Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon

 Meg Langslow, a temporary switchboard operator at her brother Rob's computer-game company, Mutant Wizards, must find the real killer when Rob, who made his fortune from a game called Lawyers from Hell, is accused of strangling the office pest to death with a computer mouse cable. Keeping exposition to a minimum, the author lets crackling dialogue propel the plot. The office boasts a menagerie of remarkable pets, notably George, a buzzard with only one wing who has a perch by Meg's desk. There's a smile on nearly every page and at least one chuckle per chapter. The denouement may stretch credibility, but getting there is such fun it scarcely matters.

Fall of Giants

Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families-American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh-as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.

 

The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës

Essays by leading scholars explore the lives and tragic early deaths of the three Brontë sisters. They set two of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century :Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, in the context of the other prose and poetry of the sisters, and trace the reputation of the Brontës through history. A detailed chronology and guides to further reading are included.

Bahama Crisis

The Mangans, having fought on the losing side of the American War of Independence, sail to the Bahamas, where they settle and prosper. Several generations later, Tom Mangan is the affluent proprietor of a  number of luxury hotels, whose future looks even brighter with the injection of fifty million dollars provided by a well-heeled Texan family. The day Mangan clinches the deal with his friend, Bill  Cunningham, should be the happiest day of his life, but a family tragedy followed by a series of misfortunes and disasters eventually leads him to suspect a conspiracy to ruin him, or, perhaps, something even more horrifying.

Flyaway

The disappearance of Paul Billson, clerk in an engineering firm, seems a minor matter to security consultant, Max Stafford. But when routine enquiries result in Stafford being beaten up, he goes after Billson, who has impulsively taken off for the Sahara, where his air ace father had crashed during the London to Cape Town air race forty years earlier. A recent newspaper smear implied that Billson's father had rigged the crash to profit from an insurance scandal. Now Billson is intent on locating the plane and clearing his father's name - but someone is determined that he should never find it.