Touching Darkness

Jonathan Whitelaw (Author)

The Village Hall Vendetta

There's a fine art to murder... Hal Mulberry has long dreamt of owning the iconic painting, Buttermere at Dawn. And now the entrepreneur has got his hands on it, he's determined to bring it back to the Lakes where it belongs and put it on show, turning Penrith Village Hall into a cultural hotspot - with the painting at its heart. Journalist Jason Brazel is delighted to get the exclusive. Even if his mother in law, Amita, thinks he's making a fuss about an ugly piece of modern art. But when Amita uncovers a theory that the painting is cursed, she wonders just what Hal is bringing to their door: hex, hoax or dirty-deal? While the great and the good gather for the unveiling, someone's got murder on their mind. And it's up to Jason and Amita to find who is trying to put people out of the picture ... permanently.

Padmini Rajappa (Author)

Kadambari: Bana

Bana is among the three most important prose writers in classical Sanskrit, all of whom lived in the

Allen Eskens (Author)

The Quiet Librarian

2,After the murder of her best friend, a librarian's search for answers leads back to her own dark secrets in this "searing and timely" novel about a woman transformed by war, family, vengeance, and love, from the author of the beloved bestseller The Life We Bury (Kristin Harmel, author of The Paris Daughter). "Fans of Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale or Kate Quinn's books will be caught up in this story of a courageous woman."―Library Journal (starred review) "Exquisitely written, profoundly affecting, and undoubtedly one of the best books I will read this year."―Louise Fein, author of The London Bookshop Affair Hana Babic is a quiet, middle-aged librarian in Minnesota who wants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that something evil has come for her, a dark remnant of the past she and her friend had shared. Thirty years before, Hana was someone else: Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia--until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. The events of that day thrust Nura into the war, leading her to join a band ...