Canterbury Tales Guesthouse

[Daveo]

Killer in My Eyes by Giorgio Faletti.

 

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A murderer obsessed with comic strips...When Mayor Marsalis' son, Gerald, is found dead in his studio, his body is stained red and arranged like the cartoon character Linus, with a blanket next to his ear and his thumb stuck in his mouth.

Desperate, Marsalis asks his ex-cop brother, Jordan, to investigate the murder.

Yet the killer strikes again.

This time Chandelle Stuart, a film producer with strange sexual predilections, is found leant against a piano like Lucy, listening to Schroeder playing.

Meanwhile, a beautiful young detective Maureen Martini has moved from Rome to New York to forget the brutal murder of her boyfriend. After undergoing a corneal transplant, she starts having distressing visions that somehow seem connected with the grisly murders. Thrown together, Maureen and Jordan race against time to unmask this killer.

But who is Snoopy? And who is Pig Pen? And why does this killer find pleasure in arranging his victims like comic strip characters?

In New York, nothing is ever quite what it seems...

 

[Daveo]

Tennison (Tennison 1) by Lynda La Plante.

 

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From the creator of the award winning ITV series Prime Suspect, starring Helen Mirren, comes the fascinating back story of the iconic DCI Jane Tennison.

 

In 1973 Jane Tennison, aged 22, leaves the Metropolitan Police Training Academy to be placed on probationary exercise in Hackney where criminality thrives.

We witness her struggle to cope in a male dominated, chauvinistic environment, learning fast to deal with shocking situations with no help or sympathy from her superiors.

Then comes her involvement in her first murder case.

 

[Daveo]

The Target (Will Robie Series) by David Baldacci.

 

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Government operatives Will Robie and Jessica Reel are faced with a lethal mission in The Target, from best-selling author David Baldacci.

An attack from North Korea looks likely as US involvement in an attempted coup is revealed, and a bond of trust has been broken at the very highest level.

 

Chung Cha is a young woman who was raised in the infamous Yodok concentration camp.

It's a place where honour, emotion and compassion don't exist. Cold, calculating and highly skilled, Chung-Cha has been trained to kill.

And the task she has been given is to destroy the enemy at all costs.

 

A dangerous and deadly operation of cat and mouse plays out between East and West.

But who will be the hunter and who will be the hunted when the true target is finally revealed.

 

[Daveo]

Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow.

 

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"The most comprehensive, up to date, and balanced account

we have.

Superb, balanced in interpretation...

immensely readable and full of new and interesting detail."—George Herring, Univ. of Kentucky.

 

[Daveo]

Another Hour On A Sunday Morning by Julia Scheeres.

 

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All Julia Scheeres ever wanted was to have a normal, happy family. But when her fanatical mother decides they should all move to rural Indiana, Julia's life begins to unravel.

 

In the blistering heat of the isolating community, Julia and her adopted brother David struggle together through adolescence.

But with a mother who whose first concern is her church missionaries, and a distant father whose rare presence is resented by all and feared by others, home for Julia becomes a place of unspeakable burdon...

 

Edited January 29, 2017 by Daveo

[Daveo]

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson.

 

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As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today.

I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning.

Thinking I'm still a child, thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me...

 

Memories define us.

So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep?

Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love all forgotten overnight.

And the one person you trust may only be telling you half the story.

 

Welcome to Christine's life.

 

[Daveo]

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[Daveo]

Raising Steam (Discworld) by Terry Pratchett.

 

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Steam is rising over Discworld. . . .

 

Mister Simnel has produced a great clanging monster of a machine that harnesses the power of all the elements, earth, air, fire, and water and it’s soon drawing astonished crowds.

To the consternation of Ankh-Morpork’s formidable Patrician, Lord Vetinari, no one is in charge of this new invention.

Who better to take the lead than the man he has already appointed master of the Post Office, the Mint and the Royal Bank?

 

Moist von Lipwig is not a man who enjoys hard work, unless it is dependent on words, which are not very heavy and don’t always need greasing.

He does enjoy being alive, however, which makes a new job offer from Vetinari hard to refuse.

Moist will have to grapple with gallons of grease, goblins, a controller with a history of throwing employees down the stairs, and some very angry dwarfs if he’s going to stop it all from going off the rails.

 

[Daveo]

Death Message by Mark Billingham.

 

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THE MESSAGE

DI Tom Thorne has seen plenty of dead bodies in his time.

But when he starts receiving sick photos of murder victims on his mobile phone, he soon realises that the next body could be his.

THE KILLER

And even when the man who has been sending the photos is tracked down, the deadly threat remains, For some, the case is all but closed, but Thorne's nightmare is just beginning.

THE TWIST

Because someone else is masterminding the death messages.

The most vicious psychopath Thorne has ever faced is able to manipulate others even behind bars, and time has only deepened the deadly grudge he has against the policeman who put him away...

 

[Daveo]

Escape: The True Story of the Only Westerner Ever to Break Out of the Bangkok Hilton by David McMillan.

 

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Klong Prem prison, Thailand.

The 'Bangkok Hilton', where 600 foreigners wait and rot among the 12,000 inmates.

Amidst the tragic, ruthless and forgotten, one man resolves to do what no other has done: Escape.

 

This is the true story of drug smuggler David McMillan's perilous break out from Asia's most notorious prison.

After being arrested at Don Muang airport, McMillan spent over a year in Klong Prem awaiting trial.

He watched as the other foreign prisoners fell prey to disease, violence and despair.

Death appeared to be their only way out, but he resolved that this would not be the end for him.

 

Two weeks before a near certain death sentence, McMillan escaped, never to be seen in Thailand again.

In this gripping account, he reveals the nightmare of existence in this infamous jail and explains how he made his hazardous jailbreak.

 

[SLEUTH]

 

Escape: The True Story of the Only Westerner Ever to Break Out of the Bangkok Hilton by David McMillan.

 

In Now @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya..

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Klong Prem prison, Thailand.

The 'Bangkok Hilton', where 600 foreigners wait and rot among the 12,000 inmates.

Amidst the tragic, ruthless and forgotten, one man resolves to do what no other has done: Escape.

 

This is the true story of drug smuggler David McMillan's perilous break out from Asia's most notorious prison.

After being arrested at Don Muang airport, McMillan spent over a year in Klong Prem awaiting trial.

He watched as the other foreign prisoners fell prey to disease, violence and despair.

Death appeared to be their only way out, but he resolved that this would not be the end for him.

 

Two weeks before a near certain death sentence, McMillan escaped, never to be seen in Thailand again.

In this gripping account, he reveals the nightmare of existence in this infamous jail and explains how he made his hazardous jailbreak.

 

I didn't know this story, looks a cracking read.

[Daveo]

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata.

 

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Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer’s masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.

 

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha.

She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome.

In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.

 

[Daveo]

At Risk by Stella Rimington.

 

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For MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle the nagging complications of her private life are quickly forgotten at Monday's Counter Terrorist meeting.

An invisible may have entered mainland Britain.

 

An 'invisible,' a terrorist who is an ethnic native of the target country, who can cross its borders unchecked and move about unnoticed, is the ultimate nightmare.

 

For Liz this signals the start of an operation that will test her to the limit.

Who or what is the target?

Where and who is the invisible?

With each passing hour the danger increases, but as she desperately sifts the incoming intelligence and analyses the reports from her agents she finally realises that it is her ability to get inside her enemy's head that is the only hope of averting disaster.

 

[Daveo]

Spartacus: Rebellion by Ben Kane.

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The mighty slave army, led by Spartacus, has carried all before it, scattering the legions of Rome. 
Three praetors, two consuls and one proconsul have been defeated. Spartacus seems invincible as he marches towards the Alps and freedom.

But storm clouds are massing on the horizon. 
Crixus the Gaul defects, taking all his men with him. Crassus, the richest man in Rome, begins to raise a formidable army, tasked specifically with the defeat of Spartacus. 
And within the slave army itself, there are murmurings of dissent and rebellion.

Spartacus, on the brink of glory, must make a crucial decision to go forward over the Alps to freedom, or back to face the might of Rome and try to break its stranglehold on power forever.

 

[Daveo]

Drifting South, by Charles Davis.

 

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Shady doesn't exist anymore.

Neither does Benjamin Purdue.

In a single day he lost his family, his love, his freedom and even his name for reasons he's never known.

Now after spending twenty one years in prison for crimes he didn't commit, the young man he used to be is dead.

And the man he's become is no one he, or anyone else, would ever want to know.

With only fifty dollars of state money in his pocket, Henry Cole, aka Benjamin Purdue, journeys back to the dangerous outlaw settlement hidden deep in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia where it all began; the only place he's called home.

 

Instead of answers, he finds only old sunken graves, now as he drifts southward, he gets closer to the beautiful woman he will never forget, whose untimely visit to Shady that fateful Sunday afternoon ended in a killing.

A woman who holds the keys to his past...and his future.

 

[Daveo]

Filth...by Irvine Welsh.

 

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With the Christmas season upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson of Edinburgh's finest is gearing up socially, kicking things off with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam.

 

There are some sizable flies in the ointment, though: a missing wife and child, a nagging cocaine habit, some painful below the belt eczema, and a string of demanding extramarital affairs.

The last thing Robertson needs is a messy, racially fraught murder, even if it means overtime and the opportunity to clinch the promotion he craves.

Then there's that nutritionally demanding (and psychologically acute) intestinal parasite in his gut.

Yes, things are going badly for this utterly corrupt tribune of the law, but in an Irvine Welsh novel nothing is ever so bad that it can't get a whole lot worse.

 

[Daveo]

The English Spy by Daniel Silva.

 

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THE TARGET IS ROYAL

 

THE GAME IS REVENGE

 

Gabriel Allon returns in this summer’s hottest thriller, from #1 bestselling author Daniel Silva

 

She is an iconic member of the British Royal Family, beloved for her beauty and charitable works, resented by her former husband and his mother, the Queen of England.

When a bomb explodes aboard her holiday yacht, British intelligence turns to one man to track down her killer: legendary spy and assassin Gabriel Allon.

 

Gabriel’s target is Eamon Quinn, a master bomb maker and mercenary of death who sells his services to the highest bidder. Fortunately Gabriel does not pursue him alone; at his side is Christopher Keller, a British commando turned professional assassin who knows Quinn’s murderous handiwork all too well.

 

And though Gabriel does not realize it, he is stalking an old enemy, a cabal of evil that wants nothing more than to see him dead. Gabriel will find it necessary to oblige them, for when a man is out for vengeance, death has its distinct advantages..

 

[Daveo]

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

 

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A bold translation of Nobel Prize winner Herman Hesse's most inspirational and beloved work.

Hesse's famous and influential novel, Siddhartha, is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory our troubled century has produced.

Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis and philosophy, this strangely simple tale, written with a deep and moving empathy for humanity, has touched the lives of millions since its original publication in 1922.

Set in India, Siddhartha Is the story of a young Brahmin's search for ultimate reality after meeting with the Buddha.

His quest takes him from a life of decadence to asceticism, through the illusory joys of sensual love with a beautiful courtesan, and of wealth and fame, to the painful struggles with his son and the ultimate wisdom of renunciation.

This new translation by award winning translator Joachim Neugroschel includes an introduction by Hesse biographer Ralph Freedman.

 

[Daveo]

The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich: The True Story Behind Operation Anthropoid by Callum Macdonald.

 

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This is the true story behind Operation Anthropoid, the mission to kill one of the Nazi's most feared leaders, Reinhard Heydrich chief of the Secret Services.

 

On 4 June 1942 one of the most powerful figures of the Nazi regime died in agony from wounds sustained during an assassination attempt in Prague.

This is the story of the killing of Reinhard Heydrich, a man of extraordinary intelligence, ruthlessness and ambition who had risen from obscurity to become head of the Nazi security police and Governor of Bohemia Moravia.

Regarded by many as Hitler's most likely successor, he was feared and hated even by other high ranking Nazi officials.

 

Heydrich's death caused shockwaves throughout the Nazi leadership, provoking ferocious reprisals against Czechs and Jews. Those who carried out the assassination were hunted down, and, trapped like rats in the cellar of a Prague church, committed suicide rather than face the certainty of torture and execution at the hands of the SS.

 

Based on original archive material, interviews with surviving members of the Special Operations Executive, who trained the Czech assassins in the UK, and Czech military intelligence, Callum MacDonald's book is a well researched and gripping account of one of the most audacious assassinations of the Second World War.

 

[Daveo]

Persian Letters by Montesquieu, C.J. Betts.

 

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This richly evocative novel in letters tells the story of two Persian noblemen who have left their country, the modern Iran, to journey to Europe in search of wisdom.

As they travel, they write home to wives and eunuchs in the harem and to friends in France and elsewhere.

Their colourful observations on the culture differences between West and East culture conjure up Eastern sensuality, repression and cruelty in contrast to the freer, more civilized West, but here also unworthy nobles and bishops, frivolous women of fashion and conceited people of all kinds are satirized.

Storytellers as well as letter writers, Montesquieu's Usbek and Rica are disrespectful and witty, but also serious moralists.

Persian Letters was a succès de scandale in Paris society, and encapsulates the libertarian, critical spirit of the early eighteenth century.

 

[Daveo]

Bare Fists by Bob Mee.

 

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‘Bare Fists’ takes a look at the forgotten world of bare knuckle prize-fighting, from the heyday of pugilism in the 18th century, to its extinction at the end of the 19th, and its re emergence this century in the form of illegal underground bouts.

 

James Figg, the notorious prize fighter, swordsman and bear baiter, was the first man to help establish fist-fighting as the preferred sport of the masses, who had previously been entertained by such delights as women versus dwarfs and animals fighting in a burning barrel.

 

From the age of Figg, until the late 19th century, prize-fighting was the dominant sport of the landed classes.

All the chief combatants were backed by the rich aristocracy and a succession of kings from George I were keen followers of the sport and often to be found at ringside.

 

The author charts the progress of the so-called Championship of England and, interspersed with social observation and biographical detail, he paints a vivid picture of the society in which this sport thrived.

The reader is introduced to a variety of fighters including Jack Broughton, Jack Slack, Daniel Mendoza, Jim Belcher, Tom Cribb and Tom Sayers.

Their hard drinking and prodigious fight achievements almost beggar belief, but they usually took their toll. Most succumbed to an early grave.

 

The sport all but came to an end with the introduction of the Queensberry Rules in 1867, but that was not the end of the story. Fist-fighting continued underground as an illegal practice, and still does, although it is unrecognisable from its noble heritage.

 

In the final part of the book, laments the decline of bare-knuckle fighting from the late 19th century.

The modern-day version is a sickening and brutal world, the sort inhabited by Lenny McLean and Roy Shaw, where kicking, stamping and illegal weapons are more prevalent than the fist.

 

[Daveo]

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

by Ben Macintyre.

 

In today @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya.

 

Master storyteller Ben Macintyre's most ambitious work to date presents the definitive telling of the most legendary spy story of the 20th century.

 

A Spy Among Friends, Ben Macintyre's thrillingly ambitious new book, tackles the greatest spy story of all: the rise and fall of Kim Philby, MI6's Cambridge bred golden boy who used his perch high in the intelligence world to betray friend and country to the Soviet Union for over two decades.

In Macintyre's telling, Philby's story is not a tale of one spy, but of three: the story of his complex friendships with fellow Englishman operative Nicholas Elliott and with the American James Jesus Angleton, who became one of the most powerful men in the CIA. These men came up together, shared the same background, went to the same schools and clubs, and served the same cause, or so Elliott and Angleton thought.

In reality, Philby was channeling all of their confidences directly to his Soviet handlers, sinking almost every great Anglo American spy operation for twenty years.

Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies and obfuscations to protect his secret, Angleton and Elliott never abandoned him.

When Philby's true master was finally revealed with his defection to Moscow in 1963, it would have profound and devastating consequences on these men who thought they knew him best, and the intelligence services they helped to build.

 

This remarkable story, told with heart pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never before seen British intelligence files, is Ben Macintyre's best book yet, and a high water mark in Cold War history telling.

 

[Daveo]

Taking Liberties by Diana Norman.

 

In today @ Canterbury Tales Bookshop / Book exchange / Cafe, Pattaya...

 

From the author also known as Ariana Franklin, the thrilling sequel to A Catch of Consequence that "moves at a cracking pace."

 

Makepeace Hedley is frantic when she learns that her young daughter, sailing home to England from the rebellious American colonies, has been taken prisoner by the British.

With her usual determination, Makepeace sets out for Plymouth to rescue her child.

 

And when Countess Diana Stacpoole is asked by an American friend to help his son, also a British prisoner, Diana responds quickly and leaves her genteel past behind.

 

In the chaos of wartime Plymouth the two women face social outrage, public scandal, and even arrest.

Amidst docks and prisons, government bureaucracy and brothels, they forge an unlikely and unshakable friendship.

And in freeing others, they discover their own splendid liberty.

 

 

[Daveo]

Cary Grant: A Class Apart by Graham McCann.

 

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More than a biography, this is a savvy portrait of how Archie Leach, born to a poor working-class family in Bristol, England became Cary Grant, one of Hollywood's most irresistible and admired celebrities of all time.

 

[Daveo]

The October List by Jeffery Deaver.

 

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Gabriela waits desperately for news of her abducted daughter.

At last, the door opens.

But it's not the negotiators. It's not the FBI.

It's the kidnapper.

And he has a gun.

 

How did it come to this?

 

Two days ago, Gabriela's life was normal.

Then, out of the blue, she gets word that her six year-old daughter has been taken.

She's given an ultimatum: pay half a million dollars and find a mysterious document known as the "October List" within 30 hours, or she'll never see her child again.

 

A mind-bending novel with twists and turns that unfold from its dramatic climax back to its surprising beginning, The October list is Jeffery Deaver at his masterful, inventive best.