Fairest Creatures

A serial killer's obsession with the preservation of beauty sees him return to stalk the streets of Penzance in the summer of 2019. It's 23 years since his first victims went missing, setting DI Brandon Hammett on the hunt for the Sleeping Beauty Killer. A beautiful woman is being held captive in an unknown location. Although not physically injured, she is manacled to a chair in a darkened, sinister dining room. Her captor is polite but menacing. Her female companions silent spectators. When a glass box is found in Prussia Cove, containing a conch and the ear of a missing beauty, a murder investigation is launched. Is the Sleeping Beauty Killer back? Or is this a copycat killing? What's clear is an evasive, clever killer is at large, presenting DI Brandon Hammett with a deadly race against time. "A dark and sinister hunt for a serial killer had me hooked from the first page." Dreda Say Mitchell "Assured and intriguing, Fairest Creatures is a novel that will grip you from the first page and hold you to the last." William Ryan, author of the Captain Korolev books. "I loved this novel with its unusual viewpoints and characters. It raced along with a great pace taking the reader with it. It was easy to invest in the main characters; they were so well-drawn and rounded. I even found myself feeling sorry for the killer! This is a great debut novel from a writer I can't wait to read again. Highly recommended." Judi Daykin, author of the DS Sara Hirst novels.

The Architectonics of Meaning is a lucid demonstration of the purposes, methods, and implications of philosophical semantics that both supports and builds on Richard McKeon's and other noted pluralists' convictions that multiple philosophical approaches are viable. Watson ingeniously explores ways to systematize these approaches, and the result is a well-structured instrument for understanding texts. This book exemplifies both general and particular aspects of systematic pluralism, reorienting our understanding of the realms of knowing, doing, and making.

In Why Lyrics Last, the internationally acclaimed critic Brian Boyd turns an evolutionary lens on the subject of lyric verse. He finds that lyric making, though it presents no advantages for the species in terms of survival and reproduction, is “universal across cultures because it fits constraints of the human mind.” An evolutionary perspective— especially when coupled with insights from aesthetics and literary history—has much to tell us about both verse and the lyrical impulse. Boyd places the writing of lyrical verse within the human disposition “to play with pattern,” and in an extended example he uncovers the many patterns to be found within Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Shakespeare’s bid for readership is unlike that of any sonneteer before him: he deliberately avoids all narrative, choosing to maximize the openness of the lyric and demonstrating the power that verse can have when liberated of story. In eschewing narrative, Shakespeare plays freely with patterns of other kinds: words, images, sounds, structures; emotions and moods; argument and analogy; and natural rhythms, in daily, seasonal, and life cycles. In the originality of his stratagems, and in their sheer number and variety, both within and between sonnets, Shakespeare outdoes all competitors. A reading of the Sonnets informed by evolution is primed to attend to these complexities and better able to appreciate Shakespeare’s remarkable gambit for immortal fame.

Over the course of literary history there have been many instances of ghost writing between husband and wife, where the wife has been the genius while the husband takes the kudos for any success. A recent film, The Wife, is but one instance of how a wife may allow her husband to take the credit for her genius. In this book you will find the greatest instance of a wife sacrificing her literary genius in order to immortalise her husband. The name William Shakespeare conjures up images of an uneducated man becoming the greatest writer in English history, fêted from the stages of London to his famous poems going through several reprints. After over 400 years of bardolatry, his name appears unassailable. What if, though, the adoration and the fame afforded him has been tragically misplaced? What if, contrary to common acceptance, it was to be proven that he is not the author? What if it can be shown that the real author of Shake-speares Sonnets, and by extension, the plays and poems attributed to him have to be re-imagined as being from the pen of someone so close to him that she has been overlooked for centuries? What if, like so many other women geniuses hidden from view, the real author is none other than his wife, Anne Shakespeare? This book presents evidence that the real author of Shake-speares Sonnets is his wife, Anne, and the young man who is the subject of them is none other than her husband, William Shakespeare.