King Arthur, Camelot, and Nick Madrid come together in this hilarious medieval-meets-21st century caper When the grave of the legendary King Arthur is discovered in the West country, Nick Madrid and trusty companion Bridget Frost can't resist going in search of Camelot themselves. But instead of chivalrous knights they find rival marketing men willing to go to any lengths to make money from the discovery. Cue Camelot casinos, Avalon theme parks, medieval Excaliburger banquets, and a frenzy of feuding archaeologists as the tourism and heritage industry goes loopy for Lancelot and Co. When Nick does some digging of his own, it's not relics he finds but murder victims. Is there a Camelot-crazy serial killer on the loose? And what about King Arthur himself, who promised to return if his country needed him? If the bones in the West Country grave are his, who is that guy on the white horse riding out of the mists of time?
Peter Guttridge gives the traditional English village mystery a whole new twist in A Ghost of a Chance Nick Madrid isn't exactly thrilled when his best friend in journalism - OK, his only friend in journalism - the ''Bitch of the Broadsheets,'' Bridget Frost, commissions him to spend a night in a haunted place on the Sussex Downs, and live to tell the tale. Especially as living to tell the tale isn't made an urgent priority. But fortunately, or unfortunately, Nick stumbles on a hotter story when he discovers a dead man hanging upside down - a l? Tarot card - from an ancient oak. It's quite possible that the nearby New Age Conference Center has something to do with it, or to The Great Beast, the Hollywood movie about Aleister Crowley, filming down in Brighton. New Age meets the Old Religion as Nick is bothered, bewildered, but not necessarily bewitched by pagans, satanists, and a host of assorted metaphysicians. Seances, sabbats, a horse-ride from hell, and a kick-boxing zebra all come Nick's way as he obstinately tracks a treasure once in the possession of Crowley. practices - astanga vinyasa yoga. He lives in Sussex.
Be prepared for a long night. Guttridge combines period mystery, police procedure and noir in a fascinating tale whose only blemish is that you'll have to wait for the next in the series in its resolution” ― Kirkus Reviews, (Starred Review) The first gripping mystery in the Brighton Trilogy. July 1934. A woman's torso is found in a trunk at Brighton railway station's lost luggage office. Her identity is never established, her killer never caught. But someone is keeping a diary... July 2009. Ambitious radio journalist Kate Simpson hopes to solve the notorious Brighton Trunk Murder, and she enlists the help of ex-Chief Constable Robert Watts, whose role in the recent botched armed-police operation in Milldean, Brighton's notorious no-go area, cost him his job. But it's only a matter of time before past and present collide...
The gripping new thriller in Peter Guttridge's highly acclaimed Brighton series. The truth will out. Thriller writer Victor Tempest is dead and his son, the disgraced ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts, is discovering what really happened in the unsolved Brighton Trunk Murder of 1934. At the same time, Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist has a lead that may establish the truth about the Milldean Massacre. If she can stay alive long enough to follow it... Jimmy Tingley, once Special Air Service, now avenging angel, is in Europe on the trail of the Balkan gangsters who wreaked bloody havoc in Brighton. He's armed for World War III, but is that enough when he's his own most dangerous enemy?
A macabre discovery in Brighton has a link to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in this “clever puzzle” from the author of the acclaimed Brighton Trilogy (Kirkus Reviews). After a disastrous mistake costs him his job as Chief Constable, Bob Watts is surprised to find himself elected to the role of Brighton’s first police commissioner. But just as he returns to the public eye, Watts is hit with a shocking scandal involving the director of the Royal Pavilion. In the subsequent investigation, Det. Inspector Sarah Gilchrist and Det. Sergeant Bellamy Heap are perplexed by the discovery of looted antiquities from Cambodia’s Angkor Wat in the tunnels beneath the Pavilion. Soon, the case leads to a murder victim along with the suspicious arrival of a survivor of Pol Pot’s regime. In this “taut, richly detailed plot,” Watts and Gilchrist must uncover the dark truth before the body count rises (Publishers Weekly). “Gritty and dark, the novel is certain to appeal to readers of the author’s previous Brighton mysteries.” —Booklist “The two cases merge in a startling denouement [and] Guttridge brings back several favorite characters from earlier installments.” —Kirkus Reviews
DI Sarah Gilchrist and DS Bellamy Heap are called in when the body of a man is found floating in a lake belonging to a reclusive ex-Hollywood actress. When Major Richard Rabbitt, owner of a large estate in Sussex, is found floating in a lake belonging to Nimue Grace, a charismatic former Hollywood actress, DI Sarah Gilchrist and DS Bellamy Heap are called in to investigate - and quickly discover Rabbitt was a notoriously difficult man to deal with. Rabbitt was hated by his estranged wife, had several rivalries with residents of the area, and was involved in a number of deals with other shady businessmen . . . such as Said Farzi, a ‘criminal’ according to many, and the corrupt politician William Simpson – the father of Heap’s girlfriend. With numerous suspects and many refusing to cooperate, Gilchrist and Heap must stay on their toes to unravel all the connections. Who stood to gain the most from Rabbitt’s demise, and who can be trusted?
A body found stabbed repeatedly outside the local lido leads DI Sarah Gilchrist and DS Bellamy Heap into an intriguing new case. With an art deco lido under threat of closure by a ruthless property developer, the Save the Salthaven Lido campaigners are fighting a desperate battle to keep it open. When the lead campaigner is discovered dead, suspicion falls on the developers. No sooner have DI Sarah Gilchrist and DS Bellamy Heap begun to investigate that there is a second death during a pre-qualifying event in Brighton Bay for potential Cross-Channel swimmers. This time it’s a local millionaire businesswoman with radical plans to reorganise the family business. When another endurance swimmer dies during an event with links to the property developer, Gilchrist and Heap flounder. Are all the deaths connected to the Salthaven development? Is someone targeting open-water swimmers? Gilchrist and Heap race to uncover the truth before more victims come to the surface.
The Brighton series continues and “takes a turn towards the occult” with “well-wrought prose, an appealing new character . . . and a deadly climax” (Booklist). Something strange is in the Brighton air. Everywhere newly-promoted Sarah Gilchrist looks, unsettling things are happening. A Wicker Man is burned on the beach at dawn with a body inside; a painting titled The Devil’s Altar is stolen from the Brighton Museum; a vicar who casts out demons goes missing; and a rare medieval manuscript of the occult Key of Solomon is stolen from the Jubilee Library. Then Gilchrist’s flatmate, Kate Simpson, discovers that acts of sacrilege and grave robbing have been routinely taking place in Brighton and the surrounding villages. And ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts is puzzling over inscriptions in his late father’s books. Specifically, books by occult writers Dennis Wheatley, Colin Pearson—and the feared Aleister Crowley, cremated in Brighton in 1947. Old Religion and New Age collide and the body count mounts as the Devil’s Moon slowly rises . . . “Guttridge’s fourth dispatch from Brighton features many of the same characters as the first three but is more cerebral and slower paced. In its own different way, however, it’s just as literate and exciting.” —Kirkus Reviews
A bloody death of an actress during a theatre show has DI Gilchrist and DS Heap investigate . . . but was it a bizarre accident or a deliberate attack? During a theatre performance Detective Inspector Sarah Gilchrist is reluctantly attending, blood begins soaking through a curtain startling one actor into falling to his death from the stage. The source of the blood: Elvira Wright, the lead actress, has been bludgeoned by a lead weight used for opening the curtain. Meanwhile former Hollywood actress Nimue Grace is attracting attention from a notorious gangster. When she stumbles across something horrific in the aptly named Butcher's Wood, she interprets it as a vicious message left for her. As Gilchrist and Detective Sergeant Bellamy Heap investigate, they find themselves running in circles. All the actors were disgruntled with the director of the play, Cat Pinter, and the way it was produced, but why would any of them target Elvira? And what is the meaning of the horrible discovery in Butcher's Wood?
The new gripping mystery following City of Dreadful Night. A man impaled on the South Downs. Another skinned alive. A skeleton found beneath the West Pier, its feet encased in concrete. Brighton has been invaded. But this is no mere power struggle between rival mobsters; the motives for the killings stretch back through the decades, to an explosive forty-year-old secret Brighton's crime king John Hathaway would rather forget. But someone else remembers, and that someone has decided that revenge is a dish best served cold...
Edwards and Muller have assembled top-notch talent in this entertaining anthology of 20 original short stories... High-quality entries from the likes of Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, and Ian Rankin, as well as from lesser-known authors such as Bill Beverly, elevate this above similar volumes."--Publishers Weekly The twenty brand new crime stories in this book have been specially commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of CrimeFest, described by the Guardian as "one of the 50 best festivals in the world." Contributors come from around the world and include the legendary Maj Sjöwall who, together with partner Per Wahlöö, was the originator of Nordic noir. The editors are Martin Edwards and Adrian Muller. Martin Edwards is responsible for many award-winning anthologies and Adrian Muller is one of the co-founders of CrimeFest. Contributors to Ten Year Stretch are: Bill Beverly, Simon Brett, Lee Child, Ann Cleeves, Jeffery Deaver, Martin Edwards, Kate Ellis, Peter Guttridge, Sophie Hannah, John Harvey, Mick Herron, Donna Moore, Caro Ramsay, Ian Rankin, James Sallis, Zoë Sharp, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Maj Sjöwall, Michael Stanley and Andrew Taylor.
Nick Madrid: the continuing story of a life lived badly. Amiable, accident-prone journalist Nick Madrid has done some competitive fencing in the past and keeps fit by practising astanga vinyasa yoga. He is also something of a film buff, all of which qualify him as the prime (and only) candidate for the job of replacement stuntman on a low-budget (a very low-budget) pirate film (and musical) being shot in the Caribbean. With an oddball cast of Hollywood rejects and has-beens, not to mention a cameo appearance by Madrid's best friend Bridget 'The Bitch of the Broadsheets' Frost, dodgy props and a Second Unit which seems to be very busy doing something totally unconnected with the film, there seems little chance of sticking to the script. To confuse matters further, real, modern-day pirates turn up and the principle cast members are shipwrecked on an island with the sole survivor of Cast Adrift, a reality television game show gone horribly (very horribly) wrong. To add to the chaos, Nick, as usual, ends up naked and once again at the mercy of the predatory wildlife. And just what did happen to the original stuntman? Described as 'Agatha Christie on laughing gas', Peter Guttridge's whacky, over-the-top comedy thrillers quickly found fans among the some of the top names in British crime writing. Val McDermid said of them: 'Managed the rare double of making me laugh out loud and wince in sympathy...enormous fun' and the late Reginald Hill described the Nick Madrid series as: 'A fast moving, laugh-a-line frolic...we gasp with amazement, excitement and amusement.
Roving reporter Nick Madrid finds himself in New York covering a fencing tournament between Britain and the USA. When he stumbles over a murder plot involving big money sports sponsorship, he knows he's on to a hot story. And when he discovers a link to an old mystery from the thirties involving Nazi gold and Oswald Mosley's blackshirts, he can't resist trying to foil the villain's plan.
A macabre discovery in Brighton has a link to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in this “clever puzzle” from the author of the acclaimed Brighton Trilogy (Kirkus Reviews). After a disastrous mistake costs him his job as Chief Constable, Bob Watts is surprised to find himself elected to the role of Brighton’s first police commissioner. But just as he returns to the public eye, Watts is hit with a shocking scandal involving the director of the Royal Pavilion. In the subsequent investigation, Det. Inspector Sarah Gilchrist and Det. Sergeant Bellamy Heap are perplexed by the discovery of looted antiquities from Cambodia’s Angkor Wat in the tunnels beneath the Pavilion. Soon, the case leads to a murder victim along with the suspicious arrival of a survivor of Pol Pot’s regime. In this “taut, richly detailed plot,” Watts and Gilchrist must uncover the dark truth before the body count rises (Publishers Weekly). “Gritty and dark, the novel is certain to appeal to readers of the author’s previous Brighton mysteries.” —Booklist “The two cases merge in a startling denouement [and] Guttridge brings back several favorite characters from earlier installments.” —Kirkus Reviews
A body found stabbed repeatedly outside the local lido leads DI Sarah Gilchrist and DS Bellamy Heap into an intriguing new case. With an art deco lido under threat of closure by a ruthless property developer, the Save the Salthaven Lido campaigners are fighting a desperate battle to keep it open. When the lead campaigner is discovered dead, suspicion falls on the developers. No sooner have DI Sarah Gilchrist and DS Bellamy Heap begun to investigate that there is a second death during a pre-qualifying event in Brighton Bay for potential Cross-Channel swimmers. This time it’s a local millionaire businesswoman with radical plans to reorganise the family business. When another endurance swimmer dies during an event with links to the property developer, Gilchrist and Heap flounder. Are all the deaths connected to the Salthaven development? Is someone targeting open-water swimmers? Gilchrist and Heap race to uncover the truth before more victims come to the surface.
The new gripping mystery following City of Dreadful Night. A man impaled on the South Downs. Another skinned alive. A skeleton found beneath the West Pier, its feet encased in concrete. Brighton has been invaded. But this is no mere power struggle between rival mobsters; the motives for the killings stretch back through the decades, to an explosive forty-year-old secret Brighton's crime king John Hathaway would rather forget. But someone else remembers, and that someone has decided that revenge is a dish best served cold...
The Brighton series continues and “takes a turn towards the occult” with “well-wrought prose, an appealing new character . . . and a deadly climax” (Booklist). Something strange is in the Brighton air. Everywhere newly-promoted Sarah Gilchrist looks, unsettling things are happening. A Wicker Man is burned on the beach at dawn with a body inside; a painting titled The Devil’s Altar is stolen from the Brighton Museum; a vicar who casts out demons goes missing; and a rare medieval manuscript of the occult Key of Solomon is stolen from the Jubilee Library. Then Gilchrist’s flatmate, Kate Simpson, discovers that acts of sacrilege and grave robbing have been routinely taking place in Brighton and the surrounding villages. And ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts is puzzling over inscriptions in his late father’s books. Specifically, books by occult writers Dennis Wheatley, Colin Pearson—and the feared Aleister Crowley, cremated in Brighton in 1947. Old Religion and New Age collide and the body count mounts as the Devil’s Moon slowly rises . . . “Guttridge’s fourth dispatch from Brighton features many of the same characters as the first three but is more cerebral and slower paced. In its own different way, however, it’s just as literate and exciting.” —Kirkus Reviews
A bloody death of an actress during a theatre show has DI Gilchrist and DS Heap investigate . . . but was it a bizarre accident or a deliberate attack? During a theatre performance Detective Inspector Sarah Gilchrist is reluctantly attending, blood begins soaking through a curtain startling one actor into falling to his death from the stage. The source of the blood: Elvira Wright, the lead actress, has been bludgeoned by a lead weight used for opening the curtain. Meanwhile former Hollywood actress Nimue Grace is attracting attention from a notorious gangster. When she stumbles across something horrific in the aptly named Butcher's Wood, she interprets it as a vicious message left for her. As Gilchrist and Detective Sergeant Bellamy Heap investigate, they find themselves running in circles. All the actors were disgruntled with the director of the play, Cat Pinter, and the way it was produced, but why would any of them target Elvira? And what is the meaning of the horrible discovery in Butcher's Wood?
Peter Guttridge gives the traditional English village mystery a whole new twist in A Ghost of a Chance Nick Madrid isn't exactly thrilled when his best friend in journalism - OK, his only friend in journalism - the ''Bitch of the Broadsheets,'' Bridget Frost, commissions him to spend a night in a haunted place on the Sussex Downs, and live to tell the tale. Especially as living to tell the tale isn't made an urgent priority. But fortunately, or unfortunately, Nick stumbles on a hotter story when he discovers a dead man hanging upside down - a l? Tarot card - from an ancient oak. It's quite possible that the nearby New Age Conference Center has something to do with it, or to The Great Beast, the Hollywood movie about Aleister Crowley, filming down in Brighton. New Age meets the Old Religion as Nick is bothered, bewildered, but not necessarily bewitched by pagans, satanists, and a host of assorted metaphysicians. Seances, sabbats, a horse-ride from hell, and a kick-boxing zebra all come Nick's way as he obstinately tracks a treasure once in the possession of Crowley. practices - astanga vinyasa yoga. He lives in Sussex.
The compelling story of prohibited trade from smuggling's golden age to Second World War black marketeering which tells a wealth of anecdotes of human greed, daring and ingenuity; all revealed through centuries of rich social history This colorful history ranges from the 'owlers' smuggling wool across Romney Marsh when the customs system began in 1275 to today's internet piracy and drug mules. Its focus is on Britain's illicit trade between 1700 and 1955, featuring contraband as diverse as tea and spirits, pornography, diamonds, vulture's teeth, 'nylons' and human beings. A vivid narrative reveals how black traders obtained, concealed and sold their illicit goods, as well as exploring linked crimes such as fraud, piracy and murder. Contraband also portrays the state's struggle to protect its revenue with measures like customs cutters and an army of officials including Chaucer and Robert Burns. At the heart of the book are two fascinating opposing trends - how the increasingly global business became professional, playing for the highest stakes, and the power of events like war, taxation and prohibition to tempt the most law-abiding into 'amateur' black trade. Even the rich and famous could not resist - Samuel Pepys records his contraband spice deal with two 'wretched dirty seamen', and London's Ritz was prosecuted during World War Two for contravening restaurant restrictions.
A collection of writings on travels undertaken in the Victorian era. The texts collected in these volumes show how 19th century travel literature served the interests of empire by promoting British political and economic values that translated into manufacturing goods.
These exciting new companion handbooks are the only ones of their kind devoted solely to the effects of environmental variables on the physiology of the world's major fruit and nut crops. Their cosmopolitan scope includes chapters on tropical and temperate zone species written by scientists from several continents. The influence of environmental factors, such as irradiance, temperature, water and salinity on plant physiology and on vegetative and reproductive growth, is comprehensively discussed for each crop. In addition to being a thorough and up-to-date set of textbooks, the organzation of the two volumes makes them an excellent reference tool. Each chapter focuses on a single crop, or a group of genetically or horticulturally related crop, and is appropriately divided into subsections that address individual environmental factors. Some chapters emphasize whole-plant physiology and plant growth and development, while other chapters feature theoretical aspects of plant physiology. Several chapters provide botanical background discussions to enhance understanding of the crop's response to its environment.
Following Never Again and Having It So Good, the third part of Peter Hennessy's celebrated Post-War Trilogy 'By far the best study of early Sixties Britain ... so much fun, yet still shrewd and important' The Times, Books of the Year Harold Macmillan famously said in 1960 that the wind of change was blowing over Africa and the remaining British Empire. But it was blowing over Britain too - its society; its relationship with Europe; its nuclear and defence policy. And where it was not blowing hard enough - the United Kingdom's economy - great efforts were made to sweep away the cobwebs of old industrial practices and poor labour relations. Life was lived in the knowledge that it could end in a single afternoon of thermonuclear exchange if the uneasy, armed peace of the Cold War tipped into a Third World War. In Winds of Change we see Macmillan gradually working out his 'grand design' - how to be part of both a tight transatlantic alliance and Europe, dealing with his fellow geostrategists Kennedy and de Gaulle. The centre of the book is 1963 - the year of the Profumo Crisis, the Great Train Robbery, the satire boom, de Gaulle's veto of Britain's first application to join the EEC, the fall of Macmillan and the unexpected succession to the premiership of Alec Douglas-Home. Then, in 1964, the battle of what Hennessy calls the tweedy aristocrat and the tweedy meritocrat - Harold Wilson, who would end 13 years of Conservative rule and usher in a new era. As in his acclaimed histories of British life in the two previous decades, Never Again and Having it so Good, Peter Hennessy explains the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of a nation with inimitable wit and empathy. No historian knows the by-ways as well the highways of the archives so well, and no one conveys the flavour of the period so engagingly. The early sixties live again in these pages.
DI Sarah Gilchrist and DS Bellamy Heap are called in when the body of a man is found floating in a lake belonging to a reclusive ex-Hollywood actress. When Major Richard Rabbitt, owner of a large estate in Sussex, is found floating in a lake belonging to Nimue Grace, a charismatic former Hollywood actress, DI Sarah Gilchrist and DS Bellamy Heap are called in to investigate - and quickly discover Rabbitt was a notoriously difficult man to deal with. Rabbitt was hated by his estranged wife, had several rivalries with residents of the area, and was involved in a number of deals with other shady businessmen . . . such as Said Farzi, a ‘criminal’ according to many, and the corrupt politician William Simpson – the father of Heap’s girlfriend. With numerous suspects and many refusing to cooperate, Gilchrist and Heap must stay on their toes to unravel all the connections. Who stood to gain the most from Rabbitt’s demise, and who can be trusted?
In March 1970, Peter Rhodes and his wife went to Japan. It was Peter's second visit and an attempt to lay a ghost. His story begins in 1939 with the start of World War II and traces the war through India and Malaya, followed by three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese. When Peter returned to Britain in 1946 he attempted to rebuild his life. However, still embittered and suffering from nightmares and an intense hatred of the Japanese 25 years on, the author decided to go back to Japan to find his personal enemy. Only in doing so was he finally able to find peace and to lay a ghost.
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