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At seventeen, Lenora Hope hung her sister with a rope. Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope's End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

Napoleon, escaped from Elba, pursues his enemies across Europe like a vengeful phoenix. If he can corner the British and Prussians before their Russian and Austrian allies arrive, his genius will lead the French armies to triumph at Waterloo. In the Balkans, preparing a thrust northwards into Central Europe to block the Russians and Austrians, a horde of Muslim mercenaries is gathering.

Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades. But when the mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours – a poised English beauty, a policeman’s daughter, a frustrated female baseball star, and a rabidly pro-McCarthy typist – into an unlikely friendship.

The Romans invaded Britannia in AD 43 confident of victory. They swept through a divided and ill-equipped enemy, scattered across tough terrain. But one man was not prepared to surrender. Caratacus - quick-witted youngest son of a a tribal king - had been trained from birth to be a warrior of power and grit. Sent to be schooled by the Druids in his boyhood, his training meant that an already strong and cunning prince returned to his father's kingdom as a war machine.

It is AD 60. The hard-won province of Britannia is a thorn in the side of the Roman Empire, its tribes swift to anger and relentless in their bloody harassment of the Roman military. Far from being a peaceful northern enclave, Britannia is a seething mass of bitter rebels and unlikely alliances against the common enemy. Corruption amongst greedy officials diverts resources from the locals who need them. For the military, it's a never-ending fight to maintain a fragile peace.

It’s 1925 and the Empress of Australia is making her regular Atlantic crossing, New York-bound, with a full manifest of passengers.When a dead body is uncovered onboard, it is up to Inspector Archie Daniels to find the killer. But solving one murder quickly turns into solving two, then three, and it becomes clear that Daniels must act fast to avoid an all-souls-lost-level calamity. No one, from the horrendously wealthy and entitled first-class passengers to what they would consider the dregs of empire below deck, is safe. And no one can get off.

Germany is at war. The Nazis have absolute power. Evil men carry out their crimes without fear, knowing that the police dare not defy the regime. But Criminal Inspector Schenke - a good man living in terrible times - believes in justice. Whatever the personal cost.

Journey through the colonies of 19th-century Australia with three stand-alone novels of love, loss, survival, and redemption. In 1806, a fateful decision sends Eleanor Marling from the salons of London to a prison ship bound for New South Wales. She is put to work at the female factory of Parramatta. English settler Grace Ashwell flees an abusive lover in Hobart Town, with six-year-old Violet in tow. Deep in the wilderness, they find a crude hut inhabited by an escaped convict long presumed dead.

H.M.S. Surprise, the third in O'Brian's acclaimed Aubrey-Maturin series, follows the variable fortunes of Captain Jack Aubrey's career in Nelson's navy, as he attempts to hold his ground against admirals, colleagues, and the enemy, and accepts a commission to convey a British ambassador to the East Indies. The voyage leads him and his friend Stephen Maturin to the strange sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and through the archipelago of Spice Islands where the French have a near-overwhelming local superiority.

Autumn, 1541. King Henry VIII has set out on a spectacular Progress to the North to attend an extravagant submission of his rebellious subjects in York. Already in the city are lawyer Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak. As well as assisting with legal work processing petitions to the King, Shardlake has reluctantly undertaken a special mission - to ensure the welfare of an important but dangerous conspirator being returned to London for interrogation.

Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe is a man with a reputation. Born in the gutter, raised a foundling, he joined the army 21 years ago, and it’s been his home ever since. He’s a loose cannon, but his unconventional methods make him a valuable weapon. So when, the dust still settling after the Battle of Waterloo, the duke of Wellington needs a favour, he turns to Sharpe.

AD 652. After surviving dark intrigues at the Merovingian court of Frankia, Beobrand is finally able to undertake the mission his queen set him: to escort a party of pilgrims to the holy city of Rome. But Beobrand's life is never easy. His party includes a scheming novice churchman whose ambition is boundless, and a mysterious envoy from Frankia. Entering the lands of the Langobards, Beobrand discovers unexpected similarities to his native Northumbria in their speech and customs... and their willingness to spill blood.

Richard Sharpe, asked to help an old friend, meets, at last, the greatest enemy. Five years after the Battle of Waterloo, Sharpe's peaceful retirement in Normandy is shattered. An old friend, Don Blas Vivar, is missing in Chile, reported dead at rebel hands--a report his wife refuses to believe. She appeals to Sharpe to find out the truth. Sharpe, along with Patrick Harper, finds himself bound for Chile via St. Helena, where they have a fateful meeting with the fallen emperor Napoleon.

A lost civilisation. A curse reborn. Dr Ben Kazin has only a blurred photograph and a gut instinct that there is a lost city to uncover somewhere beneath the Botswana cliffs. Soon, a whispered curse and a chance encounter with a local tribe lead him to discover much more than city foundations. The curse, it seems, is real, and will link Ben, his oldest friend and the woman they both love with a forgotten leader from 2,000 years ago, in a city of glory and honour that subsequently disappeared without a trace.

Only she knows the truth. Only he can tell the world. Vienna, 1946. A brilliant German scientist spirited out of the ruins Nazi Europe in search of a new life. Moscow, 1964. A rising star of the British diplomatic service whose job is not what it seems. London, the present day. A once promising academic offered an opportunity to seal his place in history. Their stories, their lives, and the fate of the world, are bound by a single document: The Scarlet Papers. The devastating secrets contained within teased by a brief invitation: Tomorrow 11AM. Take a cab and pay in cash. Tell no one.

1803. The Napoleonic Wars. A Royal Navy warship is ordered to pursue an enemy frigate to the icy waters far south in the Indian Ocean. There, it must capture the enemy ship and retrieve a mysterious sea chest, contents unknown, failure not permitted. For the determined young captain and his eager crew, this already dangerous mission turns into a battle with a mysterious vessel that appears not in the sea, but unbelievably, impossibly, in the sky above. But nothing could prepare the crew for what lay beyond the 50th latitude of south.

1660, General Edward Whalley and Colonel William Goffe, father- and son-in-law, cross the Atlantic. They are on the run and wanted for the murder of Charles I. Under the provisions of the Act of Oblivion, they have been found guilty in absentia of high treason. In London, Richard Nayler, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council, is tasked with tracking down the fugitives. He'll stop at nothing until the two men are brought to justice. A reward of £100 hangs over their heads—for their capture, dead or alive.

Summer 1914. A world on the brink of catastrophe. In London, 26-year-old Venetia Stanley – aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless – is having a love affair with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most sensitive matters of state. As Asquith reluctantly leads the country into war with Germany, a young intelligence officer is assigned to investigate a leak of top secret documents – and suddenly what was a sexual intrigue becomes a matter of national security that will alter the course of political history.

In the last years of the ninth century, King Alfred of Wessex is in failing health, and his heir is an untested youth. The Danes, who have failed so many times to conquer Wessex, smell opportunity.... First comes Harald Bloodhair, a savage warrior leading a Viking horde, who is encouraged to cruelty by his woman, Skade. But Alfred still has the services of Uhtred, his unwilling warlord, who leads Harald into a trap and, at Farnham in Surrey, inflicts one of the greatest defeats the Vikings were ever to suffer.

Penguin presents the audio edition of Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett, read by David Monteath. It is 1557, and legendary Scottish warrior Francis Crawford of Lymond is once more in France. There he is leading an army to rout the hated English from Calais. Yet while Lymond seeks victory on the battlefield he is haunted by his troubled past - chiefly the truth about his origins and his marriage (in name only) to young Englishwoman Philippa Somerville.