Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Literature & Fiction

A media billionaire’s daughter disappears following a massacre at a Belfast student party and nobody knows if she has been kidnapped or caught in the crossfire. A controversial new abortion clinic is firebombed, and a fire-and-brimstone church movement is blamed. Hired to both find the missing daughter, and prove the church’s guilt, Dan Starkey suddenly finds himself struggling to cope with two very different investigations...or could they possibly be connected?

When you are an inoffensive retired librarian with bitter personal experience of Evil Talking Cats, do you rescue a kitten from the cold on a December night? Do you follow up news items about cats digging in graveyards? Do you inquire into long-ago cats who voyaged around the world with Captain Cook? Well, yes. If you are Alec Charlesworth, that is precisely what you do - with unexpected and terrifying consequences.

Written in his own words, and guided by a man who collects glasses in a local pub, this is the story of Herod 'Rod' Pinkney's search for Daisy Lamprich, a young woman he first sees on a decade-old episode of the Judge Judy Show and who he now intends to marry. When Daisy is located in the coastal city of Huntington Beach, California, he travels there with his good friend and next-door neighbour, Donald, a man who once fought in the tunnels of Cu Chi during the Vietnam War and who now spends most of his time in Herod's basement.

Meet Adrian Mole, a hapless teenager providing an unabashed, pimples-and-all glimpse into adolescent life. Writing candidly about his parents' marital troubles, the dog, his life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual', Adrian's painfully honest diary is still hilarious and compelling thirty years after it first appeared.

Adrian Mole continues to struggle valiantly against the slings and arrows of growing up and his own family's attempts to scar him for life in this second volume of his secret diary.

Everyone in Cape Cod thinks that Mother is a wonderful woman: pious, hardworking, frugal. Everyone except her husband and seven children. To them she is a selfish and petty tyrant, endlessly comparing her many living children to the one who died in childbirth, keeping a viselike hold on her offspring even as they try to escape into adulthood. Welcome to Mother Land: a suffocating kingdom of parental narcissism.

Joel Foster is a hapless twenty-something. His girlfriend, Beth Lewis, would likely have been a hapless twenty-something, too, had she not been obliterated by a very large cement truck. Some time after Beth’s tragic death, Joel is still trying to juggle grief with the world of modern dating. And while he still feels like a widower, he has to find a new love before three years is up.

Once upon a time, Abbie and Matt had swoon-worthy mini breaks in Paris, and Abbie would cook him steak wearing nothing but an apron and high heels. These days, they’re experiencing the longest dry spell on record. And Abbie is keeping a very big secret. But she’s not ready to give up. Nobody knows Abbie like Matt does, and it helps that he’s tall, dark and handsome, with hazel eyes and dimples to die for. Determined to reignite the romance, Abbie initiates Operation Memory Lane and recreates their happiest memories.

1979. Jackie Chadwick is 17 and living in a supported bedsit. She’s still close to her foster parents and friends with (aka unofficial minder for) Amanda, their irresponsible daughter, but she’s enjoying her independence–until a fire leaves her temporarily homeless. Jackie’s dad, widower and recovering alcoholic Dave, has just been released from prison and sees this as his chance to make amends. He offers her his spare room–but can their relationship survive him going back on the booze, his gin – loving lady friend and her errant son?

Adrian Mole is an adult. At least that's what it says on his passport. But living at home, clinging to his threadbare cuddly rabbit 'Pinky', working as a paper pusher for the DoE and pining for the love of his life, Pandora, has proved to him that adulthood isn't quite what he expected.

London, early 1950s. Marcia Beasley of St John's Wood is discovered dead in her home, naked and covered with a coal scuttle. Detective Sergeant Greenleaf is tasked with solving the crime and bringing meaning to her gruesome death, and it seems her whole social circle have secrets to hide and grudges to bear. Who, for example, is the limping midnight visitor? Is the bibulous priest as ingenious as he seems? And will Mrs Burkiss ever yield her keys to the broom cupboard?

A comedy of Russian gangsters, town planners and a dog called Dennis. This hilarious story from Monty Python star, Terry Jones, will make you laugh out loud. Martin Thomas is not happy. The view he loves is about to be blocked by an ugly building. He decides to take action and forms a protest group. Then things go wrong and Martin finds himself running for his life. Along the way he gets mixed up with depressed town planners, violent gangsters and a kidnapped concert pianist.

So how do I greet the New Millennium? In despair. I'm a single parent, I live with my mother...I have a bald spot the size of a jaffa cake on the back of my head...I can't go on like this, drifting into early middle-age. I need a Life Plan....

Ben is still desperately trying to forget that Katy had a one-night stand just before she announced she was pregnant. Nine months later a new baby explodes into their lives, creating utter chaos. Being a stay-at-home dad isn’t as simple as it seems; in fact it’s a disaster. Then help arrives in the most unlikely form: the wife of Katy’s ex-lover. Should Ben tell Katy about his secret rescuer, or is it his turn to keep a secret?

On a remote South Pacific island, the struggles of an elderly tribesman to translate Hamlet into local pidgin English are interrupted by the arrival of an unexpected visitor. William Hardt is an obsessive young American lawyer who has come to help. From that moment on, nothing will ever be the same - for what (and who) William finds on the island will challenge both his and our notions about love, life, and even death.

He was perfect. Denim blue eyes, a dazzling smile. And he hadn’t sent me a picture of his junk. Which is about as rare, these days, as a dodo. When Sloane met Myles, everything fell into place. He loved a martini almost as much as she did, shared her passion for four-cheese pizzas, and made her laugh harder than any episode of Friends. She’d found 'The One' at last, and she could finally delete Tinder, forgetting all those waste-of-space men she’d never have to date again. But then she finds out that Myles has a secret. A very big one.

December, 1939. Having solved the case of the Suffolk Vampire, Inspector Betty Church and her colleagues at Sackwater Police Station have settled back down to business. There's the elderly Mr Fern, who keeps losing his slippers, Sylvia Satin's 13th birthday party to attend and the scintillating case of the missing bookmark to solve. Though peace and quiet are all well and good, Betty soon finds herself longing for some cold-blooded murder.

Set in 1981, the year of the Brixton riots, the novel is a gripping thriller in a society on the edge of explosion. Wheatle focusses on Biscuit and his posse as a way to introduce the whole community. Biscuit lives with his mother, brother and sister. He helps out by hustling on the frontline for the South London badman, Nunchaks. He doesn’t want to be doing this for the rest of his life but it’s difficult to get out of the trap. As the patience of the community breaks and the riots begin to erupt, Biscuit has to make a choice that could change his life forever.

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. But his daily discontent is nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke.

Melissa and Paul: Five years after they split he's still looking for love in all the wrong places while all she wants is him. Chris and Vicky: They are deliriously happy, so why is Chris risking it all for an affair? Cooper and Laura: He wants to settle down, she wants to take a gap year - can their relationship survive a year apart?