardine must procure the weapons from Romania. Taken to the Horn of Africa, the arms are then transported over a harsh landscape into the hands of the Ethiopian Army. On his travels Jardine acquires more baggage than he anticipated, including a beautiful, but difficult American female in search of her archaeologist mother, a determined...

"The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity."Tolstoy's War and Peace, written in serial format and published between 1865 and 1869, is widely regarded as a masterwork of Russian literature and one of the world's greatest novels.This epic novel intricately weaves together the lives of several families against the backdrop of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, and follows Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritan...

David Hume (1711-1776) remains one of the most stimulating and entertaining writers in the English essay tradition. Though primarily known for long-form writings, he was adept at taking one subject and looking at it in a more concise but accessible manner.Hume devoted his life to study – across a wide range of his personal interests, reflecting his background in philosophy, history, economics, and many other subjects. This can be clearly seen in Four Dissertations (1757) and the top...

17 twisted short stories and poems from the author of the Victorian Gothic series of novels.From first dates to shipwrecked sailors, encompassing modern horror to gothic tropes, this anthology has something for everyone with one thing in common: they want something to think about when they go to bed.

These five chilling nineteenth-century ghost stories from both sides of the Atlantic include some of the best in the genre. Bierce is well-known, but To Let by B. M. Croker and The Upper Berth provide moments to tingle the spine, as does An Account of Some Strange Disturbances by Le Fanu. This collection, which is further enhanced by suitably chilling music, was originally released under the title Classic Chilling Tales III.