Warning this story contains scenes of an explicit sexual nature, including BDSM, and is therefore strictly for adults only!

Rebel leader Corry Reah has a problem. His name is Ashton VinDerley. Though they are sworn enemies, she can’t make herself hate him. Compelling and powerful, he fascinates and seduces her, making her long for pleasures she has never known before. He teases and tempts, caresses and challenges until she forgets who is captive and who captor.

Widower Shah Rafiq moves in with his daughter Nadia after being diagnosed with an industrial disease. Once he's settled in, he sleeps in his grandson's empty bed – who is presumed to be in Kashmir, helping out with the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake. But one morning, Shah intercepts a letter addressed to Nadia and her husband. It's from Wasim, who is not in Kashmir at all, but Iraq, where he is fighting US-led forces. Shah decides to abandon everything and fly out to Iraq and bring his grandson home. He leaves a note for his daughter and sells his car. He takes a flight from Manchester to Vienna and then on to Kurdistan. Once he gets into Iraq, he uses the cash from the house sale, his car and his personal savings to track down Wasim in Sadr City. After a series of scrapes, which include an exorcism ritual and a romantic entanglement involving his grandson, he eventually brings Wasim home to his parents. Back at home, Wasim regrets his actions and promises to change. He fights a...

British Science Fiction Award (1978) Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D—which Arctor takes in massive doses—gradually splits the user’s brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn’t realize he is narcing on himself.

A gripping wilderness adventure and survival story It was getting colder. Johnny pulled the fur-lined hood of his parka over his head and walked towards his own cabin with the sound of snow crunching beneath his boots."He should be back tomorrow," he thought, as a star raced across the sky just below the North Star. "He should be back tomorrow for sure." Seventeen-year-old Johnny Least-Weasel knows that his grandfather Albert is a stubborn old man and won't stop checking his own traplines even though other men his age stopped doing so years ago. But Albert Least-Weasel has been running traplines in the Alaskan wilderness alone for the past sixty years. Nothing has ever gone wrong on the trail he knows so well.When Albert doesn't come back from checking his traps, with the temperature steadily plummeting, Johnny must decide quickly whether to trust his grandfather or his own instincts. Written in...

Over a span of twenty years, four boys have been kidnapped from their bedrooms, suffocated, and buried nearby in a shallow grave. Serial killer or coincidence? That's the question investigative reporter Maxine Revere sets out to answer when an old friend begs her to help exonerate his wife, who has been charged with their son's recent murder. But Max can do little to help because the police and D.A. won't talk to her—they think they have the right woman. Instead, Max turns her attention to three similar cold cases. If she can solve them, she might be able to help her friend.Justin Stanton was killed twenty years ago, and his father wants closure—so he is willing to help Max with her investigation on one condition: that she work with his former sister-in-law— Justin's aunt, FBI Agent Lucy Kincaid. Trouble is, Max works alone, and she's livid that her only access to the case files, lead detective and witnesses depends on her partnering with a...

What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of laughter was a force to fear—a world of wit, irony, and knowing smiles? How did Romans make sense of laughter? What role did it play in the world of the law courts, the imperial palace, or the spectacles of the arena? Laughter in Ancient Rome explores one of the most intriguing, but also trickiest, of historical subjects. Drawing on a wide range of Roman writing—from essays on rhetoric to a surviving Roman joke book—Mary Beard tracks down the giggles, smirks, and guffaws of the ancient Romans themselves. From ancient "monkey business" to the role of a chuckle in a culture of tyranny, she explores Roman humor from the hilarious, to the momentous, to the surprising. But she also reflects on even bigger historical questions. What kind of history of laughter can we...