"Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's school in 'Villette'. Strongly drawn to the fiery autocratic schoolmaster Monsieur Paul Emanuel, Lucy is compelled by Madame Beck's jealous interference to assert her right to love and to be loved." "Based in part on Charlotte Bronte's experience in Brussels ten years earlier, Villette (1853) is coloured by her sadness and isolation after the deaths...

William Crimsworth escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous but manipulative Zoraide Reuter, complicates his affections for a penniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school.

"Hannah Martel has narrowly escaped Nazi Germany after her fiancé was killed in a pogrom. When her ship bound for America is turned away at port, she has nowhere to go but to her cousin Lily, who lives with her family in Brussels. Fearful for her life, Hannah is desperate to get out of occupied Europe. But with no safe way to leave, she must return to the dangerous underground work she thought she had left behind"--

Anne Perry’s magnificent Victorian mysteries established her as one of the world’s best known and loved historical novelists. Now, in her vividly imagined World War I novels, Perry’s talents “have taken a quantum leap” (The Star-Ledger), and so has the number of her devoted readers. We Shall Not Sleep, the final book in this epic series featuring the dedicated Reavley family, is perhaps the most memorably enthralling...

"A young autistic girl is the only witness to the assassination of two men--one of them her father--and melts the dispassionate professional heart of the journalist who investigates the case." -- Amazon.com.

"It's not that Verity Kent doesn't sympathize with those eager to make contact with lost loved ones. After all, she once believed herself a war widow. But now that she's discovered Sidney is very much alive, Verity is having enough trouble connecting with her estranged husband, never mind the dead. Still, at a friend's behest, Verity attends a séance, where she encounters the man who still looms between her and Sidney--and a medium who channels a...

Despite his pressing personal problems including the bank's threat to foreclose on his house Van In suddenly faces some even more urgent police work: finding out who murdered a prominent German travel executive and who bombed the statue of beloved Flemish poet Guido Gezelle. Both are high-priority cases in the tourist-dependent medieval municipality. Between hangovers, mood swings, and other distractions, Van In starts to connect the dots of a vast...

"Berlin, 1967: four members of the British rock band Pearl Harbour die at the same time but in separate locations. Inexplicably, the police conclude natural causes are to blame. Brussels, 2010: A homeless man is hit by a car outside the Gare du Midi, leaving him with locked-in syndrome, able to communicate (sometimes) by blinking. An Irish journalist starts to investigate. How did the members of Pearl Harbor die, and how is this linked to the homeless...

"In 1931, the world's greatest detective, Hercule Poirot, finds his plans for a much-needed, restful Christmas holiday thwarted by a murder investigation and has less than a week to solve the crime and prevent more murders while someone plans to wreak holiday havoc on his life."--

Hercule Poirot doesn't need all his detective skills to realise something is troubling his secretary, Miss Lemon - she has made three mistakes in a simple letter. It seems an outbreak of kleptomania at the student hostel in which her sister works is distracting his usually efficient assistant. Deciding that desperate times call for desperate measures, the great detective agrees to investigate. Unknown to Poirot, however, desperation is a motive he...