Showing results by publisher "Quercus Publishing Ltd" in All Categories

Here, for the first time, is a complete history of the world based on the beliefs and writings of secret societies, researched with the help of an initiate of more than one secret society.

Against all his expectations, Dr Siri Paiboun has rather enjoyed his first five months in office. Now, as hot-season nights close in, Siri is spirited away from Laos' steamy capital on a Matter of National Security. Arriving in Luang Prabang, he's a busy man, examining carbonized corpses, dining with the deposed king, attending a shamans' conference and being rescued by the ghost of an elephant. Not that Siri's complaining … Luang Prabang is in mountains and a good fifteen degrees cooler.

The Industrialist: Henrik Vanger, head of the dynastic Vanger Corporation, is tormented by the loss of a child decades earlier and convinced that a member of his family has committed murder. The Journalist: Mikael Blomkvist delves deep into the Vangers' history to uncover the truth. But someone else wants the past to remain a secret and will go to any lengths to keep it that way.

John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel, a huge best seller in his native Sweden, is a unique and brilliant fusion of social novel and vampire legend. And a deeply moving fable about rejection, friendship and loyalty. Oskar and Eli. In very different ways, they were both victims. Which is why, against the odds, they became friends. And how they came to depend on one another, for life itself. Oskar is a 12-year-old boy living with his mother on a dreary housing estate at the city's edge. Eli is the young girl who moves in next door.

Crows (Community Relations Officers) have it easy handling "the sissie beat": Hollywood's domestic disputes, over-excited paparazzi, and chronic complainers. At least, that's the way it seems. But in Hollywood - where Mickey Mouse is a crack addict and Marilyn Monroe is a man - things are rarely what they seem.

For 15-year-old Gemma, it is already too late. Her body is found in the nave of a church in Ealing, West London. At first, all the signs point to suicide. But then the autopsy suggests it was not, and Detective Inspector Mark Tartaglia and the Barnes murder squad are called in.

There's a gathering of high-achieving ladies at the remote and expensive Castle Spa over the 10 days of Christmas and New Year. None of them have met before. Have they no homes to go to? Why have they put their lives on hold? Perhaps they think they've come to seek (through Botox, aromatherapy, and extravagant pampering) a better understanding of their lives?

One man saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century – amazingly he was an almost unknown, and certainly unqualified, speech therapist called Lionel Logue, whom one newspaper in the 1930s famously dubbed ‘The Quack who saved a King’. Logue wasn’t a British aristocrat or even an Englishman – he was a commoner and an Australian to boot.

Millennium publisher Mikael Blomkvist has launched an explosive investigation into the sex-trafficking industry in Sweden and its international links. When two journalists are found dead in a Stockholm apartment, police are baffled by what appears to be a professional killing. Ex-security analyst and former child delinquent Lisbeth Salander is wanted for murder, but the trail has gone cold.

Salander is plotting her revenge – against the man who tried to kill her, and against the government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. But it is not going to be a straightforward campaign. After taking a bullet to the head, Salander is under close supervision in Intensive Care, and is set to face trial for three murders and one attempted murder on her eventual release.

Hollywood lawyer Danny Roth is the victim of a world-class wine heist – and he is devastated. Sam Levitt, former corporate lawyer, wine connoisseur, and expert on cultivated crime, is called in by Roth’s insurance company, now saddled with a multi-million-dollar claim. His leads take him first to Bordeaux’s magnificent vineyards and then to glorious Provence.

In a series of accessible and engaging short lectures delivered in the deep chocolate tones of reader Laurence Kennedy, 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know introduces and explains the problems of knowledge, consciousness, identity, ethics, belief, justice and aesthetics that have engaged the attention of thinkers from the era of the ancient Greeks to the present day.

Harold Larwood is an England cricketing legend. During the MCC’s notorious 1932–3 Ashes tour of Australia, his ‘Bodyline’ bowling left Australia’s batsmen bruised and battered, halved the batting average of the great Don Bradman – and gave England a 4–1 series victory. But the diplomatic row that followed brought Anglo-Australian relations to the brink of collapse. Larwood was used as a scapegoat by the MCC, which demanded he apologise for bowling Bodyline.

Shadowed by the Malvern Hills, the village of Wychehill is no rural paradise but an uneasy mix of embittered farmers, escapees from the city, and a pub with a reputation for drug dealing. Called in to investigate an unsettling series of road accidents, Merrily Watkins stumbles into a barbed tangle of alienation, murder...and the fatal pursuit of an archaic secret.

Anax thinks she knows her history. She'd better. She's sat facing three Examiners and her gruelling four-hour examination has just begun. After the Great War in 2077, her island Republic emerged from a ruined world. Its citizens were safe - but never free. They lived in complete isolation from the outside. Until one man rescued a girl from the sea, and shook the very foundations on which the Republic was built. It was a time where ancient philosophical questions had collided dramatically with the march of technology.

Canada, 1867: As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a woman steels herself for the journey of a lifetime. To clear her son's name, she has no choice but to follow the tracks from a dead man's cabin and head north into the forest and the desolate landscape that lies beyond it.

Garway church was built by medieval Knights Templar. After seven centuries, the Welsh border village is still shadowed in their mysteries. Why do the local pubs have astrological names? What happened in Garway to intimidate the Edwardian ghost-story writer M. R James? And why is it impossible to find a builder prepared to restore the ancient Master House, a few fields away from Garway church?

Towards the end of the 18th century, two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world. The naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt travels down the Orinoco, climbs the highest mountain then known to man, counts head lice on the heads of the natives, and explores every hole in the ground. The mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to know that space is curved.

MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle has received alarming intelligence from a source in Syria. A Middle East peace conference is planned to take place at Gleneagles in Scotland, and the Syrians have learned that two individuals are mounting an operation to disrupt the conference in a spectacular way, laying the blame at Syria's door. As the conference deadline draws ever closer, Liz discovers that the threat is far greater than she or anyone else could have imagined. But so many questions are still to be answered.

Ideal for a busy lifestyle, these 50 bite-sized topics clarify key theories and tools such as the 80:20 rule, illuminate big ideas like branding and globalization and explain the latest business buzz-words. Packed with the wisdom of well-known business gurus who unlock the secrets of leadership, strategy and innovation, this is a clear and accessible introduction to the best of management thinking.