A heart-stopping novel from the WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 'A brilliantly plotted thrilling fable unravelling dark, sad secrets' Mail on Sunday 'There are things you should know about blackmail . . . ' At thirty-eight Simone has responsibilities: she's a district judge with two small boys and a husband on the verge of bankruptcy and breakdown. When she receives a letter postmarked New York she has no idea that opening it will threaten all she has worked for and call into question her judgement. For the photographs contained in the letter remind her of things she regrets from twenty years ago, and a man she'd decided to forget. But blackmail, like the heart, never forgets . . . 'A highly charged, haunting novel . . . beautifully wrought' The Times 'Excellently readable, genuinely disturbing' Anita Brookner, Spectator

From journalist Robert Timberg, a memoir of the struggle to reclaim his life after being severely burned as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam. In January 1967, Robert Timberg was a short-timer, counting down the days until his combat tour ended. He had thirteen days to go when his vehicle struck a Viet Cong land mine, resulting in third-degree burns of his face and much of his body. He survived, barely, then began the arduous battle back, determined to build a new life and make it matter. Remarkable as was his return to health--he endured no less than thirty-five operations--perhaps more remarkable was his decision to reinvent himself as a journalist, one of the most public of professions. Blue-Eyed Boy is a gripping, occasionally comic account of what it took for an ambitious man, aware of his frightful appearance but hungry for meaning and accomplishment, to master a new craft amid the pitying stares and shocked reactions of many he encountered on a daily basis. Timberg was at the top of his game as White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun when suddenly his work brought his life full circle: the Iran-Contra scandal broke. At its heart were three fellow Naval Academy graduates and Vietnam-era veterans. Timberg's coverage of that story resulted in his first book, The Nightingale's Song, a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that follows the three academy graduates most deeply involved in Iran-Contra--Oliver North among them--as well as two other well-known Navy men, John McCain and James Webb, from the academy through Vietnam and into the Reagan years. In Blue-Eyed Boy, Timberg relates how he came to know these five men and how their stories helped him understand the ways the Vietnam War and the furor that swirled around it continue to haunt the nation, even now, nearly four decades after its dismal conclusion. Timberg is no saint, and he has traveled a hard and often bitter road.

A dark and intricately plotted tale of a poisonously dysfunctional family, a blind child prodigy, and a serial murderer who is not who he seems. Told through posts on a webjournal called badguysrock, this is a thriller that makes creative use of all the multiple personalities, disguise and mind games that are offered by playing out a life on the internet.

Celebrates the unique spirit of the blue-eyed girl or boy.

Little Randy comes up against the toughest kid in school, then picks on his own friend. When he tells his father about some of the day's events, a powerful lesson is in store. How will Little Randy get out of the mess he's in? You will see how a gentle father's voice is heard in a way that not only helps his son solve problems but establishes an enduring love. The Fence Post is a book that can be enjoyed by all ages. Join Randy and Daddy in other adventures in the Blue-Eyed Boy Adventure Series: The Wisdom of a Sharecropper.

On the Boston Common stands one of the great Civil War memorials, a magnificent bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It depicts the black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry marching alongside their young white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. When the philosopher William James dedicated the memorial in May 1897, he stirred the assembled crowd with these words: "There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in the very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune." In this book Shaw speaks for himself with equal eloquence through nearly two hundred letters he wrote to his family and friends during the Civil War. The portrait that emerges is of a man more divided and complex--though no less heroic--than the Shaw depicted in the celebrated film Glory. The pampered son of wealthy Boston abolitionists, Shaw was no abolitionist himself, but he was among the first patriots to respond to Lincoln's call for troops after the attack on Fort Sumter. After Cedar Mountain and Antietam, Shaw knew the carnage of war firsthand. Describing nightfall on the Antietam battlefield, he wrote, "the crickets chirped, and the frogs croaked, just as if nothing unusual had happened all day long, and presently the stars came out bright, and we lay down among the dead, and slept soundly until daylight. There were twenty dead bodies within a rod of me." When Federal war aims shifted from an emphasis on restoring the Union to the higher goal of emancipation for four million slaves, Shaw's mother pressured her son into accepting the command of the North's vanguard black regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. A paternalist who never fully reconciled his own prejudices about black inferiority, Shaw assumed the command with great reluctance. Yet, as he trained his recruits in Readville, Massachusetts, during the early months of 1963, he came to respect their pluck and dedication. "There is not the least doubt," he wrote his mother, "that we shall leave the state, with as good a regiment, as any that has marched." Despite such expressions of confidence, Shaw in fact continued to worry about how well his troops would perform under fire. The ultimate test came in South Carolina in July 1863, when the Fifty-fourth led a brave but ill-fated charge on Fort Wagner, at the approach to Charleston Harbor. As Shaw waved his sword and urged his men forward, an enemy bullet felled him on the fort's parapet. A few hours later the Confederates dumped his body into a mass grave with the bodies of twenty of his men. Although the assault was a failure from a military standpoint, it proved the proposition to which Shaw had reluctantly dedicated himself when he took command of the Fifty-fourth: that black soldiers could indeed be fighting men. By year's end, sixty new black regiments were being organized. A previous selection of Shaw's correspondence was privately published by his family in 1864. For this volume, Russell Duncan has restored many passages omitted from the earlier edition and has provided detailed explanatory notes to the letters. In addition he has written a lengthy biographical essay that places the young colonel and his regiment in historical context.