It’s taken years, but Portia Adams has found an outlet for her obsessive curiosity as the consulting detective of 221 Baker Street, like her grandfathers before her. Scotland Yard taps her for their trickiest crimes, she’s in her last year of law school and finally things are heating up between Portia and her downstairs tenant, Constable Brian Dawes. But a bomb planted at a crime scene destroys everything she has fought so hard to establish. ​She wakes up to a world she can’t communicate with, the sounds around her dulled and unintelligible and the words that come out of her mouth are garbled and incomprehensible. Brian was hurt in other ways, the burns on his hands and arms causing pain that makes him turn to the opium dens Sherlock Holmes was also known to frequent. ​The bomber continues to wreak havoc all over London but no one will work with Portia - everyone from her allies at the Yard to the public itself dismisses the young detective as damaged goods. To make matters worse, a rabid spymaster at MI6 believes she’s involved in the bombings and Portia finds herself on the run having to relearn her skills in a deafeningly silent world.

Soon to be an Apple TV+ animated series starring Golden Globe nominee Beanie Feldstein and Emmy Award winner Jane Lynch, it's no secret that Harriet the Spy is a timeless classic that kids will love! Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. In her notebook, she writes down everything she knows about everyone, even her classmates and her best friends. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before she can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together? "What the novel showed me as a child is that words have the power to hurt, but they can also heal, and that it’s much better in the long run to use this power for good than for evil."—New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot

Will they find the spy— or will the spy find them first? When twelve-year-old cousins Sophie and Jessica take a class at a chocolate factory, they don’t expect to see bad guys in such a sweet place. Strange happenings make them wonder if they’ve uncovered another mystery, and they’re soon in danger. Can they find The Chocolate Spy in time? The Chocolate Spy is the third book in this fun and fast-paced Crime-Solving Cousins Mystery series for kids. Buy The Chocolate Spy and go undercover with Sophie and Jessica today!

The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who actually holds it? The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows - bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia and sociology - more or less concomitant inventions - had in common a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions inherit in it. The adventures of the conflict between these two realities - superficial versus real - provide the framework for this highly original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great masters of detective stories and spy novels - G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carré and Graham Greene among others - Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and imagination tell us something fundamental about the nature of modern societies and the modern state.

The comfortable life of Pickles, the calico housecat, is turned upside down when humans succumb to a zombie apocalypse. She doesn’t know where her “pet” – human child Connor – has gone, only that there are zombies everywhere. Determined to find Connor, Pickles sets off with her cat friends and a streetwise raccoon, exploring a world she has only seen through a window. Fending off human zombies, street cats from the wrong side of the track, and a fearsome gang of chipmunks, Pickles and her crew search for remnants of human society.

Every zombie apocalypse needs a hero. And that hero should be a raccoon. Trip, the clumsy but streetwise raccoon, has managed to survive the zombie apocalypse with the help of animal friends and a few kind humans. But he can’t help but notice one thing: he’s the only raccoon in his crew. In fact, he’s the only raccoon he’s seen in ages. Where have all the raccoons gone? The answer to that question is scarier than any zombie horde. People have discovered that raccoons are more than just rodents who knock over their garbage bins; they might be a tool for ending zombie-ism. And that is bad news for raccoons.

The twentieth-century English novel encompasses a vast body of work, and one of the most important and most widely read genres of literature. Balancing close readings of particular novels with a comprehensive survey of the last century of published fiction, this Companion introduces readers to more than a hundred major and minor novelists. It demonstrates continuities in novel-writing that bridge the century's pre- and post-War halves and presents leading critical ideas about English fiction's themes and forms. The essays examine the endurance of modernist style throughout the century, the role of nationality and the contested role of the English language in all its forms, and the relationships between realism and other fictional modes: fantasy, romance, science fiction. Students, scholars and readers will find this Companion an indispensable guide to the history of the English novel.

Rescued from the gallows in 1850s London, young orphan and thief Mary Quinn is offered a place at Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls where she is trained to be part of an all-female investigative unit called The Agency and, at age seventeen, she infiltrates a rich merchant's home in hopes of tracing his missing cargo ships.

Shortlisted for the HWA Gold Crown 2020 _________________________________ From the bestselling e-book sensation of The Thief Taker series comes a thrilling and sumptuous novel set during the early days of the French Revolution. 'A rip-roaring adventure.' Tessa Harris, author of the Dr Thomas Silkstone Mysteries _________________________________ 'He was alive when he went in the mortuary.' 1789. The Bastille is marked for destruction. Skirmishes in the city are rife and revolution is in the air. When a gruesomely murdered rebel is found in the prison morgue, a plot is suspected. English spy, Attica Morgan, is laying low after an abortive mission. So when she's given an assignment inside the Bastille, her instinct is to run. Instead, she's offered a pardon, in return for solving the mystery of the dead revolutionary; and exposing a plot that leads to Marie Antoinette. But as tensions rise to breaking point in the city, Attica quickly realises she's in a race against time. Soon there could be no Bastille to investigate. 'Incredible! It's the best action adventure novel I've ever read... A fantastic achievement that has blown me away with its ingenuity, scope and breathless pace.' Louise Voss, author of the Detective Lennon series