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.

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.

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.