Monthly Archives: December 2010
Experience the ultimate in virtual reality…
The Demi-Monde is the most advanced computer simulation ever devised. Created to prepare soldiers for the nightmarish reality of urban warfare, it is a virtual world locked in eternal civil war.
Its thirty million digital inhabitants are ruled by duplicates of some of history’s cruellest tyrants: Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust; Beria, Stalin’s arch executioner; Torquemada, the pitiless Inquisitor General; Robespierre, the face of the Reign of Terror.
But something has gone badly wrong inside the Demi-Monde, and the US President’s daughter has become trapped in this terrible world.
It falls to eighteen-year-old Ella Thomas to rescue her, yet once Ella has entered the Demi-Monde she finds that everything is not as it seems, that its cyber-walls are struggling to contain the evil within and that the Real World is in more danger than anyone realises.
The Demi-Monde is out from Quercus on January 6th.
Julia is hopelessly in love with her best friend Ralph, who in turn is tormented by desire for his beautiful cousin Ingrid. Ralph is devastated when Ingrid leaves to start a new life, marrying a much older art dealer in New York. But on the morning of September 11th, 2001, she has an appointment in downtown Manhattan and is never seen again.
Since Ralph cannot travel due to chronic illness, he asks Julia to investigate what happened. She makes the journey to New York – and finds herself drawn into Ingrid’s brief and troubled life more than she could have ever imagined.
The dark secret that Ingrid had uncovered in her husband’s past, and her attraction to violence, causes Julia to discover disturbing feelings in herself she never realised she had.
As Julia unravels the mystery of what happened to her friend, so she becomes increasingly ensnared in a sinister web of deceit, in a thrilling story that twists and turns until the very last page. With extraordinarily vivid, unforgettable characters, a compelling, involving plot and breathtakingly beautiful writing, Kirsten Tranter’s debut is not to be missed.
The Legacy is out from Quercus on January 6th.
We not only share nearly 99% of our genes with chimps, we also have some 35% in common with daffodils. Throughout much of the animal and even plant kingdoms, almost the same ancient genes code for almost the same proteins. And further, to everyone’s astonishment, the genes involved in making the complex eyes of fruitflies are close matches to those involved in making the very different eyes of octopuses and people.
So what leads to the nature’s ‘endless forms most beautiful’? The key to this mystery is being unravelled by ‘Evo Devo’ or the new science of evolutionary development biology.
By looking at how a single-celled egg gives rise to a complex, multi-billion celled animal, Evo Devo is illuminating exactly how new species – butterflies and zebras, trilobites and dinosaurs, apes and humans – are made and evolved. The key, it turns out, is all about location and timing…
For anyone who has ever pondered ‘where did I come from’, Endless Forms Most Beautiful explores our history, both the journey we have all made from egg to adult, and the long trek from the origin of life to the very recent origin of our species.
Endless Forms Most Beautiful is out from Quercus on January 6th.
Ruth Galloway has just returned from maternity leave and is struggling to juggle work and motherhood. When a team from the University of North Norfolk, investigating coastal erosion, finds six bodies buried at the foot of the cliff, she is immediately put on the case.
DCI Nelson is investigating, but Ruth finds this more hindrance than help – Nelson is the father of her daughter, Kate. Still, she remains professional and concentrates on the case at hand. Forensic tests prove that the bodies are from Southern Europe, killed sixty years ago.
Police Investigations unearth records of Project Lucifer, a wartime plan to stop a German invasion. A further discovery reveals that members of the Broughton Sea’s End Home Guard took a ‘blood oath’ to conceal some deadly wartime secret.
The more information they uncover, the more elusive any explanation becomes. When a visiting German reporter is killed, Ruth and Nelson realise that someone is still alive who will kill to keep the secret of Broughton Sea’s End’s war years. Can they discover the truth in time to stop another murder?
The House at Sea’s End is out from Quercus on January 6th.
Thirty-year-old Theresa Pellikaan is typical of the wealthy middle classes – with her respectable background, successful husband and house in an apparently sleepy, yet powerful, rich village. She works in a gallery, also typical of her type.
When her former schoolmate Ruth Ackermann, brought up in the same village, makes waves with an international bestseller, but none of the villagers ever mention her achievement, not even the literary circle of Theresa’s father, famous civil rights scholar Randolf Pellikaan, Theresa begins to wonder why. It can’t only be because it’s not ‘literature’.
It emerges that there is a dark secret in the village. Every member of the book club has a reason to keep quiet and Ruth Ackerman’s novel threatens to bring the past into the present, with devastating results. Unable to cope with the silence, Theresa investigates, no matter the consequences.
Marjolijn Februari’s The Book Club is out from Quercus on January 6th.
