Photographer Joanne Eberhart has just moved home to Stepford with her family, but for some reason she is having a lot of difficulty making new friends. As far as Joanne is concerned, there's something peculiar about the women of Stepford.
The international arms trade is about to become a national problem...
In 2012, in a Middle Eastern souk, CIA agent Miles Brookhaven was attacked. At the time he was infiltrating rebel groups in the area. No one was certain if his cover had been blown or if the act was just an arbitrary attack on Westerners. Months later, the incident remains a mystery.
Now, Liz Carlyle and her Counter Terrorism unit in MI5 have been charged with the task of watching the international under-the-counter arms trade. With the Arabic region in such a volatile state, the British Intelligence forces have become increasing concerned that extremist Al-Qaeda jihadis are building their power base ready to launch another attack. As the pressure mounts, Liz and her team must intercept illegal weapons before they get into the wrong hands.
When MI5 learns that the source of the arms deals is located in Western Europe, Liz finds herself on a manhunt that leads her to Paris, to Berlin and into her own long-forgotten past. A past buried so deep that she thought it would never resurface . . .
When a rogue Russian spy warns her of a plot to hack into the West's military satellite systems, MI5's Liz Carlyle finds her past catching up with her...
Geneva, 2012. When a Russian intelligence officer approaches MI5 with vital information about the imminent cyber-sabotage of an Anglo-American Defence programme, he refuses to talk to anyone but Liz Carlyle. But who is he, and what is his connection to the British agent?
At a tracking station in Nevada, US Navy officers watch in horror as one of their unmanned drones plummets out of the sky, and panic spreads through the British and American Intelligence services. Is this a Russian plot to disable the West's defences? Or is the threat coming from elsewhere?
As Liz and her team hunt for a mole inside the MOD, the trail leads them from Geneva, to Marseilles and into a labyrinth of international intrigue, in a race against time to stop the Cold War heating up once again...
I understand suddenly why I'm running. I need to warn them about the pressure switch, hidden in the crack in the road. The driver won't see it. They don't have a chance. I wave my arms, a heartbeat before the whole nasty serpent shrieks to life, and fill my lungs to cry out. And then, like always, I wake up.
It is the early months of the Arab Spring, 2011. But for three young men, two American and one Iraqi, their minds return again and again to 2006, to the bloodiest stretch of the Iraq War. Members of the same platoon, they were tasked with the often deadly job of repairing potholes in the roads of the Al Anbar Province: potholes that almost always concealed a home-made bomb. They have survived the war but now they must learn to live with themselves.
Discharged without honour, medic Doc Pleasant returns to his impoverished hometown to face his failures, both real and imagined. The platoon's young lieutenant, Donavan, carries the weight and the scars of his responsibility - of the superiors he never let himself doubt and the orders he dutifully followed.
And at a Tunisian university, Kateb, the Iraqi interpreter his fellow troops knew only as Dodge, tries to lose himself in his studies of classic American fiction. But the memories of his broken country, of the family he left behind and the choices that the conflict forced him to make, keep intruding.
As they struggle to find their place in a world that no longer knows them, they realise that the war has left nothing in their lives untouched and that salvation may come from an unexpected quarter.
It is the final days of the Chinese Empire. Trade in opium with Europe is slowly corroding the power of the Ch'ing Dynasty. Orchid, a beautiful seventeen-year-old from an aristocratic but impoverished family, is pushed into the maelstrom when she finds herself unexpectedly chosen to become a lower-ranking concubine of the Emperor.
The world inside the Forbidden City is erotically charged and highly ritualised, but beneath its immaculate face lie whispers of murders and ghosts. The thousands of concubines will go to any lengths to bear the Emperor a son and become his Empress. Determined not to be a victim of the jealousies and foul play, Orchid trains herself in the art of pleasuring a man, bribes her way into the royal bed and seduces the monarch. Little does she know that China will collapse around her, and she will be its last Empress.
Bill Wyeth is a successful attorney in his late thirties with a beautiful wife and son. Some would say he has it all, but, by the merest of chances, one day he loses everything: family, job, status. Unmoored and alone, Wyeth drifts toward the city's darker corners, where restoration seems unlikely, redemption impossible.
At his lowest ebb, Wyeth finds himself in an old-time Manhattan steakhouse where he becomes intrigued by the manager, Allison Sparks - sexy, complicated, and independent. She controls access to a private basement bar. This is the Havana Room, and what goes on in there, he's told, is secret and available only to a privileged few.
When Wyeth agrees to help a friend of Allison's in concluding a last-minute real-estate transaction he knows something is wrong. He soon finds himself sucked into a world far darker and more terrifying than anything he has previously known and he realises that he will have to unlock the deadly secrets of the Havana Room in order to survive.
Some neighbours are playing Scrabble one evening when their cat drags into the house not a bird, or some other catch, but human fingers. A guest arrives at a dinner party where he is not welcome, and his hosts conspire to find and attack his Achilles heel. This is a collection of dark tales.
A collection in which unsuspecting victims are devoured by their own obsessions: a man becomes devoted to his pet snails; a young nanny turns arsonist in a bid to become heroine of the hour; and, a boy finally stands up to his mother, with knife in hand. It probes the dark corners of the human psyche.
When a baby escapes a murderer intent on killing the entire family, who would have thought it would find safety and security in the local graveyard? Brought up by the resident ghosts, ghouls and spectres, Bod has an eccentric childhood learning about life from the dead.
Ray Mitchell is lying in a hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, his head a bloody mess of swabs and bandages. He knows who did it, but he's not saying. He had been a successful and wealthy TV scriptwriter, but returned to the mean streets of Dempsey, New Jersey, in order to give something back to the community where he grew up.
Regional Police Chief Tom Shackleton has his sights set on the top job at the London Met, but no-one is more ambitious for his future than his wife Jenni. So when Jenni gets the chance to lunch the second-in-command to the Home Secretary, she raises the stakes and will stop at nothing to get what she wants.
On the night the Used Women's Book Club last met to exchange literary views, the husband of one of its members was being murdered. It wasn't the first time Rob had borrowed the flat of his friend Larry to conduct his adulterous fling, but whoever came to the door that night was wielding a vicious weapon.
