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The Crime Writers'' Association have put togetheran anthology of short stories by their members every year for the past 40 years. This year''s collection includes contributions from well-known authors such as Ruth Rendell and lesser-known talents.' ... Read more

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The Zephyr program is monitoring the progress of Britain's only spy satellite. When Zephyr goes briefly off the air, Hepton finds himself in danger and the mistrusted Dreyfuss, sole survivor of a shuttle crash, has the only key to the riddle that must be solved if both men are to stay alive. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

Very Highly Recommended
I am a long-time fan of Jack Vettriano's work, particularly his limited-editions, so I was looking forward to reading this latest book, Studio Life.I was not disappointed.It's a good read - all about Jack's early life, his adolescent years, how and why he began painting.Some very good photos/explanations of how he sets up his paintings, and of course,fabulous photos of several of his paintings, including a couple of some very interesting close-ups of his work.

I would highly recommend the book to those who enjoy Vettriano's paintings, however, I cannot imagine anybody not enjoying it - easy to read, divine photos, beautifully produced.

Vettriano lets us take a look inside his work.
I'll confess it now, I'm not much of one for most modern art. I tend to find it too loud, or too busy, or just plain awful. But, as they say, there are exceptions to every rule, and Scottish born, self-taught, artist Jack Vettriano is one of them. You might not recognize his name right off, but if you saw his work, you would know right away who he is. The best known of his works are the two paintings, Elegy for the Dead Admiral and The Singing Butler. It seems that nearly every poster shop in the world has these two available.

But I prefer his moodier, darker works. In those, men and women are shown in intimate moments. Some have dangerous overtones, others are very sexual in nature. Sometimes there is nudity, but not very often. But what does come across in every one of them is a sizzle of passion and intensity.

With his book, Studio Life, Vettriano lets us into the world where he creates his images. Even more interesting, he shows us just how he gets there -- from the places where he gets his inspiration from -- Scotland, London and Nice, France -- his models, where he works, and finally, himself.

The book is filled with photographs and reproductions of Vettriano's works, from the inital sketches and rough ideas, to how he sets up his models for a shoot -- and sometimes uses himself as a model, all the way through to the final painting.

Other intriguing aspect is how culture has both influenced, and has been influenced by, Jack Vettriano's work. I was rather pleased to see that some of my own favourites were there too -- musicians such as Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, to name a few. There's edgy glamour in his paintings, the women in them leggy and made up with scarlet lipstick, the men in suits and ties and impeccably turned out. In our age of open sleaze, and Hollywood excess, what I like about them is that it harkens back to a time when there was a bit of danger to being in love, that being with someone sometimes was a risky thing indeed, and everything could be bundled up into a single glance or the turn of a head. And sometimes, in Vettriano's work, the cigarette in a hand, or a glance.

An interesting touch is the introduction to the book, penned by none other than a fellow native son of Fife, Scotland, long time mystery author Ian Rankin. He discusses some about the nature of both the writer's and artist's life -- namely, they work alone, they have to, or otherwise nothing would ever get done.

I rather enjoy Vettriano. He's got a rough and tumble honesty to him that strips away most of the elitism or obfuscation that most modern artists cultivate. And there is a real skill underneath there, his figures are very alive and there. While his people are nearly too perfect, in a stylized film noir way, the viewer's eyes keep going back. There's a story in that painting, a snapshot of time, and you've just been allowed a peek inside. But just a peek, mind, it's up to you how the rest of it will play out.

If you can handle the sometimes disturbing, sexual, tone of his work, Vettriano is an artist that is worth a second look. While I know that there is a snowball in hell's chances of ever owning one of his works, his books do let me have a bit of his work for my very own. And that is enough.

Five stars. But not for everyone. Proceed with caution.

Fair to midlin'
I appreciate Vettriano. He's a fairly decent craftsman and his ideas are nice. He is an artist who has found a nich and is able to make a living off of it. There isnt an artist I know who wouldnt honestly trade places with him. (That tells you something about the artists I know.) The feel of the book is quite contrived. I love seeing artists' studios. ONes work space call tell you ALOT about a person. His studio is functional and boring. The best photo is of him in his artist get up. Old ripped clothing that has a huge red smear of paint across the front. How the hell did that happen (!!), apart from on purpose. Silly. The text is interesting. He explains his process, which does have merit. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Lovely Satire
The plot of Symposium weaves around a dinner party given by artist Hurley Reed and his companion, Chris Donovan. Their dinners are renown for both the quality of the food and of the people there. And the staff- the chef, the butler, the servers- are all impeccably polite. All is not quiet in this rarefied world, though- there have been a string of burglaries lately amoung their set, and there is a new member of their group. Margaret Murchie has recently become Margaret Damien, and she comes with a past that includes mysterious disappearances and deaths and an uncle who lives in an asylum who gives the family good advice. Mostly good advice.

The story jumps around in time, sometimes being the night of the dinner, sometimes in the pasts of the various diners. In this way, we learn the backstories of them all, especially that of Margaret. We also learn about Hilda Damien, Margaret's new mother-in-law. She is wealthy and is visiting from Australia to settle the newlyweds with a flat as a wedding present. She is to join the group after dinner, but sadly is detained by her own murder.

It's an entirely entertaining novel, satirical and witty, funny and dreadful at the same time.

The Best Laid Plans
The classical Greek ideal of the symposium was the perfect dinner party where the well-matched guest list would deliver scintillating discourse that would advance culture.The annals of the time have recorded many stories about how that did not always work out in practice, especially when guests showed up drunk.Fast forward to late 20th century London in Muriel Spark's novel where a fashionable couple have planned what should be a perfect dinner party wherein the sophisticated guests deliver scintillating observations and witticisms.After the party opens unspectacularly in the conversation department (one guest who was recently robbed goes on at unwelcome length at how the robbers urinated all over his place), Spark tacks to the back stories of the participants.As information is revealed, it becomes obvious that somethingcould happen when Spark eventually gets back to the party, and it won't be improved conversation.Just what that is keeps the reader in suspense right up to the end.

The hosts are Hurley, an American artist, and his significant other, Australian Chris.Their guests are Roland, the gay genealogist, and his devoted cousin, journalist Annabel; the Untzingers, a middle-aged couple whose careers split them between London and Brussels; Lord and Lady Suzy, the aforementioned victims of the robbery; and newlyweds, William and Margaret.So recently and suddenly are they newlywed, there is some surprise that William wasn't coming with his mother, Hilda, a wealthy widow and close friend of Chris.The back story touches on everyone but Margaret gets the most scrutiny as revelation after revelation throws her into ambiguous moral lights.The story of how she and William met cute in the grocery, for instance, could either be what it was or engineered.But what is disturbing are the murders and unexplained deaths that seem to pop up around her.You get the growing suspicion that something will culminate at the dinner party, but will it have something to do with Margaret or what?

This story moves along like a freight train.It doesn't hang quite together like some of Spark's earlier and more well-known fictions, like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, Memento Mori or A Far Cry From Kensington.That said, it has its moments.There is one hilarious passage that seems to have butted in from another book, an abbey with left-leaning nuns, one of whom is unrepentantly foul-mouthed.

"In Scotland, People Are More Capable Of Perpetrating Evil Than Anywhere Else"
Though Muriel Spark went on to write three additional novels before her death earlier this year, Symposium (1991), which has the frothiest surface of all of Spark's fictions, was her last genuinely substantial work. Symposium features a number of playful allusions to her earlier books, which suggest that Spark, in rollicking trickster fashion, was looking back over her career during its composition. Thus, longtime admirers will recognize such motifs as the briefly-mentioned Scottish schoolmarm and her young female charge as a cue to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), while sinister butler Charterhouse recalls the scheming Lister and the precognitive domestic staff of Not To Disturb (1971). Spark also tips a nod toward both the wayward nuns of The Abbess of Crew (1974), here reimagined as foul-mouthed socialists, and the sophisticated criminal assaults on the very wealthy from The Takeover (1976).

The subject of psychosis, which Spark briefly explored in The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and more fully in The Driver's Seat (1970), rears its head again here in the form of inherited family madness. The metaphysical concerns which subtly dominated The Comforters (1957), Memento Mori (1959) and The Hothouse by the East River (1973) are present, but now blowing at gale force: though no Spark novel ever offers a irrefutable solution to the mysteries it raises, with Symposium, Spark came closest to offering her audience a definitive statement on the paranormal and the nature of reality. As with most of her work, Symposium questions not only the nature of reality and what force or forces guide it, but who--or what--is ultimately in control of individual and collective human existence.

Spark has never been overly optimistic about the inherent goodness of mankind, and accordingly, the novel is replete with deceivers, plotters, parasites, and bisexual social bounders of every stripe.

Symposium is largely the story of Margaret Damien, a complex young Scot who has been a "passive carrier of disaster" since puberty. Exhausted, dismayed, and frustrated by the violent calamities that continue to occur around her, Margaret, like Lise in The Driver's Seat, decides to firmly establish a determining role in shaping her future. Cleverly insinuating herself among London's cultural elite, Margaret is shortly married to a millionaire's son and surrounded by the sort of upper class British citizen who quotes Walter de la Mare, owns Monets and Bacons, and maintains residences in Brussels or Paris as well as in London.

Though Margaret shrewdly promotes herself as innocent, philosophically sunny, and selfless, Spark makes it clear that she is a mythically-framed femme fatale, if, due to her inability to effectively wield her "evil eye," something of an awkward one. Though beautiful, Margaret nonetheless has fang-like "protruding teeth" and a head of brilliant red hair; in one scene, Margaret appears in "a longish green velvet dress with flapping sleeves" against a backdrop of autumn foliage, which immediately reminds suspicious painter Hurley Reed of one of the languid, vampirish women of the pre-Raphaelite school. The personal favorite of her jubilantly insane and permanently institutionalized Uncle Magnus, who acts as her mentor and accomplice, the rest of her family lives in quiet horror of Margaret's inexplicable power and unfathomable private motives.

Armed with her voodoo doll pins and fragments of ominous border ballads, Margaret moves confidently forward into London high society, unaware that she is but one human monster in an invisible web of well-camouflaged human monsters.

Though unworthy of being considered with Spark's best novels, Symposium rests comfortably among her second tier novels, such as Robinson (1958), The Public Image (1968) The Hothouse By The East River, and Territorial Rights (1979).


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Chapters: Josephine Tey, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Rankin, Peter May, Glenn Chandler, Quintin Jardine, J. I. M. Stewart, Marion Chesney, Denise Mina, William Mcilvanney. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 63. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL (22 May 1859 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a father of Irish descent, Charles Altamont Doyle, and an Irish mother, née Mary Foley. His parents were married in 1855 and he was one of 10 siblings. Although he is now referred to as "Conan Doyle", the origin of this compound surname (if that is how he meant it to be understood) is uncertain. The entry in which his baptism is recorded in the register of St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh gives 'Arthur Ignatius Conan' as his Christian name, and the simple 'Doyle' as his surname. It also names Michael Conan as his godfather. Conan Doyle was sent to the Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst, at the age of nine. He then went on to Stonyhurst College, but by the time he left the school in 1875, he had rejected Christianity to become an agnostic. From 1876 to 1881, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, including a period working in the town of Aston (now a district of Birmingham) and in Sheffield. While studying, he also began writing short stories; his first published story appeared in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal be...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=18951335 ... Read more

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Chapters: Josephine Tey, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Rankin, Peter May, Alexander Mccall Smith, Stuart Macbride, Christopher Brookmyre, Glenn Chandler, Quintin Jardine, Val Mcdermid, Bruce Durie, Denise Mina, Frederic Lindsay, Lin Anderson, Angus Macvicar, Philip Kerr, Iain Mcdowall, Karen Campbell, Grace Monroe, Caro Ramsay, Allan Guthrie, Gillian Galbraith, Morag Joss, Margot Bennett, the Mulgray Twins, Reg Mckay, Mary Kelly. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 111. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL (22 May 1859 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a father of Irish descent, Charles Altamont Doyle, and an Irish mother, née Mary Foley. His parents were married in 1855 and he was one of 10 siblings. Although he is now referred to as "Conan Doyle", the origin of this compound surname (if that is how he meant it to be understood) is uncertain. The entry in which his baptism is recorded in the register of St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh gives 'Arthur Ignatius Conan' as his Christian name, and the simple 'Doyle' as his surname. It also names Michael Conan as his godfather. Conan Doyle was sent to the Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst, at the age of nine. He then went on to Stonyhurst College, but by the time he left the school in 1875, he had rejected Christianity to become an agnostic. From 1876 to 1881, he studied...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=18951335 ... Read more

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It is Scotland in the early eighteenth century. Fear and superstition grip the land. Robert Wringhim, a boy of strict Calvinist upbringing, is corrupted by a shadowy figure who calls himself Gil-Martin. Under his influence he commits a series of murders which he regards as 'justified' by God under the tenets of his faith. Hogg's book is a brilliant portrayal of the power of evil, and a scathing critique of the organised religion. Superbly crafted and deftly executed, it resists any easy explanation of events; is this stranger a figment of Robert's imagination or the devil himself? ... Read more

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Chapters: Colin Dexter, Edith Pargeter, P. D. James, John le Carré, Lawrence Block, Dick Francis, Ian Rankin, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Ruth Rendell, Leslie Charteris, Evan Hunter, Reginald Hill, Julian Symons, H. R. F. Keating, Eric Ambler, Peter Lovesey, Lionel Davidson, Robert Barnard, Sara Paretsky, Michael Gilbert, John Harvey, Margaret Yorke, Cartier Diamond Dagger. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 141. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), who writes under the name John le Carré, is an author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under the pseudonym "John le Carré". His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) was an international best-seller, and remains his best known work to date. Following the novel's success, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. Le Carré has since written several novels that have established him as one of the finest writers of espionage fiction in 20th century literature. In 2008, The Times ranked le Carré #22 on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". On the 19th of October 1931, David John Moore Cornwell was born to Richard Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (190675) and Olive (Gassy) Cornwell, in Poole, Dorset, England, UK. He was the second son to the marriage, the first being Tony, two years his elder, a retired advertising executive; his younger sister is the actress Charlotte Cornwell, and Rupert Cornwell, a former Independent newspaper Washington bureau chief, is a younger half-brother. John le Carré said he did not know his mother, who abandoned him when he was five years old, until their re-acquaintance when he was twenty-one years old. His relationship with his father was difficult, giv...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=180618 ... Read more

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Chapters: Scottish Crime Fiction Writers, Josephine Tey, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Rankin, Peter May, Alexander Mccall Smith, Stuart Macbride, Christopher Brookmyre, Glenn Chandler, Quintin Jardine, William Roughead, Val Mcdermid, Carol Anne Davis, Bruce Durie, Denise Mina, Frederic Lindsay, Lin Anderson, Bill Knox, Angus Macvicar, Philip Kerr, James Mclevy, Iain Mcdowall, Karen Campbell, Grace Monroe, Caro Ramsay, Allan Guthrie, Gillian Galbraith, Morag Joss, Margot Bennett, the Mulgray Twins, Reg Mckay, Mary Kelly. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 127. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL (22 May 1859 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a father of Irish descent, Charles Altamont Doyle, and an Irish mother, née Mary Foley. His parents were married in 1855 and he was one of 10 siblings. Although he is now referred to as "Conan Doyle", the origin of this compound surname (if that is how he meant it to be understood) is uncertain. The entry in which his baptism is recorded in the register of St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh gives 'Arthur Ignatius Conan' as his Christian name, and the simple 'Doyle' as his surname. It also names Michael Conan as his godfather. Conan Doyle was sent to the Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst, at the age of nine. He then went on to Stonyhurst College, but by the time he left the scho...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=18951335 ... Read more