Edgy revelations and revealing first-hand accounts, including the inspirations for popular TV dramas as diverse as The Wire, The Sopranos and Life on Mars. Terrorists, criminal gangs, drug-dealing lawyers, solitary psychos and suspected serial killers all feature as the intended targets in these cops' tales. Using fake identities and complex back-stories, dependent on teamwork to keep one step away from exposure, torture and death, the subjects of this book describe in vivid detail what it is like to cultivate contacts and gather evidence in major prosecutions: in the UK, Northern Ireland, the USA and around the world.

New mysteries, as well as variations on recurring ones, continue to surface on a weekly basis around the globe, from showers of frogs over Hungary to birds falling to earth in Arkansas. This compendious round-up of unexplained phenomena examines everything from the experiments being done with the Large Hadron Collider to classic maritime mysteries involving inexplicably missing crews, via UFOs, mediums, cryptozoology, panics, paranoia and a universe proving stranger in fact than we'd imagined.

This bumper collection of Irish humour covers topics such as Absenteeism and Zoos and everything in between. It would be disappointing should such a large collection not include the best of famous Irish wits such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, but the emphasis is very much on contemporary Irish humour from the likes of Tommy Tiernan, Dylan Moran, Ardal O'Hanlon and Dara O'Briain, to name just a few. Lunatic, iconoclastic and, as Spike Milligan might have put it, involving 'sideways thinking', this is Irish humour at its very best.

Love will find a way - 19 fantastic future-set romances. The good news is, in the future there will be no shortage of romance. On space ships, on newly-colonized planets or on a barely recognizable Earth, life forms, whether human, alien or something in between, will find their way to love. As giant corporations grasp new opportunities for profit and future armies clash, both in deep space and 'dirtside', former romantic partners try to put the past behind them and time-travelling rebels set out to romance the past. These science fiction stories of future love and lust - by Marcella Burnard, Bianca d'Arc, Jess Granger, Linnea Sinclair, C. L. Wilson and many more - are brimming with passion and humour. So, even though in space no one can hear you scream, they might just be able to hear you laugh.

The biggest-ever selection of first-hand accounts and news reports of shark attacks, both recent and historical, shows how sharks are masters of the ocean and how we enter their domain at our own risk. Think you're safe in the Med? Read about the Great Whites that thrive near holiday beaches. Think you're safe in large groups? Read about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in 1945 when hundreds of sailors floated for days in shark-infested waters, being picked off one-by-one. Think you're safe at home? Read about the 69-year-old man, taking his regular evening swim, jumping off his backyard dock straight into the mouth of a bull shark. Many more extraordinary and gruesome accounts, including the shark-boat skipper who slit open the belly of a 360-kg tiger shark only to have a human head, pelvis, and arm come tumbling out, provide horrific and moving tales of shark encounters. The courage of survivors and those who have risked their lives to save shark attack victims is truly inspirational. Where can you find sharks? Features on different shark species with illustrations, fact boxes and maps show where they lurk around the world. Also included are a selection of full-colour photographs and special sections on the life cycle of a shark, how to avoid a shark attack and how to survive one.

This selection of the very best writing on Everest begins with the first attempts and continues, via Mallory's failed bid and Hillary and Tenzing's triumph, to the disasters of recent years. It features 35 white-knuckle accounts of climbing on the world's highest mountain, with all the tragedy and triumph of humankind's striving for the top of the world, by those who know the 'Death Zone' best - the climbers themselves. But this is much more than just the best of exhilarating first-hand accounts of climbing on Everest. It includes the full history of the conquest of Everest, and provides an evocative portrait of the cruel, natural beauty of Chomolungma, 'The Mother Goddess of the World'.

An engrossing A-Z of over 60 gory years of slasher and splatter movies, from Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later to Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters. Here you will find the low-down on over 250 movies with entries from 23 different countries. The index, which includes every movie mentioned in the A-Z and accompanying notes, runs to 540 movies. The book includes the list of video nasties which the UK government attempted to ban.