Florianne Vidal Books

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, she just thinks he has gone off by himself for a few days - as he has done before - and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home. But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realises. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were published it would ruin lives - so there are a lot of people who might want to silence him. And when Quine is found brutally murdered in bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any he has encountered before . . . A compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn, The Silkworm is the second in the highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant Robin Ellacott.

On a train departing from Manchester, a woman sits among sleepy commuters, wiping away tears and trying to remain unnoticed. Emily has a happy marriage, a child, and a beautiful home. Yet, she has just abandoned it all, relying on a train ticket and a new name. Hours earlier, she had dressed quietly and left the bedroom without a glance at her husband, certain that if he woke, he would stop her from leaving. Her departure was surprisingly easy; all it took was some money and a few essentials in her bag, while she pushed aside thoughts of those she was leaving behind. Emily is determined to seek a new beginning, to build a life entirely opposite to the respectable one she has led until now. However, a shadow looms: the memory of her twin sister, Caroline, who has always hated her and seemingly tried to ruin her life at every turn. What secret binds the two sisters, and what event from their past casts a dark shadow over Emily's escape? Is it truly so simple to disappear and start anew?

Steve Martini crafts a gripping narrative that resonates with contemporary anxieties and future headlines. Jocelyn "Joss" Cole, a weary public defender from Los Angeles, seeks solace in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. Her only notable case involves a group of commercial fishermen afflicted by a mysterious illness that defies medical explanation, which Joss suspects is linked to industrial activities. Suddenly, Dean Belden, a wealthy entrepreneur, approaches her for legal assistance in establishing a business in the islands. Shortly after, Belden is summoned before a federal grand jury. Tragically, he dies in a catastrophic float plane explosion on Seattle's Lake Union just after his testimony, leaving Joss in the dark about the grand jury proceedings. Meanwhile, Gideon Van Ry, a nuclear fission expert at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, grapples with the unsettling disappearance of two tactical nuclear devices from a former Soviet storage facility. These weapons were last known to be packed for shipment to Belden Electronics, a company Gideon cannot trace. His only lead points to Joss Cole, the attorney who incorporated the elusive firm, intertwining their fates in a web of intrigue and danger.