Fiction
Alexandria
Lindsey Davis, paperback,12.80
In his latest historical detective story Marcus Didius Falco is agent to the Emperor Vespasian. A mysterious death in the world-famous library in Alexandria brings him into immediate conflict with the darker side of academic life. With forensic science in its infancy, even an illegal autopsy fails to find real answers. So when the Head Librarian dies in suspicious circumstances, the Roman authorities are only too happy to dump the case on one of the Empire's most celebrated investigators.....
The Childrens Book
A.S. Byatt, paperback, € 12.80
Byatts latest book, is a very detailed and charged re-creation of the period between the end of the 19th century and the first world war, overflowing with people attempting to define, fulfil or evade their responsibilities with some simply attempting to unearth who they are and what they should do. Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them.
The Private Patient
P.D.James, paperback, € 12.80
The scar on Rhoda Gradwyn's face was to be the death of her ...When the notorious investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, books into Mr Chandler-Powell's private clinic in Dorset for the removal of a disfiguring and long-standing scar, she has every prospect of a successful operation and the beginning of a new life. But the Manor holds a secret and deadly enemy. While she lies drowsily recovering from the anaesthetic a white-shrouded figure stealthily enters her bedroom and within minutes Rhoda is dead. Dalgliesh and his team, called in to investigate the murder, and later a second equally horrific death, find themselves confronted with problems even more complicated than the question of innocence or guilt. Find out what happens…
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel, large format paperback, € 20.80
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2009. 'Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,' says Thomas More, 'and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.' England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor, charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly art in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages. Wolf Hall is a great English novel, one that explores the interaction of individual psychology and wider politics. Plenty of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.
Careless in Red
Elizabeth George, paperback, € 11.20
It is barely three months since the murder of his wife and Thomas Lynley takes to the South-West Coast Path in Cornwall, determined to walk its length in an attempt to distract himself from his loss. On the forty-third day of this walk, he sees a cliff climber fall to his death, apparently witnessed by a surfer in a nearby cove. Shortly afterwards, Lynley encounters a young woman from Bristol whose personal history is a blank before her thirteenth year. These events propel him into a case that brings Barbara Havers from London and thrusts both detectives into a world where revenge is only one of the motives they must sift through to identify a killer.