Books in Charnwood Large Print series

January 1970. Lieutenant Ross Blackwood is grieving for his distinguished father, Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Blackwood, who has been murdered in Cyprus. Ross is also disillusioned, believing there is no future for him in the Royal Marines, whose role has been diminished to policing and paperwork. But the loyalty and dedication of a Blackwood to the Corps sustain Ross from vicious guerrilla warfare in Malaysia, through the moral and political minefields of Northern Ireland, to the South Atlantic, and a conflict as bloody as it is unpredictable. And he learns, as every Blackwood has before him, that mere courage is not enough. Survival and victory balance on the knife edge of destiny.

On a cold, miserable night in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a night that wouldn’t feel so unusual if it wasn’t the Fourth of July, an antique wooden boat runs full-speed into a line of old railroad pilings in the shallow waters of Waishkey Bay. When Alex McKnight helps rescue the passengers, he finds three men. The driver is out cold, the other two are dazed but conscious. When they’re all finally back on dry land and sent away in an ambulance, Alex figures he’ll never see them again. He couldn’t be more wrong. It’s not enough that Natalie Reynaud, the woman who has become the center of his life, is five hundred miles away, working a dangerous undercover operation in Toronto. Now Alex has even more problems when the men from the boat get tangled up with his best friend, Vinnie. It’s all Alex can do to keep Vinnie from killing them or being killed by them. With Vinnie in danger on one side of the border, and Natalie in just as much danger on the other, what comes next will be the absolute darkest hour of Alex’s life, beyond anything he’s ever faced before.

Catherine “Cat” Ferry is a forensic odontologist, a specialist in bite marks and the clues they provide. But while Cat’s colleagues know her as a world-class scientist, she secretly attempts to manage her fragile psyche with alcohol, delving into the minds of rapists and murderers yet never allowing her own frightening past to creep into the foreground.Cat’s latest case involves a disturbing murder in New Orleans. Banishing her personal demons, she focuses on the potential killer, until one morning she’s paralyzed by a panic attack at a grisly murder scene. Praying the attack is a onetime event, she continues her job as a consultant to the New Orleans Police Department, but when another victim dies in the same shocking way―raising fears that a serial killer is at large―Cat blacks out over the victim’s mutilated corpse.Suspended from the FBI task force, plagued by nightmares, and at odds with her married lover―a homicide detective―Cat finally reaches her breaking point. In a desperate effort to regain control over a life spiraling out of control, Cat retreats to her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi. But her family’s secluded antebellum estate provides no sanctuary.When some of Cat’s forensic chemicals are spilled in her childhood bedroom, two bloody footprints are revealed. This sight shocks her more than any corpse she has seen in her career. Cat’s father was murdered when she was eight years old, but she always believed the crime occurred in the garden outside their home. The bloody footprints suggest otherwise.Driven by this fragment of her past, Cat attempts a forensic reconstruction of the decades-old crime, even as developments with the New Orleans task force pull her back into the case she left behind. Plagued by troubling nightmares, Cat pieces together the horrifying events she has been shielded from all her life. Soon, both she and the FBI realize that the murders occurring now in New Orleans are intimately bound up with Cat’s family and her past.Can Cat trust her own memories? Or has the truth been so distorted that she can never know her family’s real history? Finding a solution to these intertwined murders means more than stopping a remorseless killer―it may be the only way to save Cat Ferry’s sanity...and her life.Greg Iles is a masterful storyteller. In this dramatic novel of suspense he deftly probes the relationship between good and evil, and the unique power of human memory to reconstruct―or completely reinvent―the past.

Another brilliant novel in the record-breaking Discworld series.VOTED AS READERS' FAVOURITE DISCWORLD NOVEL IN THE DISCWORLD CUP 2010! 'Some people would be asking: whose side are you on? If you're not for us, you're against us. Huh. If you're not an apple, you're a banana.'When it comes to racial hatred and sectarian violence, the phrase 'vive la difference' is usually one of the furthest from the tip of the mob's tongue. When a whole city is poised on the very brink of anarchy, it only requires one thing to pitch it over the edge. Like the murder of one of the key participants for example.