belinda Skottowe

Pre-med student Coral is on vacation in Idaho when something terrible happens. The black cloud is followed by a wildfire and searing heat that lasts for days. She survives deep in a cave but emerges days later to find the world transformed, with blackened trees, an ash-filled sky, and no living creatures stirring - except for her. So begins her desperate journey to find water and food and other survivors...and the answer to the mystery of what happened.

There are hangovers, there are bad hangovers, and then there's waking up inside someone else's head. Thirty-something bartender Charlie Wilkes is faced with this dilemma when he wakes up to find himself trapped inside The Black Room - a space consisting of impenetrable darkness and a huge, ethereal screen floating in its center. It is through this screen that he sees the world of his female host, Minnie.

Nobody knew where it came from. Nobody knew why it came. When an eight-foot-tall man made of stone appears in the middle of a busy city center one July afternoon, two-bit (and antisocial) reporter Andy Pointer assumes it's just a publicity stunt. Indeed, so does everyone else...until the Stone Man begins to walk, heading silently through the wall of the nearest building, flattening it, and killing several people inside as a result.

Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of four centuries of witches - a family given to poetry and incest, murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being called Lasher who haunts the Mayfair women. Moving in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and the France of Louis XIV, from the coffee plantations of Port-au-Prince to Civil War New Orleans and back to today, Anne Rice has spun a mesmerizing tale.

A golden summer, and six talented teenagers are looking forward to the brightest of futures—until a daredevil game goes horribly wrong, leaving three strangers dead. 18-year-old Megan takes the blame for the crime, leaving her friends to get on with their lives. In return, they each agree to a 'favour', payable on her release from prison. Twenty years later Megan is free. It is payback time. And her friends start disappearing, one by one . . .

A man discovers an incredible talent for painting after a freak accident in which he loses an arm. He moves to a "new life" in Duma Key, off Florida's West Coast - a deserted strip, part beach, part weed-tangled reef, owned by a patroness of the arts whose twin sisters went missing in the 1920s. Here, Freemantle is inspired to paint the amazing sunsets. But soon the paintings become predictive, even dangerous.

End of Watch is a compelling and chilling suspense novel which sees retired detective Bill Hodges back on the trail of his nemesis, Brady Hartsfield, the criminal the press called The Mercedes Killer. Foiled in his attempt to commit a second mass murder, Hartsfield is confined to a hospital brain-injury unit in a seemingly unresponsive state. But all is not what it seems: Brady is able to influence both his physician and the hospital librarian to commit crimes in the outside world.

Meet Johnny Smith. A young man whose streak of luck ends dramatically in a major car crash. Followed by blackness. A long, long time in cold limbo. When he wakes up life has been turned upside down. His fiancée has met someone else. And Johnny is cursed with the power to perceive evil in men's souls. He's had these hunches since he had an ice-skating accident as a child. Now he has an ability to see into the future. An ability which will bring him into a terrifying confrontation with a charismatic, power-hungry and dangerous man....

The discovery of two teenagers ritualistically murdered in a secluded Austin park outrages a nation already on the brink of tearing itself apart. The victims are the latest in an epidemic of deaths linked to a mysterious, underground virtual game known only as Play Dead. Enter a psychological thriller ripped from tomorrow's headlines that will haunt you until the last line. It is said that nothing is as it seems in the halls of power and that some truths are far too dangerous for the common man. Until now.

The world's toughest car race. Twenty-one days of searing heat and rock-hard desert tracks; of blowouts and breakdowns; of subterfuge and sabotage. Ten thousand miles of dust and glory. Driving at breakneck speed over Australia's roughest roads and through the most appalling conditions imaginable, six competitors break free from the pack and fight for the lead, gradually finding themselves entangled in a web of deceit, betrayal and danger. Dust and Glory is best-selling author Evan Green's stirring account of the most grueling race of them all.