Product DescriptionTthe first day of October brings an unheralded and violent storm, which whips through Fairacre, blowing down trees and telephone poles -- and, worst of all, damaging the roof of St. Patrick’s Church. The inhabitants of tiny Fairacre can’t imagine how they will be able to afford the repairs, until Mr. Willett suggests a fundraising festival. Preparations for a food sale, a concert, a school play, and a gigantic Christmas bazaar are soon made -- but will they be enough? With her customary humor and grace, Miss Read recounts a story of catastrophe and courage.About the AuthorMiss Read is the pseudonym of Mrs. Dora Saint, a former schoolteacher beloved for her novels of English rural life, especially those set in the fictional villages of Thrush Green and Fairacre. The first of these, Village School, was published in 1955, and Miss Read continued to write until her retirement in 1996. In the 1998, she was awarded an MBE, or Member of the Order of the British Empire, for her services to literature. She lives in Berkshire.

An elementary school teacher in training takes a midnight swim in the Thames and witnesses a body being dumped. Cribb and Thackerey investigate and uncover strange parallels with the then-popular Jerome K. Jerome mystery Three Men in a Boat.After Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat became a Victorian bestseller, rowing on the Thames was the great craze of 1889. The novel begins, however, with skinny-dipping (under another name) by some student teachers. By chance one of them finds herself a witness in a case of murder. The suspects? Three men in a boat.When Cribb and Thackeray take to the river in pursuit, nobody will take them seriously. However, they stick doggedly to the trail, which leads upstream to Oxford.

Across the English Channel, Napoleon has massed a great invasion flotilla. English forces, under Lord Nelson, are all but paralyzed—not knowing the size, strength, or time of the foreign onslaught. In a daring spy scheme to protect British shores, Ramage is chosen to plumb the secrets of the French, and the penalty for failure is the guillotine.

As the two largest, most powerfully equipped naval fleets in history move slowly toward each other near Islas Piedras–an American missile site in the Indian Ocean that threatens Russia's grip on the Middle East–two men stand in the darkened control rooms of their ships. David Charles and Alex Kupinsky are worried because, as the admirals of these fleets, they may be responsible for all-out nuclear war. They are also concerned because once, a long time ago, they were the best of friends… As Admirals Charles and Kupinsky face imminent disaster, forced to make their moves on the chessboard of modern warfare, we look back over their pasts as men of peace and men of war. David Charles learned the hard way in the tragic Bay of Pigs, on the treacherous rivers of Vietnam, and in the backrooms of embassies around the world. Alex Kupinsky was raised by the man who watched his father die in World War II–the same man who has since become Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union. Moving from the real past to the possible future, from romantic memories of the women left behind to hard action on the high seas, SHOW OF FORCE is the story of men turned warriors, of a world turned battlefield. And as communications break down between Washington, Moscow, and the fleets themselves, it becomes the story of two men with the power to stop that ultimate folly of the mighty, World War III.**

Moose Malloy, a six-foot-five giant just out of prison, gets detective Philip Marlowe involved in his seemingly hopeless search for Velma, his missing girlfriend, a seemingly routine case soon complicated by a gang of jewel thieves, a suspicious fortune-teller, corruption, and murder. Reissue.

One of a series of pulp Western novels by Max Brand featuring Silvertip, a heroic lone rider who metes out justice to various wrong-doers he runs across in his travels."No pulp writer was more prolific than Frederick Faust, who wrote nearly 15 million words under the pen name of Max Brand and seventeen others. He sold all his stories and sometimes wrote complete issues of Western Story Magazine." — The Incredible Pulps

Brett Renshaw has not been having much luck. Spurned by his fiancé and outcast from society, he has taken to his boat and escaped to the distractions of the Mediterranean. Here he is free to drown his sorrows and wallow in his misfortune. Rescuing two women from a Turkish Harem was certainly not part of the plan. For Phyllida Vanick, being rescued by such a disagreeable man is only bearable in stark comparison to the circumstances from which she is running. Phyllida has seen her father cut down before her eyes and lived through kidnap and the indignities of the harem. But she cannot go home now. Phyllida and her aunt are searching for her brother, Peter, an impetuous, idealistic young man caught up in the Greek War of independence. Reluctantly, Brett allows her to charter his yacht in aid of the search.A woman of determination, resolve, and beauty, she is more than a match for Brett Renshaw's tempers...

Mike Hammer finds himself involved with a very nasty underground network conspiring to destroy the USA.

"From between the two shuffling dancers padded something on four feet. The canine-feline creature was more than just a head; it was a loose-limbed, graceful body fully eight feet in length, and the red eyes in the prick-eared head were those of a killer.... Words issued from between those curved fangs, words which Dane might not understand.... "Dane slid his blade out surreptitiously, setting its point against the palm of his hand and jabbing painfully; but the terrible creature continued to advance.... There was no blurring of its lines...." Dane Thorson of the space-ship Solar Queen knew there was only one way to win out over this hideous thing — a battle to the end between his rational mind and the hypnotic witchcraft of Lumbrilo, the mental wizard of the planet Khatka.

Aldous Huxley's acclaimed and gripping account of one of the strangest occurrences in historyIn 1643 an entire convent in the small French village of Loudun was apparently possessed by the devil. After a sensational and celebrated trial, the convent's charismatic priest Urban Grandier—accused of spiritually and sexually seducing the nuns in his charge—was convicted of being in league with Satan. Then he was burned at the stake for witchcraft. In this classic work by the legendary Aldous Huxley—a remarkable true story of religious and sexual obsession considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece—a compelling historical event is clarified and brought to vivid life.Review"Huxley has reconstructed with skill, learning and horror one of the most appalling incidents in the history of witch-hunting during its seventeenth-century heyday. The Devils of Loudun is fascinating, erudite, and instinct with intellectual vitality" Times Literary Supplement "Huxley's analysis of motive, his exposition of the unconscious causes of behaviour, his exposure of the perversions to which religious emotion is subject, his discursions on the witch cult, on mass hysteria, on sexual eccentricity have the brilliance that all his writing has had from the very beginning" Spectator "One of Huxley's best books" Guardian "His masterpiece, and perhaps the most enjoyable book about spirituality ever written. In telling the grotesque, bawdy and true story of a 17th-century convent of cloistered French nuns who contrived to have a priest they never met burned alive ...Huxley painlessly conveys a wealth of information about mysticism and the unconscious" Washington Post About the AuthorAldous Huxley (1894-1963) is the author of the classic novels Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Devils of Loudun, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles.