10 Crime Fiction INSPECTOR GEORGE GENTLY


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75559 ALCHEMY OF MURDER by Carol McCleary


Paris 1889 and the world’s fair is on. Nellie Bly is a reporter, feminist and amateur detective, in Paris on the trail of an enigmatic killer. An epidemic of Black Fever rages, anarchists plot to overthrow the government and a murderer preys on the prostitutes who haunt the streets of Montmartre. But it is also a city of culture, a magnet for artists and men of science and letters. Can the combined genius of Oscar Wilde, Jules Verne and Louis Pasteur help Nellie prove a match for Jack the Ripper? 561pp in softback. £11.99 NOW £2


76560 GENTLY AT A GALLOP by Alan Hunter


Bludgeoned by a jealous husband, shot by a business rival, drowned in his own beer. That’s how you would expect a middle-aged womanising brewer to be murdered, not savaged to death by a horse. The strange death of Charles Berney, trampled by a horse on a windswept stretch of moorland, came as the infamous lothario had apparently settled down with an attractive young wife. Could it have been a business rival who had set the horse upon him? He may have argued with his wife at her birthday party, but when he set off for an appointment in London the following morning, no one expected to find him murdered on the moor. How did he get there? Who wanted him dead? The answer comes only after Inspector George Gently has unravelled this most bizarre case. 187pp in paperback.


£6.99 NOW £3.50


76561 GENTLY CONTINENTAL by Alan Hunter


Good music, fine dining and comfortable surroundings - that’s how the Hotel Continental is advertised. Fraud, blackmail, torture and murder - that’s what it has become famous for. The popular hotel on the English coast built its reputation on its Viennese cuisine and Austrian style, but when one of the guests is found dead at the bottom of the nearby cliffs bearing the wounds of a man who has been systematically tortured, Inspector George Gently brushes aside the hotel’s façade of respectability. A dark secret stretches from Nazi-occupied Austria across the Atlantic to the back streets of New York in this deadly conundrum. 202pp in paperback. £6.99 NOW £3.50


76562 GENTLY WHERE SHE LAY by Alan Hunter


When the naked body of a woman is found lying serenly on a forest floor showing no signs of a struggle, it looks almost as if she lay down to sleep, having folded her clothes in a neat bundle by her side. But there is murder in the air. Known as Vivienne, the victim led a bizarre life, estranged from her husband, alone in her isolated cottage except when visitors came to call. Those visitors included a group of sixth form students from a local girls’ school and when Chief Inspector George Gently discovers the reasons for their visits, the case descends into a sinister, secretive world of sleaze and vice. 217pp in paperback. £6.99 NOW £3.50


76604 CHIEF INSPECTOR GEORGE GENTLY:


Set of Three by Alan Hunter Buy all three paperbacks and save even more. £20.97 NOW £9


75928 DYING HOURS by Mark Billingham A cluster of suicides among the elderly. Such things are not unknown to the police and the deaths are quickly dismissed. Only one man is convinced that something more sinister is taking place. Having stepped out of line once too often, D.I. Tom Thorne is back in uniform and he hates it. Patronised and abused by his new colleagues, his suspicions about the suicides are dismissed by the Murder Squad he was once part of, and he is forced to investigate alone. He must gamble with the lives of those targeted by the killer unlike any he has hunted before. A haunting portrait of London’s dark heart. 496pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £4


75900 A PRESUMPTION OF DEATH


by Jill Paton Walsh


and Dorothy L. Sayers In 1939 and 1940, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a series of letters for members of the Wimsey Family for the Spectator. Although she never began another detective novel, they give a tantalising glimpse of what Lord Peter Wimsey might have done during World War Two.


It is 1940 and Harriet Vane, now Lady Peter Wimsey, has taken the children to their country home. But war has followed them - glamorous RAF pilots and even more glamorous land-girls scandalise the villagers. Then an air raid practice ends with a very real body on the ground. Before long Harriet and Peter are battling their way to the solution of a complex and dangerous mystery. 378pp in paperback. £8.99 NOW £4.50


75903 ATTENBURY EMERALDS


by Jill Paton Walsh


Based on the characters of Dorothy L. Sayers, the novel is first set in 1921, when the Attenbury emeralds were stolen and Lord Peter Wimsey made the headlines when he recovered them. Now it is 1951 and there is a new Lord Attenbury and a baffling new mystery about the emeralds - the most interesting


and challenging case Lord Peter Wimsey has ever faced. A spookily accurate continuation with all Sayers’ imperial cadences. 338pp in paperback. £8.99 NOW £4.50


75574 FAT OLLIE’S BOOK: An 87th Precinct Novel by Ed McBain


Lester Henderson has it all - widely tipped to be the next mayor he faces a glorious future - until he is gunned down. At that point he becomes Ollie Weeks’ problem. Uncharacteristically first to the scene, Ollie lands the murder of the decade, but the crime is overshadowed by a deed even more repugnant. Ollie’s life’s work is his novel. Honed by countless rejection letters, it is finally ready to be inflicted on the nation when the one and only manuscript is stolen from his car by a thief who is convinced that Ollie’s opus contains the secret location to a hoard of diamonds. 291pp, paperback. £6.99 NOW £3


74981 OSCAR WILDE AND THE DEAD MAN’S SMILE by Gyles Brandreth


Playwright and raconteur Oscar Wilde embarks on another adventure as he sets sail for America in the 1880s. On a rollercoaster of a lecture tour he meets P. T. Barnum, Jumbo the Elephant and Louisa May Alcott, becomes involved in a saloon shoot-out, and entertains Broadway’s brightest stars. But the adventure doesn’t really begin until Oscar boards an ocean liner headed back across the Atlantic and joins a motley crew led by a French actor and impresario. What begins with a curious death at sea soon escalates into a series of increasingly macabre tragedies as the acting troupe arrives in Paris to perform Hamlet. 365pp. Remainder mark. $24 NOW £4


75988 SOME LIE AND SOME DIE by Ruth Rendell


When the body of a brutally beaten girl is found in a quarry during a hedonistic hippy festival at Sundays near Kingsmarkham, Chief Inspector Wexford is the first on the scene. The victim’s face has been pulped by the back-end of a bottle, but who, in this atmosphere of peace and love, could be capable of such violence? The body is that of local girl turned stripper Dawn Stonor, but it is the unlikely link between her and the mysterious folk singer Zeno Vedast that piques Wexford’s interest. He uncovers a history of love and hate that began years earlier. 356pp, paperback. £7.99 NOW £3


76026 SAINT ZITA SOCIETY by Ruth Rendell Dex works as a gardener for Dr Jefferson at his home in Pimlico, in an exclusive street of white-painted stucco Georgian houses inhabited by the rich. The hired help, a motley assortment of au pairs, drivers and cleaners decide to form the St Zita Society as an excuse to meet at the local pub and air their grievances. When Dex is invited to attend, the others find that he is a strange man and when they discover he has recently been released from a hospital for the criminally insane, incarcerated for attempting to kill his own mother, it seems his most meaningful relationship is with his mobile phone service provider Peach. Accidental death and pathological madness cohabit above and below stairs in Pimlico. 280pp in large softback. £12.99 NOW £3.75


74847 ROAD RAGE by Ruth Rendell A by-pass is planned that will destroy the peace and natural habitat of Kingsmarkham forever. Dora Wexford joins the protest movement, but Chief Inspector Wexford must be more circumspect. Trouble is expected. Before the protesters can make their presence felt, the badly decomposed body of a young woman is discovered. While Burden believes he knows the identity of the murderer, Wexford is not convinced. Having just become a grandfather, he cannot come to terms with the most powerful, familial passions until this case is resolved. 389pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £3.25


74849 SIMISOLA by Ruth Rendell Only 18 black people live in Kingsmarkham. One of them is Chief Inspector Wexford’s new Doctor, Raymond Akande. When his daughter Melanie goes missing, Wexford takes much more than just a professional interest in the case. Melanie disappeared somewhere between the Benefit Office and the bus stop. Or at least no one saw her get on the bus when it came. Apparently happy at home, she had recently broken up with her boyfriend. No one liked to voice their suspicions that she might be dead. Superbly paced with tension and a climax of stunning unexpectedness. 378pp in paperback.


£7.99 NOW £3.25


74846 PUT ON BY CUNNING by Ruth Rendell The tragic death of Manuel Camargue, Kingsmarkham’s very own celebrity flautist, is met with a ruling of misadventure but when after an absence of 19 years his entrancing daughter Natalie reappears, Dinah his fiancé goes to Chief Inspector Wexford for help. Dinah believes Natalie is not who she claims to be. Knowing there is a large inheritance at stake, Wexford begins to investigate. Then events take a gruesome twist. 269pp in paperback.


£7.99 NOW £3.25


75026 UNRELIABLE LIFE OF HARRY THE VALET by Duncan Hamilton


An impossibly daring jewellery heist aboard a train at Paris’s Gare du Nord station captures the attention of the world in October 1893. Who would have dared pull off such a feat? The author reveals the true story of Harry the Valet, the notorious crook who was the scourge of Victorian London, who conned and stole his way into high society, living a life of excess in London’s best hotels and clubs. Dressed in bespoke suits and handmade shoes, Harry outwitted Scotland Yard with his trademark


guile and panache. Harry was almost invisible, until blinded by love, he carried out the robbery that would prove his downfall. 311pp in paperback. Illus. £7.99 NOW £3.50


75999 MAMMOTH BOOK OF BODY HORROR


edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan


John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? coined the term ‘body horror’. It has long been used to describe such films as The Thing and most recently District 9, but the sub-genre did not begin with film. Here you will find profoundly unsettling stories, horrific tales of


transformation, mutation and contagion spanning the entire history from the best writers of horror, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, James Herbert, Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Mary Shelley. 500 page paperback. $13.95 NOW £4


75113 BAD INTENTIONS by Karin Fossum Early one September three friends spend the weekend at a remote cabin by Dead Water Lake. With only a pale moon to light their way, they row across the water in the middle of the night, but only two return. When the body of the third friend is discovered, Inspector Sejer is put in charge of the investigation and is troubled by the apparent suicide. He has an overwhelming sense that the surviving pair have something to hide. Weeks pass without any further clues, and then in a nearby lake the body of another teenage boy floats to the surface. A riveting exploration of the consequences of crime, a whydunnit rather than a traditional whodunnit. 184pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £3


75680 THREE SECONDS by Roslund & Hellström


From the amphetamine-fuelled beginning when a drug deal goes awry in a Stockholm flat, you are submerged in labyrinthine Swedish bureaucracy, its prison system and organised crime. Piet Hoffmann is the Swedish police force’s best undercover operative. Not even his family know of his double identity. Yet when a drug deal with the Polish mafia goes horribly wrong, his secret life begins to crumble around him. Two men are charged with investigating the drug-related killing and are unaware of Hoffmann’s true identity. Reviewers say this one is destined for the big screen. 638pp, paperback.


£7.99 NOW £3.50 EROTICA


Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.


- Voltaire


76624 SEX PRESS: The Sexual Revolution in the


Underground Press 1963-1979


by Vincent Bernière and Mariel Primois From 1963 to 1979, Oz, Other Scenes, Yellow Dog, The East Village, Berkeley Barb, Actuel, Suck, Screw and many other journals, magazines, fanzines and underground presses were the voice


of a dramatic sexual revolution. Most were dedicated exclusively to sex, while others looked into popular culture including politics, human rights, war, women’s lib, gay and lesbian rights. Artists such as R. Crumb are showcased together with huge sized reproductions of these revolutionary publications. It moves into the mid 1970s with its more codified form of pornography expressing a period of extraordinary experimentation, creativity and sexual freedom. With all the original typography of the time, big and bold, boobs, pubes, snogging, experimentation, lubes, dildos, mad Christmas gift suggestions on page 27, Vietnam War references and much more of the era both from Europe and the US. 240 huge pages 8½ x 13", softback. £25 NOW £12


76307 GREAT NUDES: 24 Art


Cards by Jeff Menges Share the beauty evoked by painters through the ages of Aphrodite, Andromeda and Venus and their sisters from legend. Represented here from Botticelli and Titian in the Italian Renaissance to Modigliani and Shiele in the early 20th century are 24 paintings of the female nude that have endured as


part of history’s archive of female iconic imagery. Here is the beautiful Esther preparing to be presented to King Ahasuerus by Chassériau alongside Goya’s Nude Maja, Ingres’s The Turkish Baths (detail) opposite the sensual Alma-Tadema’s In the Tepidarium. Perforated for very easy removal, each quality colour postcard could be used to send greetings, as a gift card, book mark or even to frame and display as a miniature art gallery. Printed on high quality, laminated stock, 4¼ x 6". 12 x 9" softback. £6.99 NOW £3.50


76508 FANNY & STELLA: The Young Men Who Shocked


Victorian England by Neil McKenna


With a cast of peers, politicians and prostitutes, drag queens, doctors and detectives, here is a Victorian peepshow, exposing the startling underbelly of 19th century London. By turns tragic and comic, this book is an enthralling tour-de-force. Fanny and Stella were no ordinary


A glimpse through the


keyhole of history From the earliest nude daguerrotypes to experimental nude photography


76008 1000 NUDES: A History of Erotic


Photography from 1839- 1939 Uwe Scheid Collection by Hans-Michael


Koetzle and Uwe Scheid This book offers a cross-section of the history of nude photography, ranging from the earliest nude daguerrotypes and ethnographic nude photographs to experimental


nude photography. All the pictures shown are taken from the late Uwe Scheid’s collection, which was one of the world’s largest and most important collections of erotic photography. Uwe Scheid (1944-2000) collected artistic and erotic photographs of nudes, dating mainly from photography’s early days and from the 1920s and ’30s. Scheid was a member of the German Photographic Society, the European Society for the History of Photography, the Club Daguerre and the Daguerreian Society. 5.5 x 7.7", 576 pages. Hundreds of b/w adult- only images. Text in English,


French and German.


ONLY £13


young women. They were young male clerks who liked to dress as women - part-time actresses and part- time prostitutes. Stella was the most beautiful female impersonator of her day, Fanny her inseparable companion. When the Metropolitan Police launched a secret campaign to bring about their downfall, they were arrested and subjected to a sensational show trial in Westminster Hall. If found guilty, according to the laws of the day, they faced life imprisonment. As the trial unfolded, Fanny and Stella’s extraordinary lives as wives and daughters, actresses and whores, were revealed to an incredulous public. A gripping tale about the invention of camp. 396 paperback pages with b/w archive photos. £12.99 NOW £4


44717 HAND-REARED BOY by Brian W. Aldiss


Rejected by 13 publishers, the award winning writer of science fiction Brian Aldiss eventually had his very naughty erotic novel first published in 1970 when it was long listed for the Lost Booker Prize. It is an original, delightfully funny description of the young Horatio Stubbs’s burgeoning sexuality. Circumcised rather crudely, here is a young boy who is awakened gently by the family’s 19 year old maid, shares beds with boys at his school, talks about class, the downtrodden, art, sex and socialism: ‘Stubbs, old man, the upper classes and the aristocracy absolutely hate the bloody guts of the middle classes!’ Crude, rude, funny and of its time. 189pp in paperback reprint. £9.99 NOW £4.50


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75756 TOPLESS SUMMER LOVE GIRLS


by Leslie Cabarga


Sub-titled ‘A Gentleman’s Guide to Women, Relationships and Breasts’, in Swingin’ 60s typography on the embossed cover design are two gorgeous topless beauties which gives a flavour of the big, busty content. It is a zany, pop culture commentary on growing up as a


man in the era of Playboy, feminism and swimsuit editions. This hilarious and sexy book is filled with hundreds of titillating photos of half naked women from bad cartoons, fake news clippings, spurious essays, pseudo-scientific studies and weird theories about women and breasts. There are illustrators like Chas. Addams, Al Catt, Will Eisner, Alex Niño, Victor Juhasz and Rian Hughes. Ridiculously dated with lots of spanking, caging up and puerile male ideas. 272 large glossy pages. Softback. $32.99 NOW £8


66926 BIG PENIS BOOK 3D by Dian Hanson


Big, beautiful, eye-popping penises! Muscular men half dressed in evening suit and bowtie, moustachioed, wet and hard - big men of up to 10½”! Never has man’s best friend looked so good. In 3D every page becomes a pop-up! This 220-page, 30 by 30 cm special edition includes 96 images from the original book, plus 8 new bonus photos. There is a revised introduction, new layout, and a pair of red/blue anaglyph glasses included. Unlike other 3D pictures you may have seen, the photos do not look distorted when viewed without the glasses. When you put on your glasses the parts of most interest leap from the page, as thick, fully rounded, touchable contours. This is a red-hot gift book! With 3D glasses, 11" x 11", 220 pages, from Taschen. ONLY £25


74505 NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH by Lisette Ashton


In a sleepy suburban cul-de-sac behind the tightly drawn curtains, each neighbour indulges their lewdest and bawdiest appetites. It’s not just the dominatrix at number five, the swingers at number six or the sadistically sinister couple at number four, but also the curious relationship between the Smiths, the open marriage of the Graftons and the strange goings-on at the home of Denise, a woman whose lust is never sated. 238pp, paperback. £7.99 NOW £3


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