1657 Books
Ruth has been living the life of a wealthy widow on the Costa Blanca. But the money has run out and she's going to need to provide for herself and her seven year old daughter Penny, an unwanted product of her short and loveless marriage. She ups sticks and returns to Margate, England determined to set up her own business, at any cost. Penny is the last thing on her mind as she throws herself into her new venture, and the poor little girl is left in the care of others, distanced from the cold and uncaring mother whose eyes are on the dirty tricks she's prepared to play to get what she wants. Lorna, Ruth's old friend, becomes everything to Penny, offering the love and attention she should have found with her own mother. For Lorna, Penny is the closest thing to the daughter she has always longer for. But Lorna harbours a devastating secret. Ruth shocks everyone by packing Penny off to boarding school, with little regard for seeing her again. When tragedy strikes, Lorna's cousin Maureen, a feisty ex-stripper from London, comes into Penny's life. It's time for Penny to make her own way in the world, and she bravely decides to move to the big city. She's thrown into the buzzing, grimy but thrilling streets of Soho and a life not so far removed from her past as she might have thought. However, there's a dark side to the new life she is living, and it becomes clear it wasn't just Lorna who had been keeping huge secrets. Huge shocks and difficult times await Penny. She's forced to make the most difficult choices. Can she make it in her new life, alone? Just how much is she her mother's daughter, and what happens when Penny falls for the wrong man?
People's Friend pocket novel No.1049
People's Friend Pocket Novel No. 1050
After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office. Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, thelegendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.
‘The red soil and the long, wooded hills… the twisted houses with old bones of blackened oak. And the apples. Why were apples so wholesome while the orchard was so oppressive?’ The new vicar had never wanted a picture-postcard parish. But appearances deceive. Ledwardine has a hidden history of abuse and murder, and Merrily Watkins might do well to heed the anonymous message that speaks of *The Devil’s Minister* and adds: *let him lie. Be warned*. This is the novel that introduces Merrily Watkins, before the ongoing contemporary exorcism series begins with *Midwinter of the Spirit*.
Lovely Vanessa March, two years married and very much in love, did not think it was a strange for her husband to take a business trip to Stockholm. What was strange was the silence that followed. She never thought to look for her missing husband in Vienna -- until she saw him in a newsreel shot there at the scene of a deadly fire. Then she caught a glimpse of him in a newsreel shot of a crowd near a mysterious circus fire and knew it was more than strange. It was downright sinister. Vanessa is propelled to Vienna by the shocking discovery. In her charge is young Timothy Lacy, who also has urgent problems to solve. But her hunt for answers only leads to more sinister questions in a mysterious world of white stallions of Vienna. But what promises to be no more than a delicate personal mission turns out to involve the security forces of three countries, two dead men, a circus and its colourful personnel. And what waits for Vanessa in the shadows is more terrifying than anything she has ever encountered.