Sarah Becker is the fifth girl to be abducted by a homicidal maniac. Judging from the state of the bodies that have been found, her long hair will be hacked off and she will be tortured. She has about a week to live.

An electrifying thriller from the author of the international bestsellerThe Straw Men.

Tense and suspense-filled thriller from the author of The Straw Men and The Lonely Dead.

It's 1895, and after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's being followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls - and their foray into the spiritual world - lead to?

Stephen King hailed Michael Marshall's novel Straw Men as “a masterpiece . . . brilliantly written and scary as hell.” Now, Marshall returns with this latest unnerving tale—a creepy, fast-paced thriller that grips you from the first page straight through to its shocking end. Bill Moore already has a lot, but he wants more . . . much more. He's got a lucrative job selling condos in the Florida Keys, a successful wife, a good marriage, a beautiful house. He also has a five-year plan for supersuccess, but that plan has begun to drag into its sixth year without reaping its intended rewards. So now Bill's starting to mix it up—just a little—to accelerate his way into the future that he knows he deserves. Then one morning Bill arrives at work to find a card waiting for him, with no indication who it's from or why it was sent. Its message is just one word: modified. From that moment on, Bill's life begins to change. At first, nothing seems very different. But when things begin to unwind rapidly, and one after another, people around Bill start to die, it becomes increasingly clear that someone somewhere has a very different plan for Bill's future. Confused and angry, Bill begins to fight against this unseen force until he comes to a terrifying, inescapable realization: Once modified, there's no going back.

Talking fridges, human clone farms, flying shopping malls – we must be in the Michael Marshall Smith zone. A world all too close to our own...

Michael Marshall Smith's surreal, groundbreaking, and award-winning debut which resonates with wild humour interlaced with dark recollections of an emotional minefield. May we introduce you to Stark. Oh, and by the way -- good luck. Stark is the private investigator who goes to work when Something Happens to you. And when a Something happens it's no good chanting 'go away go away go away' and cowering in a corner, because a Something always comes from your darkest past and won't be beaten until you face it. And that's not easy in a city where reality is twisting and broken, a world in which friends can become enemies in a heartbeat -- and where your most secret fear can become a soul-shredding reality. And the worst of it is, for this nightmare you don't even have to be asleep... Considered a modern classic, and consistently featured in lists of Books To Read Before Your Head Explodes, ONLY FORWARD is a novel you'll never forget.

The first ever collection of Michael Marshall Smith's award-winning short stories. The first piece of fiction Smith ever wrote -- a short story called The Man Who Drew Cats -- won the World Fantasy award. It's included here along with many others, some unpublished, which show the incredible versatility of one of the most exciting writers working in Britain today. The collection is stuffed with surreal, disturbing gems including: 'When God Lived in Kentish Town' Someone comes up to you when you're quietly eating your stir-fried rice in a great Chinese take away, and tells you: 'I've found God'. You try to ignore them, right? But what if they have, and what if He works in a drab old electrical store on Kentish Town Road and he's not getting many customers? 'Diet Hell' Some people will do anything to fit into their old jeans. 'Save As...' What if you could back up your life? Save it up to a certain point and return to it when things went horribly wrong? 'Everybody Goes' An idyllic childhood day from a long, hot summer. The kind you want to last for ever. All good things must come to an end, mustn't they?

Billy Battles is not in Kansas anymore! As Book 2 of the Finding Billy Battles trilogy opens, Billy is far from his Kansas roots—and his improbable journeys are just beginning. He is aboard an ocean liner sailing to the Mysterious East (Hong Kong, French Indochina, and the Philippines), among other places. The year is 1894 and aboard the S S China Billy meets a mysterious, dazzling, and possibly dangerous German Baroness, locked horns with malevolent agents of the German government, and battled ferocious Chinese and Malay pirates in the South China Sea. Later, he is inadvertently embroiled in the bloody anti-French insurgency in Indochina–which quite possibly makes him the first American combatant in a country that eventually will become Vietnam. Later, in the Philippines, he is thrust into the Spanish-American War and the anti-American insurgency that follows. But Billy’s troubles are just beginning. As the 19th century ends and the 20th century begins, he finds himself entangled with political opportunists, spies, revolutionaries and an assortment of malevolent and dubious characters of both sexes. How will Billy handle those people and the challenges they present?

For centuries, Chaucer has been associated with law. This study, however, is concerned less with the overt in Chaucer that concerns law than with the concealed and private: a specific body of materials -- records from the medieval English law courts that the poet evidently read, studied, discussed with colleagues, and then threaded into his texts. This book examines the effects of those documents on the so-called "minor" poems, The House of Fame, and The Canterbury Tales.