Welcome back to the Dining Club. Pass the challenges we set, and a world of pleasure awaits . . .
Giving in to the handsome Andrew's charms, Grace agrees to hear his warnings of what could lie in wait for her at The Dining Club. But what could he need to tell her so urgently? And why is he so convinced it will change what she thinks of David, her dazzling yet deeply secretive lover?
Andrew also reveals a crucial element to the next trial - the final trial - that David has held back from her. Realising it is going to require all of her seductive powers, stamina and wits, Grace faces her last weekend at the Dining Club with sensuous trepidation. And then someone lets slip that there could be one more stage, for the truly elite . . .
Let yourself indulge in the sumptuous delights of The Dining Club: Part Six.
The Dining Club is now available as a complete volume, in both paperback and ebook.
On a crisp Autumn evening in western Nebraska, what started as a group of kids filming their drug-fuelled party ends in an explosive light show, leaving the victims apparently electrocuted, with odd scorch marks being the only evidence. While Maggie tries to make sense of the different stories, sifting through what is real and what is hallucination, she realises that the surviving teens are being targeted and systematically eliminated.
Meanwhile on the East Coast, Army colonel Benjamin Platt is at the scene of a deadly outbreak, desperate to identify the pathogen that has infected children at a Virginia elementary school.
Despite the miles that separate them, the two cases collide as Maggie and Platt uncover secrets that were meant to stay hidden...
ESCAPE WITH A FEEL-GOOD READ FROM THE MULTI-MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER
Kate Lewis is thirty-five and feeling restless. She's fed up of worrying about the ironing and would like her husband Jeffrey to pay more attention to her than his golf clubs. There must be more to life than this!
Kate enrols herself on a T'ai Chi course and takes best friend Sonia along for the ride. She's determined to 'find herself' but it's easier said than done, especially when she finds the distracting Ben Mahler first . . .
YOUR FAVOURITE AUTHORS LOVE CAROLE MATTHEWS:
'A life-affirming story full of joy and hope' CATHY BRAMLEY
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'A wonderful setting where dark clouds part to reveal a happy ending' KATIE FFORDE
'An irresistibly warm-hearted story' TRISHA ASHLEY
'Warm, witty and hopeful - I was charmed' SARAH MORGAN
'The queen of funny, feel-good fiction' MIKE GAYLE
Travel to Marcus Samuelsson's Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem and you will find a truly diverse, multiracial dining room - where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers and nurses. It is also a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can finally feel at home.
Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister, all battling tuberculosis, walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a new family in Gteborg, Sweden. It was there that his new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food - from a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up.
He made his way to the US via some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, taking in some gruelling stints on cruise ships before becoming executive chef at Aquavit in New York, where at the age of 24 he became the youngest chef ever to be awarded a coveted three-star rating from the New York Times. His profile has only continued to grow from there - he's cooked state dinners for Barack Obama, runs seven restaurants including the phenomenally popular Red Rooster in Harlem, and has appeared on numerous television shows including Top Chef Masters, which he won, beating 21 world-class chefs in the process. His profile is set to rise internationally as his reputation grows, and as his incredible story is told.
Kathryn and David are the ideal couple: she, petite and pretty; he, dark, debonair and gifted. But beneath the smooth surface, unseen by their envious or admiring friends, splinters are beginning to form.
David suspects one of their two children is not his own, for plump and naughty Jeanetta does not conform with the controlled perfection with which he surrounds himself. Kathryn struggles to iron out family confrontations and maintain the calm of their lives together - but slowly things start to slip from her control. Bits of jewellery and items of clothing mysteriously go missing. David's mood swings become more irrational and violent. His drive to dominate and order the world he's created intensifies to the point of locking the playroom door and pocketing the key - a move that signals the final route into the chaos that will disrupt their perfect world.
When the body of a successful criminal barrister is found outside a chic Kensington hotel, it looks at first like a suicide. For colleagues and friends, her death comes as a huge shock - Marianne Shearer was at the pinnacle of her career, wealthy and stylish - but for the police the case is open-and-shut.
There's something strange about the circumstances, though, something that prompts fellow lawyers Thomas Nobel and Peter Friel to dig deeper. Little by little, they discover that all is not as it seems. Oddly enough, Marianne herself appears to have left a series of small, almost imperceptible clues - clues that point to a far more sinister truth. Retracing Marianne's steps, Nobel and Friel uncover a carefully concealed darker side of her perfect life that leads them back to her last, gruesome case - when she knowingly sacrificed an innocent witness to let a criminal walk free.
Beautiful, volatile Jessica has long since burned her boats in the village by the sea where she was born. She longs to return, but first she needs to secure the love of the powerful man who has spurned her obsessive adoration.
Sarah Fortune, her older, cynical friend, is keen to distance herself from her usual haunts and welcomes the chance to leave London in the hope that she might she be able to effect a reconciliation between Jessica and her mother. Pennyvale both charms and distracts her with hints of scandal and buried secrets, but it soon begins to disquiet her as cracks of distrust and jealousy show in the polite façades. Sarah is excited when Jessica tells her she is coming home, but she never arrives.
Sarah's instinctive knowledge of Jessica leads her back to the capital, fearful of what she will find. What she discovers reveals a truth more chilling than she could have imagined, but she has to return to Pennyvale to fully understand how Jessica was finally brought home, and why...
Sarah Fortune is happy to be sorting out the inheritance problems of the Pardoes, as it promises to distance her from a claustrophobic relationship with Malcolm Cook, and she cannot bear to be a captive.
But she soon discovers that guilt, insecurity, unrequited love and a touch of insanity afflict the Pardoes and the seaside town where they live in Norfolk - all a legacy of a suicide of two years before, when a beautiful woman walked into the sea and never came back. And there is another element of the legacy, a white-haired figure some call a ghost and others call a vagrant who roams the beach and harmlessly haunts the town: until he insinuates himself into the power struggles of the Pardoe children and becomes the mysterious and cunning enemy of all concerned.
Prosecutor Helen West views the whole subject with a jaundiced eye. In this case, she doesn't even like the officer accused, the volatile and compulsively unfaithful DS Ryan, friend of her lover, Superintendent Bailey. Ryan maintains a stubborn silence in the face of the charge but when the physical evidence against him proves to be unusually strong, West and Bailey assume his guilt.
Until slowly, preoccupied as they are with their own loves and loyalties, a different suspect begins to emerge. A man who knows the law and how to avoid it. A man who believes that there is no such thing as rape when the victim welcomes him. And there is no legal formula to deal with someone who brings chocolates and flowers, leaves without a trace, corrupts the witness with her own shame and learns to kill with impunity . . .
How do you make people love you? Emma Davey, who loved gemstones and life, found it easy. Everyone loved her. Until someone put a black bin liner over her head and kicked her to death.
For others, the quest is harder. Elisabeth Kennedy, Emma's older sister and a disgraced ex-police officer, considers herself beyond love or even self-respect. She is haunted by Emma's death and her own humiliating attempts to lure the killer into a confession. Then she is the victim of a senseless attack which adds physical scars to a fractured spirit. Still convalescent, but wanting to hide from the world, she flees the comfort of her mother's seaside house for her own eccentric home. High in her disused London belltower, she will be safe and anonymous.
But the safest places are not sacrosanct, especially the human heart, and the search for love, as well as revenge, goes on and on, like the search for hidden treasure. Elisabeth must find the courage to face a terror which is greater by far than loneliness . . .
Pip Carlton is a devoted husband and a highly respected pharmacist, cherished by his loyal customers in Herringbone Parade. When his wife dies in her sleep, without cause and without pain, he is distraught. Comforted by his caring assistant, Pip struggles to take up the threads of his life, ignoring the rumours about Margaret's death, relieved that the police are content to shrug off the mystery.
But Helen West, Solicitor and Crown prosecutor, fresh from hospital herself, refuses to believe that Margaret simply slipped into her final slumber. Others are more difficult to convince, including Helen's awkward and pragmatic partner, Detective Superintendent Geoffrey Bailey, and the only people who share her suspicions are a confused and lonely boy and the drug addict who dies so mysteriously in Geoffrey's arms.
Memories in the Parade are inflamed by the discovery of an unexploded bomb and in the midst of the evacuation of the streets, one lone man, armed with strange love potions prepares to murder again.
Sarah Fortune is bored to death - but few know, and less would guess, how the beautiful and successful redheaded solicitor escapes the stultifying tedium of her career. Since the death of her unfaithful husband, Sarah has found a practical way of transforming the lives of lonely men that also suits her warm and defiant nature.
Kind, witty and obese lawyer Malcolm Cook is the first to benefit from Sarah's generosity - he shrugs off years of weight and loneliness. But then she meets Charles Tysall, an important client of the firm, whose charisma and enormous wealth conceal an implacable will and a misogynist's mad obsession.
In 1951, the whole of London thrills to the Festival of Britain, but not Evie Smith. Mistress to Ted Hopkins these thirteen years, marriage is still little more than a dream. Ted has always resigned himself to caring for his bed-ridden wife in Lytham St Ann's, only seeing Evie and their two girls for a few weeks every year.
Then, just as Evie finds she is pregnant with their third child, Ted takes his wife abroad for new medical treatment. Five years passing with no word from him, Evie selflessly devotes herself to bringing up her daughters under the loving and protective gaze of her mother Flossie and stepfather Jim, until one day she meets and falls for charming George Higgins, a popular businessman with an almost endless supply of gifts for her family.
Tragically, George is killed saving his mother from a fire, leaving Evie lonelier than ever... but through grief may lie her chance of finding lasting happiness.
South London, 1932. Times are hard for ten-year old Lizzie Collins and her family. With her father dead, it is up to her mother, grandmother and aunt to scrimp and save to rear Lizzie and her three siblings. But the whole family is blessed with the indomitable Cockney spirit - and in particular the physically frail but strong-willed and intelligent Lizzie.
So it is only her strong instinct for survival that sees Lizzie through the snobbish school to which she wins a scholarship, through the life-threatening horrors of consumption, and through the dark clouds of impending war. After school and a stint as a butcher's clerk, she goes to work as a bus conductress and, through hard work and inheritance, manages to save enough to invest in a property. And then fortune smiles on her in the game of love.
Happily married after the war to Charlie Wilson, she relishes the prospect of a now secure future with her family. But Charlie has other ideas. Ideas that will take Lizzie to a lonely life in Devon, to the challenges of a new career, and away from her beloved London.
Patsy Kent is just fourteen when her beloved mother Ellen dies of consumption in November 1918. The pregnant but unmarries Ellen fled her respectable family and landed up in Tooting, desperate to find somewhere to live and a place to work. Thus she found Florrie Holmes' place in Strathmore Street. Patsy, born there, has grown up surrounded by loving people who more than compensate for the lack of a family.
On her mother's death Patsy gets a job in the same market where Ellen had worked. At sixteen she is pretty and innocent, so when she meets the gipsy Johnny Jackson at a fair she is bowled over. Hop-picking in Kent with the Jackson clan tarnishes her illusions but then Patsy becomes pregnant and the ill-suited pair marry. Divorce isn't on for people like her; when she really falls in love, with kind Eddie Owen, it looks as if she must stay shackled to the feckless Johnny . . .
Kate's father owns a boatyard and they have a comfortable, loving family life until her father gets drunk, something which is increasingly frequent - then he gets violent. Kate and her mother survive it together until the father attacks Kate one night when she is almost eighteen. Her mother stabs him in the back with a kitchen knife, kills him, is tried and hung for murder.
Kate's loving grandmother and friends help her through her trauma. The only thing she doesn't have is a man - until she meets Bernard Pinfold (Toby). They walk out together and have a night of love just before he goes off on a two-year contract in South Africa. He doesn't write and Kate is saddened by his let down. However, she gets on with her life, converting her grandmother's house into a home for handicapped children, caring for a motherless child, Joshua, whom she comes to love and almost brings up as her own.
Almost two years later she receives red roses and a letter from Toby wondering whether she is free, or found someone else. He is due to return and still loves her, but doesn't want to upset her if she's got another life. Of course, she forgives him...
Bestselling author Jack Henry is suddenly on the brink of bankruptcy. With bills mounting and the IRS calling, he realizes that he has a major problem on his hands. But who is to blame for his declining fortunes? Certainly not Jack himself. The fault, he determines, lies with his agent, Stan Wycoff - who takes 15% of everything Jack makes for doing absolutely nothing.
Jack needs a way out of his dire financial predicament - and fast. And then he remembers that both he and his agent have substantial life insurance policies on one another. If Stan were to die unexpectedly, Jack would cash in . . .
But can a famous crime writer commit the perfect crime?
Douglas Petty is a man who enjoys his reputation as an unreconstructed male with a penchant for too much wine and too many women. Inheriting his father's eccentric estate and dog sanctuary quietened him a little, and marriage to Amy a little more. Even so, it seemed out of character for him a sue a tabloid newspaper for libel when it printed a scurrilous story about him.
His lawyers told him he had a good chance of winning the case, mainly because Amy's testimony would clearly refute the story. But then Amy is involved in a horrendous train crash and while the authorities assume she died in the resulting fire, there is no body to prove it. And if she wasn't killed why has she disappeared and, with no money and no other family, where is she?
In a story of mesmerising suspense, Amy slowly reveals why she cannot return to her beloved home, and why she can never escape from the lies she was told as a child.
Someone is coming to Southtown, San Antonio, and the only thing on their mind is destruction. His name is Will 'the Ghost' Stirman, prison escapee and murderer, and he has one thing on his mind: revenge.
That's a problem for private investigator Tres Navarre, whose boss and mentor Eraiyna Manos has a past with Stirman that puts her on his hit list. As Tres digs into the past, he unpicks a thread he really doesn't want to pull.
Rich with dusty Texan atmosphere, Southtown is the fifth book in the multiple-award-winning Texan suspense series by the internationally bestselling author of the Percy Jackson novels.
A superb saga from Sunday Times bestselling author Evelyn Hood.
'Scotland's Catherine Cookson' Scots Magazine
'Hood is immaculate in her historical detail' Herald
'Evelyn Hood is a fantastic writer, bringing the past to life and drawing you right into the story' ***** Reader Review
In a decade of peace and change, uncomfortable new conflicts are looming.
Paisley, 1920.
Fiona MacDowall has made it clear she intends to inherit her father's furniture emporium. Her half-brother Alex has other ideas, but it's Alex's wife Rose who objects most.
Rose is a businesswoman in her own right, running Harlequin, the town's grandest and most successful dressmaker's. She is sure Fiona will stop at nothing to get what she wants, and Rose suspects that includes her own business.
But there are bigger troubles on the horizon for the inhabitants of Paisley. When Irish cabinetmaker Joe McCart arrives with his family and a dark secret in tow, the community is left reeling.
A superb saga from Sunday Times bestselling author Evelyn Hood.
'Scotland's Catherine Cookson' Scots Magazine
'Hood is immaculate in her historical detail' Herald
After the death of his wife, Hamilton Forsyth scandalises the small Ayrshire town of Saltcoats by departing for pastures unknown. His three adult children are left reeling with shock - and with the family ironmongery shop to run. Walter, son and heir, looks set to manage the business and marry the suitable Clarissa Pinkerton but drops a bombshell on his sisters by saying he's going to marry the housemaid Sarah who is pregnant.
Unable to tolerate the housemaid becoming mistress of their house, the girls find there are few choices within their social structure. Reluctantly, Belle moves in with her meddling Aunt Beatrice. Tarred with the brush of her brother's behaviour and thwarted in love, Morna moves down the social scale and into a boarding house. Gradually, she finds her feet, a job as a teacher - and an interest in the suffragette movement. Belle's main interest lies elsewhere - with Samuel Gilmartin, an attractive rogue with a head for business and an eye for the main change. She in turn scandalises society by marrying him...
READERS LOVE EVELYN HOOD...
'Touching, romantic and unforgettable'
'Love all her books'
'Evelyn Hood produces the best of stories'
'I cannot put her books down'
'Love everything Evelyn Hood writes
A glorious saga set on the island of Bute after WWII, from Sunday Times bestselling author Evelyn Hood.
'Scotland's Catherine Cookson' Scots Magazine
'Hood is immaculate in her historical detail' Herald
'Evelyn Hood is a fantastic writer, bringing the past to life and drawing you right into the story' ***** Reader Review
When, after serving in World War II, her grandson Joe Scott refuses to return to Barrneuk, the small farm his family has managed for three generations on the Clyde island of Bute, Celia Scott is furious.
Celia kept the farm going after the premature death of her husband and has had to keep running it into her old age, as well as raising her three grandchildren after their mother died and their father, heartbroken, left the island. She and her granddaughter Jenny have had a hard time maintaining it during the war, with a little help from Iain, her oldest grandson. Iain was to have inherited the farm, but after he was crippled in a rail accident in 1939 Joe became the natural successor. Now, his refusal to take on Barrneuk has thrown the family into turmoil, ruining each family member's plans for the future.
Celia's first instinct is to let the farm go but Jenny has other ideas and so she must convince Iain that he can take on the inheritance that is rightly his.
When ambitious, exciting Dinah Slade becomes passionately - and dangerously - involved in the private and public life of American millionaire Paul Van Zale, it is the beginning of a violent battle over his business empire and a ruthless struggle by two women to win his heart.
We follow the fortunes of Dinah Slade from the boardrooms of Wall Street across the ocean to the Norfolk Broads, from the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression and the Second World War. For two decades she stakes everything on winning the fight, in business and in love - and at any cost ...
A superb saga from Sunday Times bestselling author Evelyn Hood.
'Scotland's Catherine Cookson' Scots Magazine
'Hood is immaculate in her historical detail' Herald
'Evelyn Hood is a fantastic writer, bringing the past to life and drawing you right into the story' ***** Reader Review
When the modest young widow Lessie Hamilton realises she is sharing her tenement landing with a prostitute, she is both shocked and upset. So when the buxom Anna McCauley begs Lessie to help disguise the fact that one of her clients has passed away in her bed, Lessie is more than reluctant to get involved. But, soft-hearted as ever, she does and, because she's desperate to buy medicine for her sick toddler, accepts the twenty shillings Anna forces on her, promising herself one day she'll pay her back.
But keeping that promise is not easy and from the day she accepts the money the fates of Lessie and her beloved younger brother Davie are inextricably intertwined with Anna's. And also with the family of her deceased client who, it turns out, is none other than Frank Warren, the prosperous sugar refinery owner whose nephew Andrew is one of the most attractive and powerful men on Clydeside.
