Books published by publisher M P Publishing Limited (24 May 2012)

When Santa visits Monty's house, things don't quite go to plan. Cookie has managed to scare the reindeers away and they are nowhere to be seen. Children around the world are waiting, but who will pull the sleigh?It's going to take a massive effort to save Christmas... and time is running out. A magical festive story of friendship and overcoming the odds.

Published to great acclaim in six countries, The Great Inland Sea is a haunting novel about a boy who escapes the scorched Australian landscape of his youth with a horse called Unusual, and returns as an adult to nurse his ailing father, discovering the secrets long buried there. The Great Inland Sea is an evocative story of grace and compassion, of a boy’s loss and enduring hope as he endeavors to forge connections with the world around him. It marks David Francis as a powerful new literary voice.

The magnificent Ghosthead Oak has stood watch over coastal Alabama’s mysterious backwater bays and slow-running rivers, where bull alligators rumble the nerves of lesser creatures and every living thing has the capacity to kill, for five hundred years. Some say the fabled giant tree was once a knee-high seedling brushed by the black boot of Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez. No other tree along the entire coastal crescent from New Orleans to Apalachicola can rival its majesty or its power to draw people to it.In silence and with dignity, the Ghosthead has served as sentinel to the widow’s family land for countless generations. It was a childhood friend and a spirit guide in troubled times. Her father is buried in its shade. So why would the widow walk into a biker bar and hire a man to fire up his chainsaw and inflict fatal gashes around its trunk, ending in a few minutes what took five centuries to create?The Widow and the Tree is a tale of dark deeds committed with mercy in mind, provoking the reader to ask: Would I have done the same thing? This book is based on a true story.

Kidnapping, snuff films, amputee geeks, and a requiem for lost love.… Cast adrift after the blood symphony of Penny Dreadful, Phineas Poe is looking for answers in the form of a woman. He tracks Jude to San Francisco, where he finds her involved with John Ransom Miller, a wealthy sociopath with a mysterious hold over her. Jude is nursing her own revenge fantasy, but she needs Miller’s help, and in exchange Miller wants Jude to help him with an unspeakable crime. Alone and outgunned, Poe hopes he can save Jude from herself, make sense of his own past, and navigate the torturous internal landscape he calls hell’s half acre.About:Born in Mississippi in 1966. Old Southern family. Lived in Montreal and Italy as a child. Spent high school years in Memphis, Tennessee. Attended college in New Orleans, Louisiana (Tulane). Dropped out. Finished B.A. at Memphis State. Received MFA 1995 from Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. California since 1996, Bay Area, L.A., now Santa Barbara. Worked as homeless counselor, taxi driver, bartender, video store geek, college professor (Evergreen State, Olympia, Washington), screenwriter, and journalist. Short stories published in numerous places, notably Nerve and Bomb. Married, one child by previous marriage. One brother. Parents still living in North Carolina.

The Crimean war is raging a world away from London. Martha Lackland, Abel Lackland’s daughter, astonishes her family and friends by announcing her intention to go to the Crimea to work amongst the British soldiers. After the initial shock, her family rally round to help her raise money for food and medicines. Once in Scutari, Martha meets Florence Nightingale. She also meets a surgeon – the dashing Alexander Laurence and love grows between them amidst the devastation of war.

John Anselm is a struggling intelligence dealer whose business is information, Con Niemand is a tough ex-mercenary whose business is surviving, and Caroline Wishart is an exposé journalist whose business until now has been the sex lives of British politicians. Their paths collide when they all stumble across a secret terrible enough to destroy lives and topple governments.Against his will, Anselm is plunged into a world of violence, betrayal, and death. He must break out of his anesthetized life and pit himself against forces that he does not understand, forces determined to rebury an atrocity that threatens reputations and lives across the globe, while Niemand is hunted across two continents by people he doesn’t know.Identity Theory, cleverly plotted and peppered with dark irony and lean prose, delivers a world of political intrigue where information is more dangerous than explosives and secrets are worth more than human life.

Thirteen-year-old Peter Paddington is overweight, the subject of his classmates' ridicule, and the victim of too many bad movie-of-the-week story lines. When Peter's nipples begin speaking to him one day and inform him of their diabolical plan to expose his secret desires, Peter finds himself cornered in a world that seems to have no tolerance for difference. His only solace is "The Bedtime Movies"—perfect world fantasies that lull him to sleep every night. But when the lines between Peter's fantasy life and his reality begin to blur, no one is safe from his imagination's machinations—especially Peter himself.

To play the Game of Tongues, you must first understand the caste system. Phineas Poe, anti-hero of Kiss Me, Judas, returns to Denver to find reality rewritten and the laws of reason fractured. When Poe is enlisted by his old ally, Detective Moon, to find a missing cop named Jimmy Sky, he is drawn into the Game of Tongues, a violent fantasy game played out by disaffected college drones, hacker kids, and Goth refugees in underground punk clubs, on rooftops, and in sewers. Everyone he meets has multiple personalities, and before long Poe begins to lose track of his own identity. If he can hang on to his sanity long enough to find Jimmy Sky, he might just beat the game.About Chris BaerBorn in Mississippi in 1966. Old Southern family. Lived in Montreal and Italy as a child. Spent high school years in Memphis, Tennessee. Attended college in New Orleans, Louisiana (Tulane). Dropped out. Finished B.A. at Memphis State. Received MFA 1995 from Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. California since 1996, Bay Area, L.A., now Santa Barbara. Short stories published in numerous places, notably Nerve and Bomb. Married, one child by previous marriage. One brother. Parents still living in North Carolina.Book re-e-published