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We all imagine escaping into new worlds, but how challenging would it really be to survive? What if you were dragged through a gateway into a place filled with magic…and you had none?

On Midsummer’s Eve, Isabella Mackay finds herself pulled through the Anahera Gate into the archipelago of Hjaltland, a world of scented magic, chaotic storms and competing goddesses. Unable to understand the language, ignorant of its cultures and completely devoid of magic, she struggles to find her own path to freedom and safety. This might be a little easier if she wasn’t shackled to the sardonic Captain Bannerman upon arrival and hauled over a mountain. 

Green Shoots is a story of grief and revenge, a gripping crime thriller with an ecological heart.

Brought back from the brink of suicide by a mysterious phone call, grieving journalist John Adamson is desperate to know the truth about his wife Christina’s death in South America. The man on the phone gives John clues to what really happened, but also tips him off to investigate a spate of deaths of businessmen, all found with the same cryptic message: “Out of their ashes, green shoots will grow.” 

When a British Army helicopter crashes in a lake in Wales, killing the female pilot, questions naturally arise. Was this terrorism? If so, who were the terrorists? And why did certain people never admit they had an agent on board – one they wished dead? All too soon, the law of unexpected consequences kicks in, and the pilot’s death triggers the unravelling of five secret but interlinked lives, including that of her radical clergyman father. Moving at pace between Northern Ireland, Scandinavia, South Africa and South America, this Russian doll of a story builds to a brutal conclusion… but one with a wickedly unexpected twist in its tail.

In 1973, Stella, a university student, took her own life by jumping from a high-rise building. Or so the police reports claim. 

Meanwhile, in the present, crime fiction writer Robert Cross is attempting to organise a fifty-year reunion of his university friends. But as long forgotten memories begin to emerge, Robert is left to piece together the reality of Stella’s death, haunted by his own disreputable past.

Restless Souls plots the pathway of jaded art history lecturer R. I. Penny. 

Upon reading about the death of actress Kate Considine, found dressed as Ophelia from Millais’s painting, Penny feels complicit. Indeed, for Penny, trouble is never far away – when a file left in his pigeonhole evidences fraud in the University, he hides it. 

Bursting with swagger and vulnerability, Penny is questioned as a matter of routine by two detectives, Lucy Freeman and Richard Hart. But Penny is quickly convinced he can out sleuth Hart, and recruits an old friend Dove to help him solve the many mysteries laid out before him.

Steven Mason, a young career villain, needs to find his boss’s girlfriend Dominique. Straightaway, he knows things are not going to be easy when he finds a dead hand in Mickey Finn’s old fridge.

So begins a series of encounters: St Mary with a limp wrist; Dominique’s husband Texas – a semi-retired gigolo; his vicious brother Greg; rent boys; a psychiatrist and a corrupt detective.

The year is 1991, and the Soviet Union is in a state of collapse. But with chaos reigning in Europe and secrets being leaked all too easily from the Ministry of Defence, why should the British Security Services be interested when the premises of a small biotech start-up are burgled, resulting in an accidental death?

Complete with suspected Russian spies and biological warfare, this peculiar case proves more complex to solve than anticipated, and truth and trust are tormented by doubt and deception as the path of the small unit of MI5 agents investigating the case is criss-crossed by innocence and subterfuge, bluff and bullying.

Faded TV presenter Stewart Bingham is lured out of a quiet retirement for one last pay day interview on prime-time television, only to be fatally stabbed as he leaves the London studio. Racked with guilt for lining up this final job, his media agent Penny refuses to accept the police verdict of an anonymous stabbing and launches her own investigation.

A phone call from the anxious husband of a murdered woman brings Private Investigator, Benedict Aberthorp, into the sinister world of his first murder case. When his new client tells Benedict he is the police’s prime suspect, Benedict agrees to help him. But what is the significance of his new client’s brown raincoat? And why was a similar one found at the murder scene?

When David Kincaid, an author down on his luck, is offered a dream assignment – to write about the death of a young man, the heir to a fortune – he can’t resist taking it. The fee is enticing, and it’s a paint-by-numbers job. The young man was high (so to speak), and he fell. It was an accident. Simple. To the police and the coroner, it was an open and shut case… but David finds that key witnesses have disappeared, or worse. And now, someone with muscle is taking an unhealthy interest in him.

What happens when the person you love the most becomes the one you can trust the least? When eminent professor Alexander Hamilton is found dead in his laboratory late one evening, the police are stumped. With no apparent motive, his murder is a complete mystery, and his family find their lives thrown into turmoil. Struggling to cope with the grief following her father’s death, Alexander’s daughter Anna is led down a path of self-doubt as police evidence mounts up against the one person she has grown to love and trust: her brother, Michael. But as the past unfolds its dark web of treachery and betrayal, the complicated relationships and tragic sequence of events that led to Alexander’s demise are slowly revealed, leaving Anna questioning where her true loyalties lie.

When Paul and Christy purchase Croft House, they are both looking forward to a new start. Christy’s abusive father is dying and she is ready to put the past well and truly behind her. But the house has other ideas. They soon realise there is something in the house, something that’s trying to communicate with them. In their fear, they ask a local psychic to remove this entity. And in so doing, release something far, far worse.

Bored by the monotony of his daily routine and disillusioned by society’s social degradation, Paton Stipps is another lost soul amongst London’s faceless workforce. Another day means another fresh round of frustrations until Paton is semi-wittingly thrust into the world of celebrity where a series of fanatical and fantastical encounters set him on a path that will change everything. Throw in Coastal Love, the hottest new boyband on the scene, and the recipe turns to murder. Your complete guide to the methodical and sequential extraction of the phenomenon we’ve all come not to understand…Boybands.

Two sisters and a baby, shipwrecked refugees, wash up on a mysterious east African Island crawling with giant, blue-skinned savages. They flee to an abandoned scientific facility where incredible and terrifying experiments have been taking place, experiments that could change the course of human history. Meanwhile, the only person who can save them is a lowly monitoring station employee half a world away in Arizona – but the clock is ticking, and the universe is about to come calling.

Luke Raven, a suspended Detective Inspector, is working a private missing persons case when he stumbles upon the mystery of five unsolved murders on Westhampton Beach. Raven, however, is different – he has clairvoyant abilities that even he doesn’t fully understand. 

Molly Staker, the daughter of the head of a surreptitious organisation known as the Legion, is slowly descending into her own dark and twisted obsession, and those close to her are left to suffer the fatal consequences.

Raven’s pursuit of the Hawk leads him into a dramatic confrontation with a demon he has faced once before and a desperate battle for his son and his own sanity.

Friday 20th March 1556: Thomas Cranmer is alone in his cell in the Bocardo Prison, Oxford.

The first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury.

The first Archbishop of Canterbury to have a wife.

The first Archbishop of Canterbury to have legitimate children.

Tomorrow, on the 21st of March 1556, he will pay the ultimate sacrifice. He will be the first Archbishop of Canterbury to be burned at the stake.

Take some twenty wicked British villains. Add their dastardly crimes. Then include their miserable backgrounds. Mix in some nefarious conversations and combine all this together to produce an exciting collection of stories: Villains of Yore.

In 1755, a spirited young woman leaves her comfortable island home of Guernsey and travels to Nova Scotia, Canada to join her fisherman husband. But Elise’s dreams of adventure soon become her reality, and what follows is a life of fear, cold, mosquitos, fish, beauty, passion, loss and fulfilment.

Though to many Penweth is just another farm, to those who live and work there, it is a family home. Surrounded upon three sides by the mesmeric sea, it sits hunkered down upon a Cornish headland; it belongs there, as do its inhabitants. 

But things are changing for the family at Penweth. While his sister, Mary, sees a bright future for herself on the farm, Thomas, who is not yet a man but neither in boyhood, is tormented by two loves, his family and the sea. 

With Thomas threatening to throw his sister’s plans into disarray, and wider changes occurring that risk altering their peaceful lives forever, will the family’s unconditional love for one another, tested and strained to the limit, still be given without hesitation?

Set in a small village in the Lincolnshire Wolds, ‘Trying Times for Sebastian Scattergood’ is a chronicle of a horrendous year, narrated by an earnest and pompous man who lacks any sense of self-irony. Part disaster diary, part social satire, it is a novel of literary fiction which is both humorous and moving in equal measure.

Maggie is newly qualified, full of self-doubt and trying desperately to pretend that the dark tragedy in her past never happened. When a client, remarkably like her younger self, arrives for therapy, her carefully constructed defences are put to the test. Add in a second client with a possibly violent past, then a third preparing to face his childhood abuser in court and the stage is set for Maggie’s emotional barricades to be well and truly breached.

Denmark Street wasn’t built until the 1680s, but fascinating characters from all walks of life have been active on the site since the 1000s at least. Royalty, singers, musicians, highwaymen, murderers, thieves, arsonists, inventors, pioneers, regicides, politicians, revolutionaries, songwriters, poets and artists are all part of the colourful past of the street that became known as Tin Pan Alley.

Not long after the release of Nelson Mandela and the birth of the new South Africa, aging father Tom Lembruite moves to the small, conservative town of Fynberg, with his new wife, 40 years his junior. His purchase of the town’s only restaurant and investment in a nearby farm nestling in the foothills of the Drakensberg, sets in motion a chain of events that changes the lives of his children forever.

The First Canary is an extraordinary and epic tale of interweaving lives, self-discovery and friendship persevering despite the odds. Set in war-torn South Africa, the story follows a whole host of connected characters, from unwilling conscripts Cliff and Zeb, to Brenda, who is determined to find her birth parents, to Josh, an aspiring journalist whose dreams are threatened by a terrifying diagnosis.

When Christel divorced her husband, she was expected to fall into a ditch and become a more than a fulsome, grizzly member of the lemon-lipped ‘divorced women’s club’. Instead, she made a vow that she would stay sane for her children and those around her, uttering nothing negative about anyone and forging herself forward, into a new space. 

A quarter of a century had collapsed around her, but the memory of her parent’s failed marriage held her focus – she was not going to embody any bitterness or repeat the mistakes she had witnessed as a teenager. Many waited for her to launch an attack and were disappointed and confused when she was prepared to walk away without retribution, an action that would have blackened every precious memory.

Swapping Somerset security for tropical tempestuousness, Island to Island portrays a rare insight into a dynamic and challenging, yet privileged existence living amongst a million seabirds and some of the rarest wildlife in the world. A nature lover’s dream, to manage a tropical island nature reserve in Seychelles, just one mile long by half a mile wide, six nautical miles from the mainland, with no electricity or running water.

However, from star-filled skies to merciless monsoons, deadly pisonia to devastating poaching, turbulent seas to tumultuous staff, existence became dominated by an eclectic mix of emotional turmoil.