A northwest London detective tackles a twenty-five-year-old missing persons case in this comic crime novel.Dangerous Davies, you understand, earned his nickname in the same way that fat men nicknamed "Tiny" earn theirs. But while he may not inspire dread in the hearts of London's bad guys, he is nevertheless on the side of right and good, and has a copper's badge to prove it. True, he is known as the "last detective" —not because there are no others like him, but be...

When I got out of Military Police School, I had orders to go to Korea and Vietnam. Just before boarding the ship for Korea they changed my orders and sent me to Germany. I wasn't mad at them. I was a young man and a "player". I am sure almost any young man who was in the server will see some of themselves in this book. I started it in Germany in 1966 and didn't complete it until Jan of 2014.

The third edition of Design-Tech provides an indispensable, holistic resource for integrating building technologies into critically designed, performance-based architectural projects. The book’s format follows the developmental stages of a typical architectural project; it provides a step-by-step process for addressing and integrating building sciences from first principles of human comfort, materials, structures, and environmental systems to advanced construction systems and meas...

Winner of The Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award, by The Pattis Family Foundation and the Newberry LibraryFrom skyline-defining icons to wonders of the world, the second period of the Chicago skyscraper transformed the way Chicagoans lived and worked. Thomas Leslie’s comprehensive look at the modern skyscraper era vie...

The UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The Pirelli skyscraper in Milan. The Palazetto dello Sport in Rome. The "soaring beauty" of Pier Luigi Nervi's visionary designs and buildings changed cityscapes in the twentieth century. His uncanny ingenuity with reinforced concrete, combined with a gift for practical problem solving, revolutionized the use of open internal space in structures like arenas and concert halls.Aesthetics and Technology in Building: The Twenty-First-Century Editio...

Born in Sondrio, Italy, in 1891, Pier Luigi Nervi was a pioneer in the engineering and architecture of reinforced concrete. His buildings showed how the use of reinforced concrete expanded the possibilities of form and structure. His methods, meanwhile, ingrained his structures with patterns that came directly out of his economical, manual construction processes. The results were buildings that matched awe-inspiring spans with surprisingly human scale.Beauty's Rigor offers...

As plain-clothes men go, Dangerous Davies looks like a non-starter. The small fry of petty larceny and minor disturbances in the backwaters of north-west London are his daily round. His philosophising Welsh drinking companion Mod, his outsized and unruly dog Kitty, his quarrels with his landlady Mrs Fulljames - none of these bodes well for the efficient solving of crimes and outwitting of villainy. But Davies is encouraged by his beautiful friend Jemma, and every so often he stumbles upon ...

The new tale of love and life, rich with humour and pathos, from our best loved storyteller. From the prison cell where Chloe Smith, 43, is awaiting trial for the merciful murder of the only man who ever loved her with honesty, she recalls the men in her life who lied to her. She remembers her adored father, who drank too much; the loss of her virginity at Stonehenge to a schoolboy, her marriage to petty crook Zane Tomkins, the Isle of Wight ferryman who said he was a lonely deep sea sailo...

At four-thirty one January afternoon a bus returning to Miami and Fort Lauderdale containing tourists who have been visiting a Seminole Indian Reservation is held up at gunpoint by five hooded gangsters. The combined ages of the 5 robbers total 320 years.Leslie Thomas's latest novel is the hilarious account of the adventures of a group of elderly gangsters in Florida - the Ocean Drive Delinquent Society, known as the ODDS for short. The members include Ari the Greek - he of the leg...

In the spring of 1940, the spectre of war turned into grim reality.And on the English home front, men, women and children found themselves swept into a maelstrom of fear and uncertainty while events abroad led inexorably from the debacles of Norway and Dunkirk to the horror and glory of the Battle of Britain.For the Lovatt family - James, seconded on a hush-hush assignment to work with Churchill, and his brother Harry, a naval officer - for Bess Spofford, Joanne Schorner, G...

At the start of the war in 1939 James Bevan is a junior officer approaching middle-age, attached to a small anti-aircraft unit on the south coast.Abandoned by his wife, the soldiers he command are his family: Bairnsfather, whose sexual encounters with his girl friend Muriel take place in an air-raid shelter; Cartwright, trying to keep two women on his gunner's pay of a shilling a day; Hignet, cosily educating himself in the orderly room. It is a rude awakening when they are called ...

Leslie Thomas's odyssey is a vivid, personal account of the most fascinating islands at the furthest reaches of the globe: to islands as distant and diverse as Saint-Pierre et Miquelon off Newfoundland and Great Barrier Island off New Zealand, and to places more familiar by name, including Nantucket, Fair Isle, Tahiti, and Capri, this journey voyages to the world's smaller places.Descriptive, evocative and liberally sprinkled with anecdotes, the book weaves together a tapestry of i...