MacLehose Press The Lizard Strategy Varesi Valerio

A relentless deluge lashes the Po Valley, and the river itself swells beyond its limits. A barge breaks free of its moorings and drifts erratically downstream; when finally it runs aground its seasoned pilot is nowhere to be found • The following day, an elderly man of the same surname falls from the window of a nearby hospital. Commissario Soneri, scornful of his superiors' scepticism, is convinced the two incidents are linked. Stonewalled by the bargemen who make their living along the riverbank, he scours the floodplain for clues. As the waters begin to ebb, the river yields up its secrets: tales of past brutality, bitter rivalry and revenge

The village of Shimae is thrown into turmoil when master carp-catcher Katsuro suddenly drowns in the murky waters of the Kusagawa river. Who now will carry the precious cargo of carp to the imperial palace and preserve the crucial patronage that everyone in the village depends upon? • Step forward Miyuki, Katsuro's grief-struck widow and the only remaining person in the village who knows anything about carp. She alone can undertake the long, perilous journey to the imperial palace, balancing the heavy baskets of fish on a pole across her shoulders, and ensure her village's future • So Miyuki sets off. Along her way she will encounter a host of remarkable characters, from prostitutes and innkeepers, to warlords and priests with evil in mind. She will endure ambushes and disaster, for the villagers are not the only people fixated on the fate of the eight magnificent carp

The Reindeer Hunters is the second in a thrilling historical trilogy that began with The Bell in the Lake • The year is 1903, and twenty-two years have passed since Astrid Hekne died in childbirth. Her son Jehans lives on a modest smallholding up in the hills near Butangen, having withdrawn from his community. He is drawn to freedom, to fishing and reindeer hunting, and one day meets a stranger over the body of a huge reindeer buck • Outside the new church in Butangen, Pastor Kai Schweigaard still cares for Astrid Hekne's grave. The village's overworked priest is tormented by his old betrayal, which led to death and to the separation of two powerful church bells cast in memory of two sisters in Astrid's family. Kai is set on finding an ancient tapestry made by the sisters - the Hekne Weave - in the hope that it will reveal how he can remedy his iniquities

The townsfolk of Motal, an isolated, godforsaken town in the Pale of Settlement, are shocked when Fanny Keismann - devoted wife, mother of five, and celebrated cheese-maker - leaves her home at two hours past midnight and vanishes into the night • True, the husbands of Motal have been vanishing for years, but a wife and mother? Whoever heard of such a thing. What on earth possessed her? • Could it have anything to do with Fanny's missing brother-in-law, who left her sister almost a year ago and ran away to Minsk, abandoning their family to destitution and despair? • Or could Fanny have been lured away by Zizek Breshov, the mysterious ferryman on the Yaselda river, who, in a strange twist of events, seems to have disappeared on the same night? • Surely there can be no link between Fanny and the peculiar roadside murder on the way to Telekhany, which has left Colonel Piotr Novak, head of the Russian secret police, scratching his head

The year is 1903, and twenty-two years have passed since Astrid Hekne died in childbirth. Her son Jehans lives on a modest smallholding up in the hills near Butangen, having withdrawn from his community. He is drawn to freedom, to fishing and reindeer hunting, and one day meets a stranger over the body of a huge reindeer buck • Outside the new church in Butangen, Pastor Kai Schweigaard still cares for Astrid Hekne's grave. The village's overworked priest is tormented by his old betrayal, which led to death and to the separation of two powerful church bells cast in memory of two sisters in Astrid's family. Kai is set on finding an ancient tapestry made by the sisters - the Hekne Weave - in the hope that it will reveal how he can remedy his iniquities

The Cheffe is born into an impoverished family in Sainte-Bazeille in south-western France, but when she takes a job working in the kitchen of a couple in the Landes region, it does not take long before it becomes clear that the Cheffe has an unusual, remarkable talent for cooking. She dreams in recipes, she's always imagining new food combinations, she hunts down elusive flavours and aromas, and she soon usurps the couple's cook • But for all her genius, the Cheffe remains very secretive about the rest of her life. She becomes pregnant, but will not reveal her daughter's father. She shares nothing of her feelings or emotions. And when the demands of her work and caring for her child become too much, she leaves her baby in the care of her family, and sets out to open her own restaurant, which will soon win rave reviews and be lauded by all

The girl with the dragon tattoo lives on • Lisbeth Salander is an unstoppable force • Sentenced to two months in Flodberga women's prison for saving a young boy's life by any means necessary, Salander refuses to say anything in her own defence. She has more important things on her mind • Mikael Blomkvist makes the long trip to visit every week - and receives a lead to follow for his pains. For him, it looks to be an important expose for Millennium. For her, it could unlock the facts of her childhood • Even from a corrupt prison system run largely by the inmates, Salander will stand up for what she believes in, whatever the cost. And she will seek the truth that is somehow connected with her childhood memory, of a woman with a blazing birthmark on her neck - that looked as if it had been burned by a dragon's fire

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO IS BACK WITH A UK NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist have not been in touch for some time. Then Blomkvist is contacted by renowned Swedish scientist Professor Balder. Warned that his life is in danger, but more concerned for his son's well-being, Balder wants Millennium to publish his story - and it is a terrifying one. More interesting to Blomkvist than Balder's world-leading advances in Artificial Intelligence, is his connection with a certain female superhacker. It seems that Salander, like Balder, is a target of ruthless cyber gangsters - and a violent criminal conspiracy that will very soon bring terror to the snowbound streets of Stockholm, to the Millennium team, and to Blomkvist and Salander themselves

The frozen body of a woman is found in a fishing ark on the ice near Tornetrask in northern Sweden. She has been brutally tortured, but the killing blow was clumsy, almost amateur • The body is quickly identified, raising hopes of an open-and-shut solution. But when a six-month-old suicide is disinterred, Rebecka Martinsson and Anna-Maria Mella find themselves investigating shocking corruption at the heart of one of Sweden's most successful mining companies. One that has powerful enemies of its own

On the third day of Ramadan, the village wakes to find the severed heads of nine of its sons stacked in banana crates by the bus stop • One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in Iraq, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated • How did this good and humble man earn the enmity of so many? What did he do to deserve such a death? • The answer lies in his lifelong friendship with Abdullah Kafka and Tariq the Befuddled, who each have their own remarkable stories to tell • It lies on the scarred, irradiated battlefields of the Gulf War and in the ashes of a revolution strangled in its cradle • It lies in the steadfast love of his wife and the festering scorn of his daughter • And, above all, it lies behind the locked gates of the President's gardens, buried alongside the countless victims of a pitiless reign of terror

Paris, 1900. Aileen Bowman arrives at the Exposition Universelle, where all the world has gathered to witness the birth of modernity. A journalist in her mid-thirties, unmarried and fiercely independent, she has been sent to cover the Exposition for the New York Tribune, and her arrival soon creates a scandal in the city of lights • But it seems the life she left behind on the distant Nevada plains may have followed her across the Atlantic, and before long Aileen finds herself caught in a deadly tussle between the old world and the new • The final volume in Antonin Varenne's epic historical trilogy, The Canvas of the World takes us to heart of Paris, from the emerging metropolis to the neighbourhood brothels, in a novel driven by passion and a yearning for freedom

Refugee Camps In Africa Are Swelling • And Europe has closed its borders. The refugees have no future, no hope, and no money to pay the vast sums now demanded by people smugglers. The only thing they have is time • And Then An Angel Arrives From Reality T.V • When model and star presenter Nadeche Hackenbusch comes to film at the largest of the camps, one young refugee sees a unique opportunity: to organise a march to Europe, in full view of the media. Viewers are gripped as the vast convoy moves closer, but the far right in Germany is regrouping and the government is at a loss. Which country will halt the refugees in their tracks? • The Hungry And The Fat • A devastating, close-to-the-knuckle satire about the haves and have-nots in our divided world by one of Europe's finest and most perceptive writers