When Edinburgh restaurant owner Alex Maclennan is found dead in his bathroom, Inspector Jenny Logan is called in to investigate. At first his death looks like an accident but Logan begins to think it could be murder. Does his wife, his brother-in-law or his friend know more about his death than they will admit? Logan uncovers the truth about Alex's business affairs and personal life, and devises a plan to catch the killer.
Usually a sophisticated plotter, bestseller Baldacci (Absolute Power) offers a story line and villain on a par with an average James Bond film in what's billed as his first international thriller. Nicholas Creel, the head of the Ares Corporation, a huge defense contractor, hires a perception management firm to start a second cold war by planting fake news stories on the Internet about Russian atrocities. The propaganda campaign soon turns violent with the massacre of the members of a London think tank, the Phoenix Group, apparently by a Russian hit team.
Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language
Over the past few decades, we have reached new frontiers of linguistic knowledge. Linguists can now explain how and why language changes, describe its structures, and map its activity in the brain. We imagine a word’s origin is it’s “true” meaning, that foreign languages are full of “untranslatable” words, or that grammatical mistakes undermine English. In Don’t Believe A Word, linguist David Shariatmadari takes us on a mind-boggling journey through the science of language, urging us to abandon our prejudices in a bid to uncover the (far more interesting) truth about what we do with words.
These two renowned writers have invented a world not unlike our own - a world on the edge of chaos, torn between the madness of religious fanaticism and the stubborn denial of scientists. Only a handful of people on the planet Lagash are prepared to face the truth - that their six suns are setting all at once for the first time in 2,000 years, signaling the end of civilization!
