From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author comes a World War Two tale of one boy's fight for survival in Nazi Europe A secret mission...1939. As Europe teeters on the brink of war, Alfred Kendall is tasked with carrying out a minor mission for the British Intelligence Service. Travelling to Prague, he takes his troubled young son, Hugh, as cover. A terrible choice...When Hitler invades Czechoslovakia, Alfred is given an ultimatum by the Czech Resistance. They will arrange for him to return to England, but only if he leaves his son Hugh behind as collateral. A young boy stranded in Nazi terrain...Hugh is soon taken under the wing of a Nazi colonel – Helmuth Scholl. But even though Scholl treats Hugh well, his son, Heinz, is suspicious of this foreigner. And as the war across the continent intensifies, they are set on a path that will ultimately lead towards destruction...

From the No.1 bestselling author of The Ashes of London and The Fire Court comes the next book in the phenomenally successful series following James Marwood.

From the No.1 Sunday Times bestselling author of The Ashes of London comes the next book in the phenomenally successful series following James Marwood and Cat Lovett. A dangerous secret lies beneath Whitehall Palace... Brother against brother. Father against son. Friends turned into enemies. No-one in England wants a return to the bloody days of the Civil War. But Oliver Cromwell's son, Richard, has abandoned his exile and slipped back into England. The consequences could be catastrophic. James Marwood, a traitor's son turned government agent, is tasked with uncovering Cromwell's motives. But his assignment is complicated by his friend – the regicide's daughter, Cat Lovett – who knew the Cromwells as a child, and who now seems to be hiding a secret of her own about the family. Both Marwood and Cat know they are putting themselves in great danger. And when they find themselves on a top secret mission in the Palace of Whitehall, they realise they are risking their lives...and could...

From the No.1 bestselling author of The American Boy and The Ashes of London comes a collection of three gothic novellas – Broken Voices, The Leper House and The Scratch – perfect for fans of The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley. BROKEN VOICESDoes music have its ghosts? Its victims? Something is stirring in the cathedral that both echoes an ancient tragedy and seems to offer a chance of future happiness. One thing is certain. Broken voices make false promises. And their lies may prove fatal. THE LEPER HOUSESeawick's medieval Leper House is all that remains of the Suffolk town that was washed away to sea. A bereaved man arrives there on a stormy night and meets the mysterious woman who dwells there. In a nearby house, another woman waits for history to repeat itself. And a bell tolls once again beneath the waves. THE SCRATCHClare and Gerald live the perfect life in a remote cottage in the Forest of Dean. Cannop the cat has lived with them since they found him as a kitten deep in the...

In pursuit of the find of a lifetime, an academic confronts an old rivalOnce visited by the likes of Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and George Eliot, the London Library is a maze of books—a jumble of first editions and forgotten texts. For Tony, it is a refuge from the failure his life has become—and it is about to be invaded by a destructive old friend.Adam is a world-renowned novelist who spends so much time writing articles and appearing in documentaries that it seems impossible he actually has time to write books. He visits the library to research a nearly-forgotten English poet, Francis Youlgreave, who just happens to be Tony's obsession. Tony has staked his career on the long-dead clergyman, and will do whatever it takes to keep Adam from stealing his research. In this ghostly library, scholarly conflict is anything but academic.

From No.1 bestselling author Andrew Taylor comes the sequel to the phenomenally successful The Ashes of London. A gripping historical thriller set in the aftermath of The Great Fire of London. A city striving to recover. A killer waiting to strike. London, May 1667. Six months after The Great Fire, London is still in blackened ruins. With tensions running to boiling point, the government has created the Fire Court to settle legal disputes over the re-building of the city. James Marwood is happy keeping his distance from the machinations of the Fire Court, and settling into a quiet life as a clerk. But one day, his elderly father claims to have stumbled upon a dead woman. His story is so strange that Marwood dismisses it. The next day, though, his father is run over and killed. Soon, Marwood becomes convinced his father's death is linked to the Fire Court. And when a clerk at the Court is burned alive in his chamber, the hunt is on to stop a killer, before he strikes again...

Interweaving real and fictional elements, The American Boy is a major new literary historical crime novel in the tradition of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Possession. England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the boy’s sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant’s beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes caught up in her family’s twisted intrigues. Then a brutal crime is committed, with consequences that threaten to destroy Thomas and all that he has come to hold dear. Despite his efforts, Shield is caught up in a deadly tangle of sex, money, murder and lies – a tangle that grips him tighter even as he tries to escape from it. And what of the strange American child, at the heart of these macabre events, yet mysterious – what is the secret of the boy named Edgar Allen Poe?

From Publishers WeeklyBritish author Taylor (An Unpardonable Crime) springs a number of well-timed and well-planned surprises in this briskly paced thriller set in November 1934. Fed up with the slights and slaps of her husband, well-to-do Lydia Langstone decides to room temporarily with her father, whom she hasn't seen since she was a toddler, in his seedy boarding house in London's Bleeding Heart Square. Lydia soon finds out that papa is in the pocket of landlord Joseph Serridge, a darkly charismatic man skilled at manipulating others. Serridge is being investigated by another tenant, journalist Rory Wentwood, for his involvement in the disappearance of Philippa Penhow, the house's former owner. As Lydia helps Rory in his delvings, she uncovers a tangled skein of scandal and deadly intrigues stretching back decades and involving many of those near and dear to her. A hasty finale is the only misstep in this otherwise satisfying period piece. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ReviewTaylor is the modern master of a very Dickensian underworld... A sense of brooding evil pervades the complex plot, handled with great assurance Independent The period atmosphere, as in all Taylor's work, is flawless. He simply gets better and better Daily Telegraph

The first instalment in the acclaimed Lydmouth crime series, from the prize-winning author of the Richard and Judy Book Club novel, The American Boy. Workmen in the small market town of Lydmouth are demolishing an old cottage. A sledgehammer smashes into what looks like a solid wall. Instead, layers of wallpaper conceal the door of a locked cupboard which holds a box - and in the box is the skeleton of a young baby. Items within the box suggest that the baby was entombed early in the nineteenth century, but when another man is also found dead, the evidence suggests that the baby's death is more recent than it seems and that a killer is on the loose. Journalist Jill Francis, newly arrived from London, has her first assignment.

From the No.1 best-selling author of The American Boy and The Silent Boy comes a brand new historical thriller set during the time of the Great Fire of London. The first of an exciting new series of novels. London, September 1666. The Great Fire rages through the city, consuming everything in its path. Even the impregnable cathedral of St. Paul's is engulfed in flames and reduced to ruins. Among the crowds watching its destruction is Richard Marwood, son of a disgraced printer, and reluctant government informer. In the aftermath of the fire, a semi-mummified body is discovered in the ashes of St. Paul's, in a tomb that should have been empty. The man's body has been mutilated and his thumbs have been tied behind his back – the sign of a Regicide, one of those who signed Charles I's death warrant. Under orders from the government, Marwood is tasked with hunting down the killer across the devastated city. But at a time of dangerous internal dissent and the threat of foreign...

Books That Changed the World tells the fascinating stories behind 50 books that, in ways great and small, have changed the course of human history. Andrew Taylor sets each text in its historical context and explores its wider influence and legacy.Whether he's discussing the incandescent effect of The Qu'ran, the enduring influence of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, of the way in which Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe glavanized the anti-slavery movement, Taylor has written a stirring and informative testament to human ingenuity and endeavour. Ranging from The Iliad to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the Kama Sutra to Lady Chatterley's Lover, this is the ultimate, thought-provoking read for book-lovers everywhere.

The first book in Andrew Taylor's acclaimed William Dougal crime series - from the Richard & Judy bestselling author of The American Boy. William Dougal, a post-graduate expert in the medieval script of Caroline Minuscule, stumbles on the garroted corpse of his tutor - and finds himself embroiled in a hunt for a cache of diamonds, a deadly fairy story in which no one obeys the rules, least of all Dougal's girlfriend Amanda. As the body count rises, the couple pursue both the diamonds and their doom from London, to an East Anglian cathedral close, from Cambridge to a wintry Suffolk estuary.