Related to: 'Etiquette and Espionage'

Quitting her husband's house and moving back in with her horrible family, Lady Maccon becomes the scandal of the London season, with everyone wishing to know what has caused the rift between the couple. Queen Victoria dismisses her from the Shadow Council, and the only person who can explain anything, Lord Akeldama, unexpectedly leaves town. To top it all off, Alexia is attacked by homicidal mechanical ladybirds, indicating, as only ladybirds can, the fact that all of London's vampires are now very much interested in seeing Alexia quite thoroughly dead. While Lord Maccon elects to get progressively more inebriated and Professor Lyall desperately tries to hold the Woolsey werewolf pack together, Alexia flees England for Italy in search of the mysterious Templars. Only they know enough about the preternatural to explain her increasingly inconvenient condition, but they may be worse than the vampires - and they're armed with pesto.

Alexia Tarabotti, Lady Maccon, has settled into domestic bliss. Of course, being Alexia, such bliss involves integrating werewolves into London High society, living in a vampire's second best closet, and coping with a precocious toddler who is prone to turning supernatural willy-nilly. Even Ivy Tunstell's acting troupe's latest play, disastrous to say the least, cannot put a dampener on Alexia's enjoyment of her new London lifestyle.Until, that is, she receives a summons from Alexandria that cannot be ignored. With husband, child and Tunstells in tow, Alexia boards a steamer to cross the Mediterranean. But Egypt may hold more mysteries than even the indomitable Lady Maccon can handle. What does the vampire Queen of the Alexandria Hive really want from her? Why is the God-Breaker Plague suddenly expanding? And how has Ivy Tunstell suddenly become the most popular actress in all the British Empire?***Also available as a manga adaptation***

The Year is 2012 - and Queen Victoria still rules with an immortal fist. She's the undead matriarch of a Britain where the Aristocracy is made up of werewolves and vampires, where goblins live underground and mothers know better than to let their children out after dark. A world where technology lives side by side with magic, where being nobility means being infected with the Plague (side-effects include undeath) and Hysteria is the popular affliction of the day.Xandra Vardan is a member of the elite Royal Guard, and it's her duty to protect the Aristocracy. But things get complicated when her sister goes missing. Xandra will not only realise she's the prize in a dangerous power struggle - but she'll also uncover a conspiracy that threatens to topple the empire itself.

There are many cricket books, and they are all the same. 'Don't Tell Goochie', autobiographical insights of nights on the tiles in Delhi with Lambie and the boys; 'Fruit cake days', a celebrated humourist recalls 'ball' - related banter of yore; and Wisden, a deadly weapon when combined with a thermos flask. Rain Men is different. Like the moment the genius of Richie Benaud first revealed itself to you, it is a cricketing epiphany, a landmark in the literature of the game.Shining the light meter of reason into cricket's incomparable madness, Marcus Berkmann illuminates all the obsessions and disappointments that the dedicated fan and pathologically hopeful clubman suffers year after year - the ritual humiliation of England's middle order, the partially-sighted umpires, the battling average that reads more like a shoe size. As satisfying as a perfectly timed cover drive, and rather easier to come by, Rain Men offers essential justification for anyone who has ever run a team-mate out on purpose or secretly blubbed at a video of Botham's Ashes.

For years UN peacekeepers have been deployed to war-torn regions of the world, from Rwanda to Serbia, Congo to East Timor. Now it's America's turn. Samuel Simpson is a young, idealistic journalist from Canada, and seeking adventure, volunteers to become a records-keeper for a UN war-crimes investigation team at work in upper New York State. Months earlier, a crippling terrorist attack against the United States resulted in its cities emptied, its countryside set afire, and its government shaken to its knees. In the aftermath of this attack, a virtual civil war broke out, until UN peacekeepers arrived to establish an uneasy peace. While Samuel and his team travel through the New York countryside, searching for evidence of an atrocious war, he quickly realizes that death is quick to strike from any farmhouse, road corner or rest area. Even more chillingly, he begins to suspect that there is a traitor in his team, trying not only to conceal evidence of this war crime, but working to betray and kill them all ... Twilight is a gripping and shocking 'what-if' thriller from the master of the genre; it is a truly unforgettable read.