Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

"London 1815. Though newly-widowed Lily Adler is returning to a society that frowns on independent women, she is determined to create a meaningful life for herself even without a husband. She's no stranger to the glittering world of London's upper crust. At a ball thrown by her oldest friend, Lady Walter, she expects the scandal, gossip, and secrets. What she doesn't expect is the dead body in Lady Walter's garden. Lily overheard the man just minutes...

"In return for a random act of kindness, scholar Li Bai Chang presents young cook Kat Holloway with a rare and precious gift--a box of tea. Kat thinks no more of her unusual visitor until two days later when the kitchen erupts with the news that Lady Cynthia's next-door neighbor has been murdered. Known about London as an "Old China Hand," the victim claimed to be an expert in the language and customs of China, acting as intermediary for merchants...

"Marlowe is a pickpocket, a housebreaker--and a better actress than any professional on the stage. She runs with the Covent Garden Cubs, a gang of thieves living in the slums of London's Seven Dials. It's a fierce life, and Marlowe has a hard outer shell. But when she's alone, she allows herself to think of a time before--a dimly remembered life when she was called Elizabeth. Maxwell, Lord Dane, is intrigued when his brother, a hired investigator,...

"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, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier....

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created...

Framed around one salacious trial in 1891 London, Jobb provides a fascinating and vividly told true-crime narrative about the hunt for one of the first known serial killers. Dr. Thomas Neil Cream used poison on vulnerable and desperate women, many who had turned to him for medical help. Cream's poisoning spree in the US, Canada, and England coincided with the birth of forensic science as well as the public's growing appetite for crime fiction. --...

"As a wave of brutal and bizarre murders engulfs the city, Peter is plunged into a world where gods and goddesses mingle with mortals and a long-dead evil is making a comeback on a rising tide of magic"-- P. [4] of cover.

Secret agent Lily Dawson poses as a courtesan to try to uncover a traitor to the Crown, and soon enlists the help of Andrew Booth-Payne, the Earl of Darlington.

"The Black Death was a pandemic of unimaginable proportions, taking the lives of 75 - 200 million people worldwide. Lauren Tarshis's story of one girl surviving the plague pulses with terror, action, and hope. The deadliest disease in the history of the world... Elsie dreams of becoming a brave warrior like her father, who is an archer fighting in England's war against France. But life isn't fair in 1348 Europe. Peasant girls like Elsie can't be archers...