Sarah Borges

Less than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870, the Prussian army had devastated its opponents, captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europe's pecking order. Other countries looked on in helpless amazement. Pushing aside further French resistance, a new German Empire was proclaimed (as a deliberate humiliation) in the Palace of Versailles, leaving the French to face civil war in Paris, reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. Bismarck's War tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history.

The culmination of a globally violent decade, the Franco-Prussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck, both to destroy French power and to unite Germany. It could not have worked better, but it also had lurking inside it the poisonous seeds of all the disasters that would ravage the twentieth century. Drawing on a remarkable variety of sources, Chrastil's book explores the military, technological, political and social events of the war, its human cost and the way that the sheer ferocity of war, however successful, has profound consequences for both victors and victims.

On a cold winter's night in Minneapolis, two friends are brutally murdered on opposite sides of the city. It's clear to homicide detectives Gino and Magozzi that the men were targets - but why?

As Gino and Magozzi begin to uncover evidence, the clues rapidly start to disappear. Lost websites and missing CCTV footage lead them once more to Grace MacBride and her eccentric team of computer analysts - the only ones who can help.

But as more bodies appear, the team begin to realize that this isn't fresh blood - this is a case that stretches back sixty years. And something that has been lying dormant is now awakening.

As Gino and Magozzi race to find answers, they slowly uncover an unimaginable horror: one that they must stop if any of them are to get out alive...

Book 7 in the Twin Cities series.

It should have been a simple journey - a drive from Minneapolis to Green Bay, Wisconsin. But a couple of unplanned detours lead Grace MacBride, Annie Belinsky and police Deputy Sharon Mueller deep in the northern woods, far from civilization and a mobile phone signal. Then the car breaks down.

The nervous search for a landline and a mechanic leads the women to Four Corners, a sleepy crossroads town. And place they soon wish they'd never stumbled on - because something terrible happened in Four Corners...

Book 3 in the Twin Cities series.

The horrifying true story of one of the first eight men to enter Auschwitz Growing up in New York, Marilyn Shimon often visited her uncle in California. She saw his scars, gaped at his 31321 tattoo, and listened to his horrific stories of surviving the Holocaust. However, she could not relate to the suffering he endured or understand the significance of his accounts until now. In this grisly memoir, Marilyn resurrects Murray Scheinberg's stories of six hellish years in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The Polish Jew was one of the first eight men to enter Auschwitz, as a political prisoner in 1940, and one of the last to escape Dachau. Shockingly frank and truly harrowing, this is a gripping first-hand account of the horror and degradation of the camps, from the first day to the very last.

Gregory Norwood, wealthy businessman and close friend of Minnesota's leading candidate for Governor, is found dead on the first anniversary of his son's drug overdose. It seems clear to Detectives Gino and Magozzi that grief drove him to suicide.

Until they realize that this left-handed man seems to have used his right hand to pull the trigger.

And they find the second body.

As the seemingly open-and-shut case becomes a murder enquiry, the detectives begin to delve into the dark secrets of one of the city's most powerful families. It seems the murders are not the first in the Norwoods' tragic story - and they won't be the last...

Book 9 in the Twin Cities series.

On a bitterly cold winter night, Kelly Ramage leaves her suburban home, telling her husband she's going to meet a friend. She never comes back. When her body is discovered, murdered in what seems to be a sex game gone horribly wrong, Detectives Gino and Magozzi take the case, expecting to find a flirtatious trail leading straight to the killer. However, Kelly's sinister lover has done a disturbingly good job of hiding his identity. This isn't his first victim. And she won't be the last...

Book 10 in the Monkeewrench series.

Elderly Morey Gilbert is found lying dead in the grass by his wife, Lily, with a bullet hole in his skull. It looks like an execution, and soon the whole city is fearful as new victims are found, killed with the same cold precision. All elderly. All apparently blameless. Detectives Gino and Magozzi race to uncover a connection, and the answers, it seems, are buried in a terrible past...

The Special Operations Executive (SOE), set up by Winston Churchill in 1941, saw its role in France as helping the Resistance by recruiting and training guerrilla fighters. 39 female agents were trained alongside the men. This tells their story and sheds light on what life was really like for these brave women who tumbled from the sky.

A young woman is murdered in a park in Minneapolis. When detectives Gino and Magozzi discover a playing card near the body, they recognise the work of a serial killer who has already struck the city once before.

But it's worse than they imagined. The card is the four of spades; the last victim's was the ace: it seems they're already two murders behind.

Once again working with Grace MacBride and her team of analysts, they discover a web of evidence stretching back into the past. And there is little time to untangle it: this killer has a taste for blood, and he's intent on playing out the deck...

Book 8 in the Twin Cities series.

Minneapolis homicide cops Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth fish a murdered drag queen out of the Mississippi. Another day, another corpse. Except the victim's death throes quickly appear in a video posted online. And there are other videos, other murders.

Unable to trace who is posting the videos, the cops turn to Grace MacBride and her crew of eccentric computer mavericks. But as the bodies and videos stack up, the team desperately try and answer a terrifying question:

Is this the work of a lone individual? Or of several killers who have taken social networking to the darkest extreme...

Book 5 in the Twin Cities series.

Minneapolis, winter's first white flakes; a park full of snowmen. But the layers of packed snow hide a goulish surprise...

First, the bodies of two cops are found inside the snowmen and then a day later, in the countryside to the north, Sheriff Iris Rikker makes a similarly shocking discovery. Soon Detectives Gino and Magozzi are sent north through the worst blizzard Minnesota's seen for years to find what else links the investigations.

But some secrets you don't want to uncover. And as the cases unravel, it seems snowmen aren't the only ones with something to hide...

Book 4 in the Twin Cities series.

A missing girl is found dead in a parking lot, her throat cut. Two young immigrants are gunned down in their apartment. And with each passing day the body count rises...

For Minneapolis homicide detectives Gino and Magozzi it seems that this autumn the bodies are falling faster than the leaves. With few leads to go on, yet evidence that these killings are linked to others taking place in other cities, the pair turn to Grace McBride, maverick computer analyst.

What Grace uncovers forces Gino and Magozzi to make a dreadful and fateful choice: down which twisted path does the lesser of two evils lie...

Book 6 in the Twin Cities series.

In this electrifying debut, the slaying of an old couple in small town America looks like one-off act of brutal retribution. But at the same time, in Minneapolis, teams of detectives scramble to stop a sickeningly inventive serial killer striking again in a city paralysed by fear.

When the two separate investigations converge on an isolated catholic boarding school, decades old secrets begin to fall away. It seems an old killer has resurfaced. Yet still the killer's real identity remains dangerously out of reach...

Book 1 in the Twin Cities series.