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He needed to get out of his office, soak up the atmosphere and discover different worlds with each new investigation. He needed the cafés and bars where he so often ended up waiting, at the counter, drinking a beer or a calvados depending on the circumstances. He needed to do battle patiently in his office with a suspect who refused to talk and sometimes, after hours and hours, he'd obtain a dramatic confession. In Simenon's final novel featuring Inspector Maigret, the famous detective reaches a pivotal moment in his career.

'You see, I mainly work at night. I've ended up getting to know everybody. They're used to me in Pigalle, I exchange a few words with this person or that person. I go into the bars and cabarets where they give me a quarter bottle of Vichy without waiting for me to order anything.' An anonymous tip-off regarding the death of a restaurant owner sends Maigret into the world of Parisian nightlife, a notorious criminal gang and a man known as 'the Flea'. This novel has been pubished in a previous translation as Maigret and the Flea.

The death of a homeless man in a condemned building in Les Halles leads Maigret on the trail of the vagrant's mysterious past and an event that happened years ago in the close-knit community of Montmartre.

'He hadn't seen her arrive. She had stopped on the pavement a few steps away from him and was peering into the courtyard of the Police Judiciaire, where the small staff cars were parked. She ventured as far as the entrance, looked the officer up and down, then turned round and walked away towards the Pont-Neuf.' When an old lady tells Maigret someone has been moving things in her apartment, she is dismissed as a fantasist - until a shocking event proves otherwise.

'Maigret had never been comfortable in certain circles, among the wealthy bourgeoisie where he felt clumsy and awkward.... Built like a labourer, Oscar Chabut had hauled himself up into this little world through sheer hard work and, to convince himself that he was accepted, he felt the need to sleep with most of the women.' When a wealthy wine merchant is shot in a Paris street, Maigret must investigate a long list of the ruthless businessman's enemies before he can get to the sad truth of the affair.

Leaning on the banisters, Madame Maigret watched her husband going heavily downstairs.... What the newspapers didn't know was how much energy he put into trying to understand, how much he concentrated during certain investigations. It was as if he identified with the people he was hunting and suffered the same torments as they did.

A visit from a long-lost schoolmate who has fallen on hard times forces Maigret to unpick a seedy tangle of love affairs in Montmartre, and to confront the tragedy of a wasted life. This novel has been published in a previous translation as Maigret's Boyhood Friend.

What else did they have to do with their days? They ambled around casually. From time to time, they paused, not because they were out of breath but to admire a tree, a house, the play of light and shadow, or a face. While taking a much-needed rest cure in Vichy with his wife, Maigret feels compelled to help with a local investigation, unravelling the secrets of the spa town's elegant inhabitants.

Maigret would have found it difficult to formulate an opinion of him. Intelligent, yes, certainly, and highly so, as far as one could tell from what lay beneath some of his utterances. Yet alongside that, there was a naive, rather childish side to him. Maigret is savouring a beautiful spring morning in Paris when an aspiring film-maker draws his attention to a much less inspiring scene, one where ever-changing loyalties can have tragic consequences.

'Maigret looked at him in some confusion, wondering if he was dealing with a skilful actor or, on the contrary, with a sickly little man who found consolation in a subtle sense of humour.' A series of anonymous letters leads Maigret into the wealthy household of an eminent lawyer and a curious game of cat and mouse with Paris high society.

In the darkness beyond the galaxy, there are monsters. Some swim closer to the light, drawn by the beacon that is the Astronomican, while others stalk the Void, predators in the dark. The Carcharodons have hunted for millennia, but now they are drawn into a new blackness...the Dark City of the drukhari itself. Commorragh. For a thousand years, Chaplain Tangata Manu has searched for a relic lost under his watch: an ancient thing, once charged into the keeping of the Forgotten One himself. But at the brink of seeing his hunt fulfilled and the relic returned, it is stolen from under him.

Jack Dee is here to help. Too often today the emphasis in psychotherapy is on providing clients with a metaphorical hug when what they so clearly need is good slap, so Jack Dee took the matter into his own hands, and whilst everyone else was baking bread and clearing out their cupboards during lockdown, he retrained online as a psychotherapist. After an incredibly gruelling four hours of study, he got his certificate of completion from The Ruislip College of Advansed Learning (sic).

When Queen Mary died in 1953, James Pope-Hennessy was commissioned to write an official biography of her - unusual for a Queen Consort. Queen Mary's life, contrary to popular belief, was essentially dramatic, and she played a far more important and influential role in the affairs of the British monarchy than her public image might have otherwise suggested. Using material from the Royal Archives, private papers and Queen Mary's personal diaries and letters, Pope-Hennessy's biography was a remarkable portrait of a remarkable woman and received rave reviews across the press.

Becky Brown has selected extracts from the Mass Observation Archives to anthologise the voices of everyday people as they deal individually and collectively with the crisis of the Second World War. The diarists themselves have been selected from every level of society - from warehousemen to widows, soldiers to farmhands, WRENs to architects. The extracts have been chosen to both uplift and to ground, to remind listeners that nothing is new, that everything can be weathered and perhaps even made better. After all, World War II saw the birth of the NHS.

Despite the many films and television programmes over the decades since the end of the Second World War that portrays our allied heroes as grown-up men and women, the Battle of Britain was in the main actually fought and won by teenagers. The average age of an RAF fighter pilot was just 20 years old. Many of the men and women who designed and built their planes were even younger.

It is Spring 1871 when Lizzie Ross accompanies her formidable Aunt Parry on a restorative trip to the south coast. Lizzie's husband, Ben, is kept busy at Scotland Yard and urges his wife to stay out of harm's way. But when Lizzie and her aunt are invited to dine with other guests at the home of wealthy landowner Sir Henry Meager, and he is found shot dead in his bed the next morning, no one feels safe.

Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase are back for their seventh blockbusting adventure by the best-selling author of The Hunt for Atlantis, Andy McDermott. When archaeologist Nina Wilde and her husband, ex-SAS soldier Eddie Chase, are given the chance to work on an Interpol investigation into smuggled artefacts, they are stunned to realise that the artefacts hold clues to the location of a lost Inca settlement hidden somewhere in South America. As Nina and Eddie dig deeper, it soon becomes clear that finding the settlement may only be the start of their incredible quest.

Drawn from the Royal archives, including Prince Albert’s voluminous correspondence, this brilliant and ambitious book offers fascinating never-before-known details about the man and his time. A superb match of biographer and subject, Prince Albert, at last, gives this important historical figure the reverence and recognition that is long overdue.

Maigret finds himself back on the Rue des Acacias just 10 days after cracking another case there. This time it is the murder of a criminal Maigret has known for over 20 years and one he always suspected was behind a string of jewellery robberies in the city. Maigret's patience is tested as he eliminates neighbour by neighbour in his hunt for the murderer.

For the first time in his career Inspector Maigret receives written summons to the Prefect's office where he learns that he has been accused of assaulting a young woman. With his career and reputation on the line, Maigret must fight to prove his innocence. This novel has been published in a previous translation as Maigret on the Defensive.