Books published by publisher Charnwood

The intrepid Oxford don, explorer and author of "Going to Extremes" is back, and he's set himself a challenge to cope with the worst that nature can throw at him. Travelling to four of the most extreme natural environments: swamps, deserts, jungles and arctic wastelands, the question is can he pick up enough tips from the indigenous people to hack it at the very edge of human existence, or will his mid-latitude sensibilities forever let him down? This is Nick's account of how he put his body and mind to the test in a survival experiment.

When a drug bust turns into a bloodbath in a dark, rainy Scottish town, it's up to Inspector Macbeth and his team to clean up the mess. He's the best cop they've got, and he's rewarded for his success. Power. Money. Respect. They're all within reach. But he's also an ex-drug addict with a troubled past - and a man like him won't get to the top. Plagued by hallucinations and paranoia, Macbeth starts to unravel. He's convinced he won't get what's rightfully his...unless he kills for it - and then the ambitions of a corrupt policeman are pitted against loyal colleagues, a drug-depraved underworld, and the pull of childhood friendships.

'Claire Rayner writes with verve and her characters bounce off the page.' - SUNDAY EXPRESS. The second volume of THE QUENTIN QUARTET. Tilly Quentin finds that her lodgers demand a great deal of her time - particularly Silas Geddes, an alarmingly attractive man, who disturbs her normally well-ordered emotions. And then there is her beloved son, Duff, now a young man, who has fallen in with some very unsuitable company. As a distraction, Tilly reintroduces him to his childhood companion, Sophie - with some trepidation. As Tilly's distrust of Sophie grows, Duff announces that he is to make Sophie his wife. With such a crisis, Tilly can ill afford Silas Geddes's attentions...

Elizabeth's eyes have failed. She can no longer read the books she loves or see the paintings that move her. But her mind remains sharp, and music fills the vacancy left by her blindness. When her father's journals are discovered on a shipwrecked boat, she enlists the help of a delinquent teen, Morgan, to read to her. As an unlikely friendship grows between them, Elizabeth is carried back to her childhood home - the lighthouse on Porphyry Island, Lake Superior - and to the memory of her enigmatic twin sister Emily. But for Elizabeth, the faded pages of her father's journals reveal more secrets than she anticipates...

When prison inmate and former police officer John Brace says he's willing to give up information about a long-dead wheeler dealer in return for protection for his family, Vera knows that she has to look into his claims. But opening up this cold case strikes much closer to home than Vera anticipates as her investigation takes her back in time to The Seagull, a once decadent and now derelict nightclub where her deceased father and his friends used to congregate. As Vera's past collides dangerously with the present, she will have to confront her unwanted memories and face the possibility that her father was involved in what happened. The truth is about to come out - but is Vera ready for what it will reveal?

On a gloomy February afternoon, Jim, an Irish immigrant, sends his wife Annie out to do the shopping before dark falls. He seals their meagre apartment, unhooks the gas tube inside the oven, and inhales. Sister St. Saviour, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, catches the scent of fire doused with water and hurries to the scene: a gathered crowd, firemen, and a distraught young widow. Moved by the woman's plight, and her unborn child, the ageing nun finds Annie work in the convent's laundry - where, in turn, her daughter will grow up amidst the crank of the wringer and the hiss of the iron. As the decades pass, Jim's suicide reverberates through many lives - testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness.

Feliks Zhukovski is a Pole in Paris - a hangover from another age. Estranged from his family by the Second World War, Feliks has given his life to Communism. As a travel guide to the old eastern bloc, his personal life is a resounding failure. Unfortunately for Feliks, it's 1991. Europe pulls back the Iron Curtain, taking away the certainties of his life. Potentially unemployed, Feliks is surprised to be selling his guide to an American firm, setting in motion life-changing events. Reunited with a brother he hasn't seen for fifty years, Feliks has hope of finding his mother and a long-lost love...after he finds a way through the smoke and mirrors of Europe's past. And the convictions on which he based his adult life.

1986: Young Eddie and his friends spend their days biking around their sleepy little English village, looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code; little stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same... In 2016, Eddie thinks he's put the past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank - until one of them turns up dead. That's when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago...