This book displays just one of the creative streams to which Sydney-born Peter Poidevin contributes. His output is prodigious as it is seemingly irrepressible. It has interspersed a varied and interesting working life during which he worked with some of Australias best proponents in the hospitality industry. He managed and owned restaurants and clubs then changed to taxi driving for twenty years on the Gold Coast in Queensland. These jobs brought him into contact with a great variety of people, but thats another story. Through his acquaintance with musicians, he produced a CD of childrens songs, which he had written. This CD, called Animals Oztralia, has been widely distributed throughout the world and been very well received. The songs feature the unique native animals of Australia, as well as Australian folklore. Though Peter is not able to write music or play a musical instrument, melodies and words come together in his mind as he proceeds to write each song. These he then sings to the musician who writes and arranges the music for the song. Luckily, he has access to some of the best musicians in Australia. Now retired and happily settled in Tasmania, he continues to write. His writings were brought to my attention with a view to have them illustrated. For me, it has been a pleasure to contribute to his most interesting works.

The victims were shredded in a storm of glass. There was nothing the truck driver could do. The van was driving on the wrong side of the motorway, at night, with its headlights turned off. It came out of nowhere, loaded with sheets of cheap glass. The combined speed of the impact was 185 miles per hour. What was left of the passengers had to be collected in bags. A horrific accident takes a mysterious turn when a bullet is found lodged in the base of the van driver’s skull. Suicide pact or something more sinister? A case this bizarre calls for the skills of Harry Feiffer, Hong Bay’s finest detective. Meanwhile Christopher O’Yee is manning the psychopath hotline at Yellowstreet police station, and things turn canine for Spencer and Auden as they attempt to use an untrained Alsatian to catch a dog which has been terrorising the city’s apothecaries. The thirteenth book in William Marshall’s classic series mixes horror, humour and humanity in his distinct staccato style. Praise for the Yellowthread Street series: “Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense and wild humor and making them both work.” Washington Post Book World “Marshall’s style – blending the hilarious, the surreal, and the poignant – remains inimitable and not easily resisted.” San Francisco Chronicle “Marshall has few peers as an author who melds the wildest comedy and tragedy in narratives of nonstop action.” Publishers Weekly “Marshall is building a growing, iconoclastic body of work that mixes weird fantasy [and] wayward characterization . . . to produce a subtle, charged, atmospheric, lush fiction hybrid sure to satisfy those with a taste for mysteries on the far edges.” Philadelphia Inquirer “Despite the wild humor, Marshall’s stories contain excellent police procedure, real suspense, and fine irony . . . incessantly scary.” Chicago Tribune “Among the best police procedural series on the market.” Detroit Free Press “As an inspired poet of the bizarre, [Marshall] orchestrates underlying insanity into an apocalyptic vision of the future.” New York Times Book Review “Marshall’s novels feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure.” TIME “Nobody rivals Marshall’s ability to expose the links between comic hysteria and the most mundane human foibles, from greed to cowardice to simple funk.” Kirkus Reviews “Moves at the speed of a bullet; don’t read it aloud or you’ll run out of breath.” Chicago Sun-Times

After the ceasefire in Laos in February 1973, London forbids Colonel Jason Rance, the British Defence Attaché in Laos, from continuing his search for four Lao ‘moles’, who work within the Communist Party and wear a dedicated ring as a talisman. Unsanctioned contingency plans are therefore made by others for Rance to continue his work with the moles, the ‘Four Rings’, in an unattributable Operation Four Rings. But Rance remains ignorant of the plan and does not know he is in imminent danger. The communists now suspect the Four Rings as well as Colonel Rance and they launch their own Operation Four Rings: to kill the four moles and the British Defence Attaché. The tightest of races ensues. Based on historical fact and the author’s personal experience, Operation Four Rings is the fifth in a series of books involving Gurkha military units and includes Operation Black Rose, Operation Janus, Operation Blind Spot and Operation Stealth. The author, a retired Gurkha colonel, draws on real characters and events he witnessed across various theatres of war.

Imprisoned for life aboard a zeppelin that floats high above a fantastic metropolis, greeting-card writer Harold Winslow pens his memoirs. His only companions are the disembodied voice of Miranda Taligent, the only woman he has ever loved, and the cryogenically frozen body of her father, Prospero, the genius and industrial magnate who drove her insane. As Harold heads toward a last desperate confrontation with Prospero to save Miranda's life, he finds himself an unwitting participant in the creation of the greatest invention of them all: the perpetual motion machine. Beautifully written, stunningly imagined, and wickedly funny, Dexter Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a heartfelt meditation on the place of love in a world dominated by technology.