In A Dry Season

During a blistering summer, drought has depleted Thornfield Reservoir, uncovering the remains of a small village called Hobb's End - hidden from view for over 40 years. For a curious young boy this resurfaced hamlet has become a magical playground ... until he unearths a human skeleton. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is given the impossible task of identifying the victim - a woman who lived in a place that no longer exists, whose former residents are scattered to the winds. Anyone else might throw in the towel but Banks sets out to uncover the murky past buried beneath a flood of time...

‘The Alan Banks mystery-suspense novels are the best series on the market. Try one and tell me I'm wrong’ – Stephen King In A Dry Season is the tenth novel in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series, following on from Dead Right. A lost village. Past crimes. Present evil. During a blistering summer, drought has depleted Thornfield Reservoir, uncovering the remains of a small village called Hobb's End – hidden from view for over forty years. For a curious young boy this resurfaced hamlet is a magical playground . . . until he unearths a human skeleton. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is given the impossible task of identifying the victim – a woman who lived in a place that no longer exists, whose former residents are scattered to the winds. Anyone else might throw in the towel but DCI Banks is determined to uncover the murky past buried beneath a flood of time . . . In A Dry Season is followed by the eleventh book in this Yorkshire-based crime series, Cold is the Grave.

Wonderful, simply wonderful. A story of love, healing, and forgiveness sure to grip the heart of every reader. --Debbie Macomber, New York Times #1 bestselling author In a Drought, It's the Darkest Cloud That Brings Hope It's 1954 and Perla Long's arrival in the sleepy town of Wise, West Virginia, was supposed to go unnoticed. She just wants a quiet, safe place for her and her daughter, Sadie, where the mistakes of her past can stay hidden. But then drought comes to Wise, and Perla is pulled into the turmoil of a town desperately in need of a miracle. Casewell Phillips has resigned himself to life as a bachelor...until he meets Perla. She's everything he's sought in a woman, but he can't get past the sense that she's hiding something. As the drought worsens, Perla's unique gift divides the town in two, bringing both gratitude and condemnation, and placing the pair in the middle of a storm of anger and forgiveness, fear and faith. -- This debut novel is splendid. The story is genuine and heartfelt, with just a touch of the Divine. A story of forgiveness and reckoning, and realizing love does cover a multitude of sins. Thomas will be a go-to author after you read Miracle in a Dry Season. --Rachel Hauck, bestselling author of The Wedding Dress and Once Upon a Prince Charming, whimsical, and intelligently written, Miracle in a Dry Season is a beautiful debut novel! --Ann Tatlock, Christy-award winning author of Promises to Keep

Shelby Foote's magnificently orchestrated novel anticipates much of the subject matter of his monumental Civil War trilogy, rendering the clash between North and South with a violence all the more shocking for its intimacy. Love in a Dry Season describes an erotic and economic triangle, in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi families—the Barcrofts and the Carrutherses—are joined by an open-faced fortune hunter from the North, a man whose ruthlessness is matched only by his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the passions he so casually ignites. Combining a flawless sense of place with a Faulknerian command of the grotesque, Foote's novel turns a small cotton town into a sexual battleground as fatal as Vicksburg or Shiloh—and one where strategy is no match for instinct and tradition.

On a rainy night in Eastvale, a teenager is found in an alleyway, smashed over the head with a beer bottle and beaten to death. What first looks like a typical after-hours pub brawl gone seriously wrong soon becomes more complex and more sinister. The victim, Jason Fox, was a member of a white power organization known as the Albion League, and had recently been let go from his factory job because of his racist views. So who was his killer? The Pakistani youths he had insulted in the pub earlier that evening? The shady friends of his business partner, Mark Wood? Or could it have been someone from the organization who was concerned with Jason's growing power? Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and Detective Constable Susan Gay must struggle with a case complicated by escalating racial tensions and simmering departmental politics.

These ten short stories from the prize-winning Zimbabwean writer, were banned in (the then) Rhodesia, but some were published in Europe. One of the stories, 'The Setting Sun and the Rolling World', gave its title to another acclaimed collection.

As startling and powerful as when first published more than two decades ago, André Brink's classic novel, A Dry White Season, is an unflinching and unforgettable look at racial intolerance, the human condition, and the heavy price of morality. Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies—until the sudden arrest and subsequent "suicide" of a black janitor from Du Toit's school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man's death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair—a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.

Nearly 100 years ago Mary Henrietta Kingsley made a journey to Africa about which she wrote on her return in Travels in West Africa. In this blend of historical sleuthing and travel writing, Caroline Alexander describes the effect on her of reading Kingsley's book and her decision to make her own journey in Kingsley's footsteps, following her path as closely as possible. Staying at Catholic missions, travelling by pirogue through waterways and rapids, she encounters the ghosts of Trader Horn, Albert Schweitzer and Dr Robert Nasau. But contact with the past gives way to adventures which might have amazed Miss Kingsley.