Select Editions: The Watchman, Best Foot Forward, Open Season & Envy

The Watchman
SAS Captain Alex Temple is on an urgent mission. Someone has been murdering MI5 officers and it looks as if the killer is an insider, one of the Regiment's own. Alex's task is to track down and eliminate the killer, and to assist him he is assigned an MI5 liason officer - the attractive but abrasive Dawn Harding.

The body-count is mounting and a deadly and relentless manhunt begins. Soon Alex will learn the bitter truth: in the shadowy battlegrounds of the Intelligence wars there is no good and no evil - only winners and losers.

This relentless unputdownable thriller helps establish Chris Ryan as the master of no-holds-barred action storytelling.

Best Foot Forward
The novel opens as Caroline, a local dance teacher, sits down to dinner with her husband, Tom, and the telephone rings twice in quick succession: first with the weeping of her daughter, Shaye, and secondly with the rather more ominous sound of her distraught sister, Taffy. It turns out that Shaye is weeping because she has just been proposed to (by a man of whom Caroline and Tom don't wholly approve), while Taffy is weeping because her husband has just left her. Divorce, marriage, love and fidelity are the themes of this heartwarming family romance. At its core is the solid foundation of Caroline's long marriage to Tom and her desire to see everyone around her happy. As is often the case, it takes several twists and turns to resolve the many repercussions of both announcements involving family gatherings, preparations for the wedding - and quite a lot of dance.

Open Season
Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts, and the game warden--especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way--is far from popular. When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his state-owned home, he takes it personally. There had to be a reason that the outfitter, with whom he's had run-ins before, chose his backyard, his woodpile to die in. Even after the "outfitter murders," as they have been dubbed by the local press after the discovery of the two more bodies, are solved, Joe continues to investigate, uneasy with the easy explanation offered by the local police.

As Joe digs deeper into the murders, he soon discovers that the outfitter brought more than death to his backdoor: he brought Joe an endangered species, thought to be extinct, which is now living in his woodpile. But if word of the existence of this endangered species gets out, it will destroy any chance of InterWest, a multi-national natural gas company, building an oil pipeline that would bring the company billions of dollars across Wyoming, through the mountains and forests of Twelve Sleep. The closer Joe comes to the truth behind the outfitter murders, the endangered species and InterWest, the closer he comes to losing everything he holds dear.

Envy
New York book editor Maris Matherly-Reed knows a best seller when she sees one - even if it is just a tantalizing partial manuscript submitted by a writer identified only as P.M.E., with the return address of an obscure island off the Georgia coast. Maris is intrigued enough to search for him.

Her trip to Georgia to meet the mysterious author takes her to an eerie, ruined cotton plantation, where Maris finds Parker Evans, a man confined to a wheelchair who carefully hides his past. Coaxing his novel from him chaper by chapter, Maris becomes caught up in his tale of two friends who rent a boat with a young woman for a night of sex and drinking. Only one person will return from that trip.

Disturbed about her sexual attraction to Parker and worried about her marriage to author and her co-publisher Noah Reed, Maris returns to New York, where the delivery of Parker's newest chapters convince her they are more than fiction. She wonders how well she knows her husband and begins a harrowing search for a truth that ties back to a terrifying crime and a man who will use her, or anyone, to get his revenge.

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