2011 CGD Award Winner! Gripping, Thrilling, Compelling, Hilarious! Set in small town Middle England where nothing nasty should happen, this witty thriller will make you laugh, cry, and question one or two of lifes quirkier realities. Lying somewhere between Niall Johnsons and Richard Russos 'Keeping Mum' and CBS televisions 'Dexter' (a serial killer hero - should you love him or hate him?). 'Cross-dressed to kill' picks up the story of a likeable rogue, a gently camp hairdresser who, disappointed with life and disillusioned with his once glittering career, after he begins chatting neurotically to his contrary reflection in a salon mirror, starts disposing of his most irritating clients. The novel follows its 'hero' through the course of one turbulent year, charting half a dozen 'unfortunate' murders, a host of twists and turns, and ultimately a devastating revenge...PAPERBACK SOON TO BE RELEASED IN THE UK THROUGH AMAZON AND ALL OTHER GOOD BOOK RETAILERS see andrewlucas.co.uk for further updates ---- 'Easy reading at its very best, a captivating writing style'.Petra Kitto - CGD July 2011 ----'Fab holiday reading, had me laughing on the sand and on the edge of my bed last thing before sundown' Ava Gale - Feb 2011 ---- 'In 'Cross dressed to kill' Andrew Lucas presents us with a baddy indeed, but a nicer, more appealing villain, a serial killer to love, a Sweeney Todd for the 21st century' . Max Southwell - Read/Write, May 2011. ----

'Cross-dressed to Kill' is a collection of extraordinary stories by twenty women cross-dressers of English, Irish, French, Prussian, Russian, Spanish, American and Israeli nationalities. The book answers the questions of why young women dressed as men to fight as soldiers in the 17th to 20th centuries? There were literally hundreds of known women cross-dressers yet they have been erased from both social and military history. It also contributes to the current debate about binary versus non-binary sexuality, for these women defied their birth sex and social gender assignation by assuming male disguise. The penalty for cross-dressing in this period was death.So, the bravery of these women masquerading as men and the risks they took were great. They watched their fathers, husbands and brothers head off to war, before breaking free from domesticity and joining the army too. Betty Friedan, doyenne of the feminist movement asks 'why should women have a half-life?' The cross-dressing women answer that by their actions. Fearless, 'tomboys', early feminists and decidedly full of what the newspapers called 'pluck and spunk'. They were young women for whom 'patriotism has no sex', determined to fight for their country. What happened to them in countless battles and wars around the world? Many were killed in combat, their sex discovered while dying on the battlefield. None were afraid to kill men and their bravery was rewarded by their officers and by royalty too. Medals, money and fame came to them when they told their stories to newspapers and book publishers. Were they lesbians or transsexuals? Some women like Maria van Antwerpen felt that they were 'in appearance a woman but in nature a man'. The book has the intimate details of how they disguised themselves and kept their sex secret for so long. They bandaged their breasts, used metal pipes to urinate, cropped their hair and adopted male mannerisms to deceive recruiting sergeants, their military companions and other women. Oscar Wilde wrote that what you wear 'penetrates to the very soul of the wearer...' So that 'the mind changes its sex' and you can behave as a man if dressed like one. What is the legacy of these courageous cross-dressers? Some are now hailed by the Army as the first female soldiers- like the American Deborah Sampson and Lucy Brewer. Statues have been erected in towns across Europe. Their bravery recognised by medals and life-long annuities from an admiring and astonished Royalty. Women soldiers today trying for the elite forces and demanding equality in the ranks can look to their historic sisters in arms. For they were iconic and spirited fighters for a right to full lives, crashing the barriers of society's prescribed roles for women. There are contemporary songs and poems written about them, for they were in their heyday minor celebrities. The Appendix lists for the first time those women recorded in military, archives and the law courts. Once forgotten but now remembered. As the writer Hilary Mantel says of women in history, ' their story is our story'.

Eddie Izzard - action transvestite, boy racer and male tomboy - spent the 1990s conquering Britain. As the decade ended, he looked further afield. "Dressed To Kill", his stand-up tour, saw him transport his high heels and off-the-shoulder numbers to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, taking a natural comedian's delight in the differences separating the two sides of the Pond. In this book, he reflects on his birth in Yemen and his childhood in Northern Ireland, Wales and London, and muses on animals, male tomboys, street theatre, sex, crime, God, "The Great Escape", Bible stories starring Sean Connery and James Mason, and cats who dig for oil. He also reflects on the trials and tribulations of being an cross-dressing, surrealist comedian intent on making it in America.

Alex Cross watched a man die at the hands of an old enemy. . . and he's back from the grave for revenge. Alex Cross, I'm coming for you-even from the grave if I have to. Along Came a Spider killer Gary Soneji has been dead for over ten years. Alex Cross watched him die. But today, Cross saw him gun down his partner. Is Soneji alive? A ghost? Or something even more sinister? Nothing will prepare you for the wicked truth. BookShots Lightning-fast stories by James Patterson Novels you can devour in a few hours Impossible to stop reading All original content from James Patterson

#1 New York Times bestselling author of American Assassin—now a major motion picture—and “the voice of today’s postmodern thriller generation” (The Providence Journal) delivers a pulse-pounding novel starring a young, hungry, and lethal operative named Mitch Rapp as he begins his career as a CIA superagent. In the year since the CIA fully trained and then unleashed him, Mitch Rapp has been steadily working his way through a list of men, bullet by bullet. His latest target takes him to Paris but in the split second it takes the bullet to leave Rapp’s silenced pistol, everything changes. The tables have turned, and Rapp finds himself brutally outnumbered. In the same instant, he has become a liability. Operating on his own and outside the control of his handlers, it soon becomes clear that nothing is more dangerous than a wounded and cornered man. Because if anyone can survive and come out on top, no matter whom he must kill to get there, it’s Mitch Rapp. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been as Mitch Rapp embarks on the journey that will turn him into America’s most deadly asset. The non-stop and realistic action proves that “Flynn is a master—maybe the master—of writing thriller novels in which the pages seem to turn themselves” (Bookreporter).

Not much is going right these days for once rich, now impoverished Nora Blackbird—what with her lover under house arrest and her best friend in the slammer. Then Nora and her sisters receive word of a million-dollar inheritance.... Great-aunt Madeleine Blackbird has died in a volcanic eruption on an Indonesian island and left her fabulous Bucks County estate to the three Blackbird sisters. But when Nora and her scandal-ridden sisters, Libby and Emma, go to claim their windfall, they find the house in decay and all of their aunt’s to-die-for treasures gone. They also find a woman’s body.... Nora feels compelled to seek out the truth, but even with help from her mobster boyfriend, Mick Abruzzo, who provides distractions both dark and delightful, solving this case proves challenging. Relatives are circling to claim a share of Madeleine’s property, the suspect list is growing, and Nora’s wild and wacky sisters are adding one surprise after another. It’s enough to put Nora’s couture undies in a serious twist!

This unique and fascinating book, meticulously and systematically develops a theory of male femaling which has major ramifications for both the field of 'transvestism' and 'transsexualism' and for the analysis of sex and gender more generally.

With relentless danger around every corner, Detective Alex Cross is hunting down a kidnapper . . . but only if someone powerful doesn't kill him first. The President's son and daughter are abducted, and Detective Alex Cross is one of the first on the scene. But someone very high-up is using the FBI, Secret Service, and CIA to keep him off the case and in the dark. A deadly contagion in the water supply cripples half of the capital, and Alex discovers that someone may be about to unleash the most devastating attack the United States has ever experienced. As his window for solving both crimes narrows, Alex makes a desperate decision that goes against everything he believes-one that may alter the fate of the entire country. Kill Alex Cross is fast, exciting, and tightly wound, full of "fast-and-furious action" (Washington Post).

A threat from an anonymous caller sends D. C. into panic as Detective Alex Cross teams up with his wife to uncover the chilling truth. An anonymous caller has promised to set off deadly bombs in Washington, DC. A cruel hoax or the real deal? By the time Alex Cross and his wife, Bree Stone, uncover the chilling truth, it may already be too late . . . . BookShots Lightning-fast stories by James Patterson Novels you can devour in a few hours Impossible to stop reading All original content from James Patterson

The noble wives in María de Zayas's Desengaños suffer terrible fates: one is beheaded, another poisoned, one is cemented into a chimney, while yet another is locked into a tiny wall closet where she dies. The hallmark of Zayas's aesthetics, these characters are the central reason why her fiction has increased in popularity through the ages. Yet their stories pose an apparent contradiction between the author's pro-female rhetoric and her gusto for killing model women, then beautifying their mutilated cadavers. Dressed to Kill reconciles Zayas's Desengaños with the age in which it was written, contextualizing the book in baroque poetics, the Spanish honour code, and fifteenth-century martyr saints' lives. Elizabeth Rhodes elegantly uncovers Zayas's intention to reform the Spanish nobility by displaying noble misbehaviour and its deadly consequences. Her book concludes by detailing the Desengaños' intriguing influence on the aesthetic base of Gothic literature by revealing that its authors were avid readers of Zayas.