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By January 1666, the plague has almost disappeared from London, leaving its surviving population diminished and in poverty. The resentment against those who had fled to the country turns to outrage as the court and its followers return, their licentiousness undiminished. The death of a well-connected physician, the mysterious sinking of a man-of-war in the Thames and the disappearance of a popular courtier are causing concern to Thomas Chaloner's employer.

At the Central Criminal Court, an eager crowd awaits the trial of Victoria Lamartine, an active participant in the Resistance during the war. She is now employed at the Family Hotel in Soho, where Major Eric Thoseby has been found murdered. Thoseby is believed to have fathered Lamartine's child, and the prosecution insist that his death is revenge for his abandonment of Lamartine and her arrest by the Gestapo. A last-minute change in Lamartine's defence counsel grants solicitor Nap Rumbold just eight days to prove her innocence.

The fourth adventure in the Thomas Chaloner series. Christopher Vine, a Treasury clerk working in solitary piety in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster, is not alone. A killer waits in the draughty hall to ensure Vine will not live to see in the New Year. And Vine is not the only government official to die that season. The Lord Chancellor fears his enemies will skew any investigation to cause him maximum damage, so he decides to commission his own inquiries into the murders.

"I’ve always wanted to see something of the Empire outside Rome." AD 71. Germania Libera: dark, dripping forests inhabited by bloodthirsty barbarians and legendary wild beasts, a furious prophetess who terrorises Rome, and the ghostly spirits of slaughtered Roman legionaries. Enter Falco, an Imperial agent on a special mission: to find the absconding commander of a legion whose loyalty is suspect.

'He is the David Attenborough of mountaineering . . . Bonington's most personal memoir yet' The Times 'This is a compelling tale of fortitude and endurance' The Sunday Times Chris Bonington is Britain’s best-known climber, having spent a lifetime among the world’s highest and wildest...

Much has changed since Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor Police and hard-nosed Jerusalem detective Arieh Ben-Roi last met. Ben-Roi is about to become a father, and Khalifa is struggling with personal tragedies. But as they each work on their own - seemingly isolated - cases, the two investigations begin to entwine. They soon find themselves drawn into a sinister web of violence, abuse, corporate malpractice and anti-capitalist terrorism. And at the heart of the web lies the Labyrinth...

1862. A goods train is speeding through the Sapperton Tunnel when it hits a makeshift pen of sheep inexplicably set up near the exit. The animals are slaughtered by the impact whilst the train hits a pile of rocks and is derailed, seriously injuring the occupants. Inspector Colbeck discovers that the shepherd and his dog are missing. Stephen Rydall who owned the sheep is shocked by the occurrence, which further affects him as he is a major shareholder in the Great Western Railway.

When the decapitated body of a monk is found outside Vienna's most splendid baroque church, a young psychoanalyst, Dr Liebermann, must enter a world of secret lore and mysticism if he is to find the key to the mystery....

Your brother seemed to know what he was doing.' Rome, AD 72. Falco returns home from a six-month mission to the German legions. But trouble is in store for him: his apartment has been wrecked by squatters and an ex-legionary friend of his colourfully heroic brother Festus is demanding money, allegedly owed him as the result of one of Festus's wild schemes. Worse still, the only client Falco can get is his mother - who wants him to clear the family name.

Exploding pressure cookers, a thwarted wife's deadly revenge and transvestites in distress - manning an ambulance in the seventies kept you on your toes. Having survived the rites of passage as a probationer, Les Pringle now has to face up to the reality of life as an ambulance man in Thatcher's...

Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave, E. M. Forster’s conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria, desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead, the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies.

In the court of King George IV, Major Mearns - an old dog of war and veteran of Willington's army - is the guardian of Windsor Castle. Some would call him a spy; he calls himself a "watcher." Working with his close friend, the resourceful Sergeant Denny, the pair maintain a cool facade behind which they go about their duties quietly and unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, until the day Mearns receives a parcel containing a gruesome surprise: a pair of severed human legs.

The 10th edition of the long-established definitive guide to the EU. From its original six members (who formed the European Economic Community in 1957) what became the European Union had grown to 27 members in 2007, with several more candidates for membership standing in the wings.

"The first concern of an author is to do down his colleagues." In the long, hot Roman summer of AD 74, Falco, private informer and spare-time poet, gives a reading for his family and friends. Things get out of hand, as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus, a wealthy Greek banker and patron to a group of struggling writers, who offers to publish Falco's work.

In the spring of 1666 everyone's first reaction to a sudden death at the palace of White Hall is that the plague has struck, but the killing of Thomas Chiffinch was by design, not disease. Chiffinch was holder of two influential posts - Keeper of the Closet and Keeper of the Jewels - and rival courtiers have made no secret of their wish to succeed to those offices. To Thomas Chaloner, ordered to undertake the investigation, such avarice gives a whole host of suspects an ample motive for murder.

London, 1818. MP Sir Roger Mellanby attends a performance of Macbeth at Covent Garden, featuring Hannah Granville. It is the final performance of what has been a triumphant production and both the Prince Regent and Hannah's love, Bow Street Rival Paul Skillen, are in the audience. After the show, both Mellanby and the Prince Regent make their way to the stage door for a glimpse of Hannah.

SOHO - ILLICIT, GLAMOROUS, SORDID, LOUCHE, POVERTY-STRICKEN, SQUALID, EXHILARATING. One of Britain's best-loved historians, Dan Cruickshank grants us an intimacy with centuries of rich and varied London history as he guides us around the Soho of the last five hundred years. We learn of its...

When the body of Pauline Brent is found hanging from a yew tree in a local graveyard, DS Wesley Peterson immediately suspects foul play. Then history provides him with a clue. Wesley's archaeologist friend, Neil Watson, has excavated a corpse at his nearby dig - a young woman who, local legend has it, had been publicly hanged from the very same tree before being buried on unhallowed ground five centuries ago. Wesley is now forced to consider the possibility that the killer knows the tree's dark history.

On 16 July 1940, Hitler issued Directive No. 16, setting in motion Operation Sea Lion: his plan to invade England. The success of Operation Sea Lion hinged entirely on the destruction of the RAF and the Royal Navy, but even as Hitler's plans swung into action and England, barely recovered from Dunkirk, rallied her defences, the Battle of Britain began and in just a few months Germany had lost all hope of dominating England's skies and with it, the key to the invasion. On 17 September, 1940, Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion indefinitely and the entire episode faded from memory.

1895. A senior executive at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is found in his office with a bullet hole between his eyes, a pistol discarded close by. The death has officially been ruled as suicide by local police, but with an apparent lack of motive for such action, the museum’s administrator Gladstone Marriott suspects foul play.