Books in Charnwood series

Mark and Melanie Bridges are lost in the world's most hostile forest. They have no shelter, no water, and no hope. Then, they stumble on the wreck of a crashed helicopter. Inside, the skeletons of the pilot and passenger remain, their doomed mission uncertain. Vital supplies have been left behind - and a mystery that threatens to kill them. Soon nowhere is safe. Not even the civilisation they left behind. As the clues unfold it all begins, the lies, the blackmail, the kidnapping and murder. Mark and Melanie's secret is far bigger than the jungle that hides it, and the ruthless killers who pursue it. It is a secret that commands the power of life and death - a secret that will change the world forever.

'Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew make today's hightech adventurers look like dilettantes. Their interminable voyage across frozen land and open sea is one of the most harrowing survival stories of all time.' Sebastian Junger, author of the bestselling The Perfect Storm. In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men set sail for the South Atlantic on board the Endurance. The object of the expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland. In October 1915, still half a continent away from their intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in ice. For seventeen months Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs and then on the stormiest seas on the globe, were castaways in this most savage region of the world. Frank Hurley, the photographer of the expedition, documented their struggles, miraculously saving his negatives and photographs from destruction at each stage of their journey. His photographs illustrate the dramatic, terrible beauty of the lands with which they were contending. They also provide an unsurpassable insight into the extraordinary spirit of Shackleton and his crew, and their extraordinary indefatigability and lasting civility towards one another in the most adverse conditions. Lansing's gripping narrative, based on firsthand accounts of crew members and interviews with survivors, vividly describes how the men lived together in camps on the ice until they reached land, how they were attacked by sea leopards, ate sea lion and polar bear, developed frostbite (an operation to amputate the foot of one member of the crew was carried out on the ice), and finally embarked on a 850-mile voyage in a 22-foot open lifeboat to find help.

The sequel to the number one bestselling JURASSIC PARK. The fourteenth novel from a master storyteller. It is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since that extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end - the dinosaurs destroyed, the Park dismantled, the island indefinitely closed to the public. There are rumours that something has survived...

In 1984 the author built a replica Bronze Age galley and with a crew of modern Argonauts retraced Jason's route of thirty-three centuries earlier in search of the Golden Fleece. The 1500 mile voyage took them from present-day Greece, across the Aegean Sea, through the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara, through the Bosphorus to the Black Sea, along the entire northern coast of Turkey, ending up in the state of Georgia in the Soviet Union.

Henry Page, owner of The Northern Light, Tynecastle's oldest and most respected newspaper, refuses a lucrative takeover offer. Rebuffed, the new man from London set up a well-funded rival paper. Soon Henry's belief in honest, unsensational news presentation is challenged and opposed by every dirty, mass-circulation trick in the book. He and his paper are almost brought to their knees. Then, still holding fast to his principles and the point of victory, sudden tragedy strikes at the single most important thing in his life.

The Year 1000 is a vivid and surprising portrait of life in England a thousand years ago - a world that already knew brain surgeons and property developers and, yes, even the occasional gossip columnist. Uncovering such wonderfully unexpected details, authors Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger bring this distant world closer than it has ever been before. How did people survive without sugar? How did monks communicate if they were not allowed to speak? Why was July called "the hungry month"? The Year 1000 answers these questions and reveals such secrets as the recipe for a medieval form of Viagra and a hallucinogenic treat called "crazy bread." In the spirit of modern investigative journalism, Lacey and Danziger interviewed the top historians and archaeologists. Research led them to an ancient and little-known document of the period, the Julius Work Calendar, a sharply observed guide that takes us back in time to a charming and very human world of kings and revelers, saints and slave laborers, lingering paganism and profound Christian faith.