Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts. But Fiona's professional success belies domestic strife. Her husband, Jack, asks her to consider an open marriage and, after an argument, moves out of their house. His departure leaves her adrift, wondering whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability; whether it was not contempt and ostracism she really fears. She decides to throw herself into her work, especially a complex case involving a seventeen-year-old boy whose parents will not permit a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their beliefs as Jehovah's Witnesses. But Jack doesn't leave her thoughts, and the pressure to resolve the case--as well as her crumbling marriage--tests Fiona in ways that will keep readers thoroughly enthralled until the last stunning page.

October 1914: the destroyer Svea emerged from the Stockholm archipelago bearing south-south-east. On board was Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a naval engineer charged with making depth soundings to find a navigable channel for the Swedish navy. His instinct for his profession is reflected in the comfortable domesticity he enjoys with his wife.

The thrilling, bloody and glorious new novel, from the master of the epic tale, Tim Willocks, author of The Religion Paris, August 23rd, 1572 What do you do when your wife disappears In the middle of the bloodiest massacre in European history And you know she is about to give birth to your only child? Three wars of religion have turned Paris into a fetid cauldron of hatred, intrigue and corruption. The Royal Wedding, intended to heal the wounds, has served only to further poison the fanatics of either creed. But Carla could not have known that when she accepted an invitation to the ceremony. When Mattias Tannhauser rides into town, on Saint Bartholomew's Eve, his only intention is to find her and take her home. But as the massacre of tens of thousands of Huguenots begins, and the city plunges into anarchy, Carla is abducted by Grymonde, the grotesque gang leader of the Yards, and Tannhauser finds himself imprisoned in the Louvre, at the centre of a vicious conspiracy. Wanted by the law, the assassins' guild, and a militant army who call themselves the Pilgrims of Saint-Jacques, Tannhauser must rise to pitiless extremes even he has never known before. With no one to help him but a stable boy, he wades into a river of blood without knowing what lies on the other side. As he harrows Hell in search of his beloved His destiny is changed forever by The Twelve Children Of Paris... Tim Willocks is a novelist, screenwriter and producer. He was born in Cheshire in 1957 and has lived in London, Barcelona, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, County Kerry, and Rome. After qualifying as a doctor from University College Hospital Medical School, he went on to specialize in psychiatry and addiction. Translated into twenty languages, his novels include The Religion - the first novel to feature Mattias Tannhausaer - Bad City Blues, and Green River Rising. He has worked with major Hollywood directors, dined at the White House and holds a black belt in Shotokan karate. His new book, The Twelve Children of Paris, also featuring Tannhausaer, is set during the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.

This is a seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, which tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; it exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life. It conjures up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the most powerful men.

Ben Du Toit is an ordinary, decent, harmless man whose sense of justice is outraged by the death at the hands of the police of a man knew. As Ben investigates, he finds that his curiosity becomes labelled as rebellion. The author has won South Africa's CNA award for both Afrikaans and English work.