Destitute and desperate, George Lassiter breaks into the kitchen of a stranger's house for food and shelter. There he witnesses the murder of a beautiful girl. But when the police search the house minutes later, they find nothing. The corpse has vanished, as if by magic. Even George's friend and rescuer Jack Haldean believes it was nothing more than a nightmare. But the consequences of that nightmare will plunge Jack into a tangle of lies and obsession as he hunts a ruthless killer.

Hamo Langmuir flies westwards round the world to examine the effects of his miraculous high-yielding rice, leaving a bleak and impotent existence behind him. His god-daughter, Alexandra Grant, travels with her magic of myths and mysticism along the hippy trail to the East. With a wry wit Angus Wilson brings into focus their separate adventures (Quixotic in Hamo's case, dreamlike in Alexandra's) until the tragic denouement when they meet in Goa. 'Enough thought, comedy, wit, excitement and pathos to keep a dozen less profligate and inventive novelists busy for years.' Francis King, "Observer "

This Selected Poems gathers together work published between 1991 and 2016 from collections that have been lauded, awarded and widely translated, collections that have gained a large audience and a considerable reputation, nationally and internationally, for one of Ireland's foremost poets and most distinctive voices. A great deal has changed in the world in the arc of time covered by these poems, and those changes are noted and considered by poems that are remarkable for their clear-eyed witness. Meehan's devotion to, and mastery of, her craft, has always been one of the key signatures of her work, as has been her immersion in her beloved native Dublin. In her Selected Poems we see this and more -- her uncompromising engagement with the politics of gender and class, her love of the natural world and her grief at what threatens it, her holistic and visionary impulse to bless the creation, to be grateful for her place in it.

There is a near-compulsion in most people to escape from human problems by resorting to types of "magic", sometimes without proper guidance.

The third Jack Haldean mystery set in 1920s England.