Лучшие книги Лауры Уилсон

The Floating Admiral was the first of the Detection Club’s collaborative novels, in which twelve of its members wrote a single novel. Eighty-five years later, fourteen members of the club have once again collaborated to produce The Sinking Admiral.

‘The Admiral’ is a pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell, The Admiral Byng. ‘The Admiral’ is also the nickname of its landlord, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, as well as the name of the landlord’s dinghy. None of them are as buoyant as they should be, for the pub is threatened with closure due to falling takings.

Tempers are already frayed due to the arrival of a television documentary team when Fitzsimmons is found dead in his tethered boat. The villagers assume a simple case of suicide and fear that their debt-ridden pub will now sink without trace. The journalists seem determined to finish the job by raking up old skeletons, but they weren’t banking on the fact that this story has been written by 14 extremely competitive crime writers – arch bamboozlers who will stop at nothing to save a good pub.

The Sinking Admiral, edited by the Detection Club’s outgoing President – author and broadcaster Simon Brett, OBE – continues a tradition established by the Detection Club’s founders in 1931 when Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts and eleven other esteemed authors wrote The Floating Admiral, a ‘collaborative novel’ to challenge themselves, fox their readers and help to pay for the Club’s running costs. Now, 85 years later, 14 of today’s leading crime writers have repeated this unique game of literary consequences, producing an original, ebullient and archetypal whodunit that will keep readers guessing right up to what crime lovers insist on calling the dénouement…

London, 1956. DI Ted Stratton is tasked with investigating the murder of Jeremy Lloyd, a strange young man with a taste for esoteric religion. Stratton's enquiries lead him to Suffolk, where the mysterious Mr Roth has founded a Foundation for Spiritual Understanding.

Summer, 1944: After almost five years of conflict, London's exhausted inhabitants, battered by the new menace of Hitler's V1 bombs, are living hand-to-mouth in a world of dust and dereliction, and war-weary.

DI Ted Stratton is no exception. Still haunted by the memory of Diana Calthrop, the beautiful M15 agent who worked with him on a case in 1940 and whose fate he never discovered, Stratton is called upon to investigate the case of a dead doctor, found in suspicious circumstances on a bomb-site near Fitzrovia's Middlesex Hospital. Was it an affair that turned fatally sour, revenge for a fatal case of misdiagnosis, or, despite appearances, simply an unfortunate accident? Or, as Stratton begins to suspect, is there someone at the hospital who is not what he appears to be and will go to any lengths to protect his fake persona?

Ted's wife, Jenny, working at the local Rest Centre, battles on valiantly although her spirit of make-do is wearing as thin as her clothing and she desperately misses her children, who are still evacuees in Suffolk.When a bombed-out and destitute woman appears at the centre, declaring that the man who claims to be her husband is, although identical, an imposter, Jenny thinks that it must be due to the effects of shock. The reality, however, is much stranger and far more dangerous...

London, June 1940. When the body of silent screen star Mabel Morgan is found impaled on a wrought-iron fence, the coroner rules her death as suicide. Detective Ted Stratton is not convinced and suspects that Morgan’s fatal fall may have been the work of one of Soho’s most notorious gangsters.

Meanwhile, MI5 agent Diana Calthrop is leading a covert operation when she discovers that her boss is involved in espionage. Only when Stratton’s path crosses Diana’s does the pair start to uncover the truth. And soon they also begin to realize they like each other a little too much. . . .

In 1987, Sheila Shand was given a suspended sentence for killing her father. But, when novelist Amy Vaughan begins her research on a book some 17 years later, she soon discovers that some key aspects of the case have been overlooked.

Richard Avedon's In the American West is widely regarded as a landmark project in photographic history and a definitive expression of the power of photographic art. First published by Abrams in 1985 in conjunction with an exhibition at the

London, 1955. Three bodies are found in a house – but when the police search for the murder weapon, vital evidence is destroyed. One of the victims is former society beauty Georgina Gresham, prime suspect in the notorious murder of her husband, James, almost thirty years earlier. Beside her lie the bodies of her brother Edmund and housekeeper Ada.

But there is a link with the past. In the 1890s, in a beautiful garden, three children played together. Their lives were secure, their future certain – until the youngest child was found with fatal head injuries…