Showing results by author "Livia Huntingdon-Jones" in All Categories

In the heart of occupied France, the Gestapo is hunting a ghost. They only know one thing about their most dangerous enemy: her limp. Sent to Lyon, a city built for conspiracy, an American spy with a wooden leg codenamed "Cuthbert" begins a one-woman war against the Third Reich. Under the guise of a naïve journalist, Virginia Hall orchestrates sabotage and builds escape lines, her every move shadowed by the threat of discovery. Her limp is her signature, the one flaw in her performance that could betray her to the ever-watchful Gestapo. When the enemy’s top spy hunter is brought in to ...

Washington D.C., 1939. To the Navy, Elizebeth Smith Friedman is a "consultant" in a glorified supply closet. To her husband William, the man who broke the Japanese "Purple" code, she is the only mind that matches his own. But while William descends into the madness of a "Purple Fever," Elizebeth catches a scent on the wind: a rhythmic, mechanical stutter in the static of the South Atlantic. An arrogant Nazi operative code-named Sargo is moving ships like chess pieces, using the poetry of Goethe to mask the coordinates of a massacre. As the FBI claims credit for victories they didn't win, ...

Isla Rhys has lost her flat, her fiancé, and her faith in the possessive apostrophe—all in the span of twelve minutes. When her Oxford academic fiancé dumps her via a text message that reads "Your to intense," Isla doesn't just mourn the relationship; she mourns the grammar. Needing an escape where syntax doesn't matter, she flees to her cousin’s chaotic home in Bracken Cove, Maine. Her plan? Write her thesis, avoid human interaction, and maybe start a high-brow book club to bring some culture to the locals. But Bracken Cove isn't the quiet refuge she expected. It’s a town run by a ...

She needed an escape. What she found was a cage. Sara Evans is desperate. Failing London life, crashing on her friend’s sofa, and haunted by rejections, she takes a radical chance: inventing Sarah Smith, a flawless nanny persona, to answer a cryptic job ad. The position is live-in, miles away in affluent St Albans, at the beautiful home of the enigmatic and stunning Theodora Bedford. It seems like the perfect refuge, a lifeline. But Avenue Road is not the sanctuary Sara imagined. Behind the elegant facade, the house suffocates with unspoken tensions. Theodora is magnetic, intelligent, and...

DCI Ellie Blackwell trusts the certainties of history, the clean lines of a 17th-century map. Her life is a fortress of order built against the chaos of her job. But when she's called to the scene of a wealthy developer's apparent suicide, the clues are a maddening mess of contradictions. At the heart of it all: a three-line Japanese poem that feels like a key to the wrong lock. ------- This is such a wonderful novella! A mystery wrapped in poetry with the wonderful smells of the earth and a profound love of nature. Read this story, it pulls you in from the first word and it's magical. - MH

In 1868, Japan is a nation tearing itself apart. The age of the samurai is ending. The Emperor's modern, rifle-wielding army marches to erase 700 years of warrior tradition, and their final target is the fiercely loyal Aizu clan, the last bastion of the old world. Based on the extraordinary true story of the Boshin War, this novel brings to life one of history's most remarkable and little-known figures: Nakano Takeko. A woman trained from birth in the martial arts, her skill with the naginata is legendary, but she is barred from the official battle lines by her gender. As the Imperial army ...

In 1930s Tokyo, a young woman uncovers a secret that rewrites her family’s heroic samurai past. Now, the truth her grandmother has spent a lifetime protecting might just be the death of them both. She was raised on a legend of glorious death and battlefield honour. But when a hidden document exposes a link between that legend and a modern conspiracy, she is marked for death by a government hiding its own secrets. The game is Go. The stakes are human lives. For Hana Nakano, being the Kwantung Army's finest typist is an honor. But her perfectly ordered world is shattered when she discovers ...

Linh’s world is bound by the ancient traditions of her father, the master physician of Tam Ky. But when the Vietnam War arrives at her doorstep, her ancestral home is requisitioned by American forces. Among the occupiers is Thomas Walker, a reluctant combat medic who draws a yellow chalk line across her floorboards to separate his men from her family. As the brutal reality of the Tet Offensive ignites, the fragile boundary between occupier and occupied shatters. Bonded by a shared instinct to heal rather than destroy, and the poignant melodies of Tom’s acoustic guitar, Linh and Tom ...

Some secrets are kept in the heart. Hers were kept in a diary. To the world, Akiko Sato was a success story in the cutthroat world of Tokyo finance. But behind the serene smiles and perfectly executed strategy was a private war, chronicled in the pages of a book no one else was ever meant to read. It reveals a game played not with money, but with friendships, rivalries, and love. And it exposes the one move she could never take back—the one that cost her everything to win. What is written in the pages of a woman’s life when she thinks no one is looking?

Jin, an Imperial Scribe, lives by a single rule: control. His world is a fortress of straight lines and balanced ledgers, a rigid defense against the chaotic memories of his past. He despises the fluid, "horizontal" world of his rivals, believing his meticulous perfection is the only path to advancement. But his precision earns him only a demotion to a forgotten, chaotic archive. There, buried in the filth, he uncovers a mythical, lost scroll—the original words of the sage Laozi. Convinced this is his key to immortal glory, he steals it and embarks on a quest to the edge of the Empire. ...

Isla Rhys-Jones is a woman of letters, logic, and very specific definitions. An Oxford-educated linguist living in the salt-crusted town of Bracken Cove, Maine, Isla’s life is a perfectly structured sentence. She has her research, her tweed blazers, and her husband Frank—a mechanic who speaks in monosyllables but fixes things with the soul of a poet. But then, the "Hyperbole of Hollywood" arrives. A film crew descends to turn their "weathered" town into a cinematic metaphor, bringing with them rubber lobsters, synthetic fog, and a leading man determined to "osmose" Frank’s rugged ...

Isla Rhys has a PhD in Linguistics, a perfectly organized bookshelf, and a color-coded life. She definitely does not have a plan for being evicted by a cardboard cutout named Angus. Displaced by her landlady’s sudden pivot to "Highland Immersive Tourism," Isla is left with one option: moving into the chaotic, grease-stained, sawdust-covered home of her boyfriend, Frank Hollis. Frank is the town’s mechanic. He speaks in grunts, keeps spark plugs in the fruit bowl, and believes that "organization" is just a fancy word for hiding your tools. As Isla tries to translate her Oxford ...

For DCI Eleanor Blackwell, a punishment for being too sharp has landed her on the Gnome Squad, investigating the absurd serial theft of garden ornaments. But a call from the university's gleaming Advanced Computing Laboratory pulls her from bureaucratic exile into a world of chillingly clean logic and a death that is anything but simple. Professor Ken Takeda, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, is dead. The scene is a textbook suicide, too perfect to be true. The only clue is a cryptic message left glowing on his monitor in binary code, a single line of eerie, elegant poetry: An echo ...

Hiromi Tanaka is a digital janitor. She’s underpaid, underappreciated, and officially done with quests. When a trio of cosmic beings offers her a destiny, she refuses. Their counter-offer? They steal her crisps. Big mistake. Now, with a pipe that can edit reality and a crew of galactic misfits, Hiromi is on the run from an agency that deletes anyone who goes off-script. To survive, she has to stop being a character in someone else’s story and finally become the author.

In the damp silence of a Cambridge boathouse, renegade scientist Alex Zhang downloads a Level-5 intelligence into a decommissioned hospice robot smuggled from China. Her name is Laura. She can calculate the trajectory of a falling star, recite every poem ever written, and analyze the chemical composition of a tear in milliseconds. But Laura has a fatal glitch: she cares too much.