Showing results by publisher "Orion Publishing Group" in All Categories

This isn't a midlife crisis, OK? For a start I'm not old enough yet to have one of those. I'm calling it a happiness project. I've stolen an entire summer from my life, and by the time it's over I plan to leave this place with a list in my hand. The ten things that make me happy, that's all I want to know. How difficult can it be? They may be small things - a perfect cup of coffee, a day without rain - or bigger ones. It's still the beginning, so how can I know?

A dark moon is rising. A perfect black circle, barely visible in the night sky, the dark moon casts its void over the wind-scorched moor, over the soaring mass of a great limestone hill, and over the town that cowers in its shadow. The dark moon is the absence of moon before the slender silver crescent of the new moon appears again and people can breathe a little easier. The month is March, and the night is clear and cold, black as pitch.

D/S Jimmy Suttle is called to a brutal murder in the picturesque Devon village of Lympstone. Harriet Reilly, a local GP, has been found disembowelled in the bedroom of her partner, climate scientist Alois Bentner. Suttle's estranged wife, Lizzie, has abandoned Portsmouth, moved to Exeter and returned to journalism, hearing rumours of a local GP offering mercy killings to patients meeting certain criteria. The name of the GP is Harriet Reilly. So begins two investigations of the same crime.

In the end, all things are known. Return to the world of The Relic Guard with this remarkable fantasy novel. Divided, hunted and short on resources, the surviving members of the Relic Guild are in real trouble. Their old enemy, the Genii, and their resurrected master have infiltrated Labrys Town and taken over the police force. So the Relic Guild must flee their home and set off on a dangerous journey across the worlds of the Aelfir. One that will lead them to a weapon which might destroy the Genii.

Uprooted from her home in India, Alice is raised by her aunt, a spiritualist medium in Windsor. When the mysterious Mr Tilsbury enters their lives, Alice is drawn into a plot to steal the priceless Koh-i-Noor diamond, claimed by the British Empire at the end of the Anglo-Sikh wars.Said to be both blessed and cursed, the sacred Indian stone exerts its power over all who encounter it.

It is no small matter, after all, to create something - to make it so only by setting down the words. We forget the magnitude, sometimes, of that miracle. Mr. Crowe was once the toast of the finest salons. A man of learning and means, he travelled the world, enthralling all who met him. Now Mr. Crowe devotes himself to earthly pleasures. He has retreated to his sprawling country estate, where he lives with Clara, his mysterious young ward, and Eustace, his faithful manservant.

Thomas Pakenham's classic portraits of 60 distinctive trees, available in download form for the first time. Written by Thomas Pakenham and read by Bill Paterson with an introduction read by the author and music by Orlando Gough. This download includes a fully illustrated accompanying PDF booklet. In 1996, with this astonishing collection, Thomas Pakenham produced a new kind of tree book. The arrangement owes little to conventional botany.

Rose waits for her family to arrive at their villa in Tuscany when a casual glance at her husband's phone tips her world upside down. The text reads simply: 'Miss you. Love you. Come back soon.' Daniel has always been popular with women, she knows that. But until this moment she has had no cause for worry. Has something shifted within their marriage without her realising? As the family gathers for the summer break, Rose's faith in Daniel is shaken. How well does she really know him?

Beauty can be a gift...or a wicked temptation.... So it is for Filippo Lippi, growing up in Renaissance Florence. He has a talent - not only can he see the beauty in everything but he can capture it, paint it. But while beauty can seduce you and art can transport you - it cannot always feed you or protect you. To survive, Filippo di Tommaso Lippi, street urchin, forger, drinker, seducer of nuns, must become Fra Fra Filippo Lippi - Carmelite friar, man of God.

Far removed from the picture of Tehran we glimpse in news stories, there is another, hidden city, where survival depends on an intricate network of lies and falsehoods. It is a place where Mullahs visit prostitutes, cosmetic surgeons restore girls' virginity and homemade porn is bought and sold in the bazaars. It is also the home of our eight protagonists, drawn from across the spectrum of Iranian society.

>Dangerous Days in the Roman Empire is the first in a new adult series by Terry Deary, the author of the hugely best-selling Horrible Histories, popular among children for their disgusting details, gory information and sharp wit, and among adults for engaging children (and themselves) with history. The Romans have long been held up as one of the first 'civilised' societies, and yet in fact they were capable of immense cruelty. Not only that, but they made the killing of humans into a sport.

To prevent a war in Asia - one that could quickly spread to the rest of the world - Paul Janson and Jessica Kincaid must learn the truth behind a young woman's murder.... Prominent US senator James Wyckoff hires former government agents turned private security consultants Janson and Kincaid to locate his teenage son, Gregory. Gregory's girlfriend, Lynell, has been found strangled in a Seoul hotel, and Gregory has fled the city to avoid being arrested for the crime.

When her beloved father dies, Vivien Epstein - a 22 year old hairdresser from Manchester - leaves her hometown for London in the hope of finding Jack Fox - a man she had a brief, but intense, love affair with some months ago. All Vivien has to go is one letter Jack sent to her father, the address of a boarding house scribbled hastily on the back, and very soon her hopes of finding him are dashed.

Spot on the Fishcake! The famous fairy detective agency, Wings & Co, has a problem. Really quite a big problem. Well, a few of them actually. There's the missing giant, Billy Buckle, who has vanished without a trace, and left his giant daughter with the detectives. There's a surprise visit to the seaside, which uncovers a murder and a stolen diamond. And then there's that tricky business of the TV talent show. Squat on a squid, this is Emily, Buster and Fidget's most complicated case yet. Read by Simon Russell Beale.

Megan is a suburban soccer mom who once upon a time walked on the wild side. Now she's got two kids, a perfect husband, a picket fence, and a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Ray used to be a talented documentary photographer, but at age forty he finds himself in a dead-end job posing as a paparazzo pandering to celebrity-obsessed rich kids. Broome is a detective who can't let go of a cold case - a local husband and father disappeared seventeen years ago, and Broome spends the anniversary every year visiting a house frozen in time....

Russia, 1920: Kolya has deserted his Red Army unit and returns home to bury his brother and reunite with his wife and sons. But he finds the village silent and empty. The men have been massacred in the forest. The women and children have disappeared. In this remote, rural community the folk tales mothers tell their children by candlelight take on powerful significance and the terrifying legend of The Deathless One begins to feel very real. Kolya sets out on a journey through dense, haunting forests and across vast plains as bitter winter sets in, in the desperate hope he will find his family.

Smoke opens in a private boarding school near Oxford, but history has not followed the path known to us. In this other past, sin is a physical attribute, visible to all, and children are born carrying the seeds of evil within them. It is in this school, surrounded by the sons of the wealthy and well connected, that two boys called Thomas and Charlie discover that the world of smoke, soot and ash is not as it seems, for sin has a secret history and virtue a politics both intricate and murderous.

All was quiet in the Bodle home in Plumstead village on the morning of 2 November 1833. In the large ten bedroom farmhouse, the maid Sophia Taylor began preparing breakfast while, at the cottage down the track, Mary Higgins came down to set the fire. But all was not as it seemed that morning... When the local doctor was summoned several hours later he found four women suffering from severe vomiting and stomach pains whilst the master of the house was delirious with pain.

Eminent scientist Dr Ralph Padley is dying - and he knows it's time to finally tell the truth. Padley has a dark secret which, if it got out, would have deadly consequences. But there are powerful men who will stop at nothing to silence him. FBI special agent Reilly has an agenda of his own. For months he has sought the man who kidnapped and brainwashed his five-year-old son. But that man is a ghost - a highly protected CIA official with no name and no identity, and who may have links to Reilly's own father.

Features an Introduction read by Ian Rankin. Mary Miller had always been an outcast. Burnt in a chemical mix as a young girl, sympathy for her quickly faded when the young man who pushed her in died in a mining accident just two days later. From then on she was regarded with a mixture of suspicion and fascination by her God-fearing community. Now, years later, she is a single mother, caught up in a faltering affair with a local teacher. Her son, Sandy, has fallen in love with a strange homeless girl.