Recommendations based on "Julia"

A charmingly witty fantasy adventure in the world of Strange Practice, starring Dr. Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, who must solve a dangerous medical mystery at a secret French spa for mummies.Oasis Natrun: a private, exclusive, highly secret luxury health spa for mummies, high in the hills above Marseille, equipped with the very latest in therapeutic innovations both magical and medical. To Dr. Greta Helsing, London's de facto mummy specialist, it sounds like paradise. But when Greta is invited to spend four months there as the interim clinical director, it isn't long before she finds herself faced with a medical mystery that will take all her diagnostic skill to solve.A peculiar complaint is spreading among her mummy patients, one she's never seen before. With help from her friends and colleagues -- including Dr. Faust (yes, that Dr. Faust), remedial psychopomps, a sleepy scribe-god, witches, demons, a British Museum curator, and the inimitable vampyre Sir Francis Varney -- Greta must put a stop to this mysterious illness before anybody else crumbles to irreparable dust......and before the fabric of reality itself can undergo any more structural damage.

The start of a thrilling new Second World War mystery series from the number-one-bestselling and multi-award-winning author of Murder Most Unladylike .'Superb' Observer'Meticulous and sharp' Guardian'Engaging . . . You will make the journey with a spring in your step' The Times'Robin Stevens is Agatha Christie for children' Katherine Rundell on the Murder Most Unladylike series1940. Britain is at war, and a secret arm of the British government called the Ministry of Unladylike Activity is training up spies.Enter May Wong : courageous, stubborn, and desperate to help end the war so that she can go home to Hong Kong (and leave her annoying school, Deepdean, behind forever). May knows that she would make the perfect spy. After all, grown-ups always underestimate children like her.When May and her friend Eric are turned away by the Ministry, they take matters into their own hands. Masquerading as evacuees, they travel to Elysium Hall, home to the wealthy Verey family - including snobby, dramatic Nuala . They suspect that one of the Vereys is passing information to Germany. If they can prove it, the Ministry will have to take them on.But there are more secrets at Elysium Hall than May or Eric could ever have imagined.And then someone is murdered...'Spirited and fun . . . A must for young murder mystery fans' Bookseller

“Quinn evocatively balances the outward cheerfulness of the 1950s with historical observations exploring racism, misogyny, homophobia and political persecution in this sharply drawn, gripping novel.” - People Magazine The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era. Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare. Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst? Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test. A beautiful, foil cover, first edition.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.

'Brooks writes with tremendous warmth, a natural knack for dialogue and such persuasive narrative skill that, travelling further into the cult's clutches, your brain feels insidiously sapped... It begs to be read; resists caricature; and has you fumbling, like its principal character, in a ragbag of knowledge, attempting to fend off that philosophical nonsense which marshmallows the brain' NEW STATESMAN When Lucy goes missing, her sister Carmen sets out to find her. The search leads Carmen into the closed world of an enigmatic religious cult and, in the week that follows. Carmen's induction into the society of ever-smiling, singing people with strangely vacant eyes leaves her raging, confused, exhausted and suspicious. Is this a dream of perfect love, or a sinister manipulation? Heavenly Deception is a remarkable and profoundly disturbing portrayal of fanaticism. 'A powerful study in psychic manipulation, and a well-aimed ana hard-hitting story' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 'The sinister mind-bending practised by the Moonies is a serious subject, and Miss Brooks writes about it with a compelling, crusading energy that makes for a convincing, disturbing and valuable novel' DAILY TELEGRAPH.

A COMPELLING STORY OF A WOMAN TRAPPED IN THE WRONG TIME, AND A POWERFUL, DEADLY CURSE THAT HAUNTS THREE GENERATIONS WITHOUT MERCY...Adam Craig is fourteen when, near an isolated Celtic Stone in the wild Scottish Highlands, he meets Brid, whose exotic, gypsy-like dress and strange attitudes fascinate him. They become friends and, in time, passionate lovers. She leads him, unsuspecting, into the sixth century where - training as a Druid priestess - she has mastered their ancient mysteries and powerful, dangerous magic.In her obsession with Adam, Brid is seen as a traitor to her people, only escaping death by following Adam to Edinburgh when he leaves home to study medicine.As the years pass, Adam makes new friends, and finds new love. But Brid, consumed by jealousy, haunts him like an evil shadow until, fifty years on, Adam's granddaughter, Beth, helps him discover the secret that will free them from the terror of Brid's curse.

Two women, centuries apart. One endless nightmare tearing Wales apart – and only they can stop it.Sunday Times bestselling author Barbara Erskine returns to Hay in the year that marks the 30th anniversary of her sensational debut bestseller, Lady of Hay.Hay-On-Wye, 1400 – War is brewing in the Welsh borders, Catrin is on the brink of womanhood and falling in love for the first time. Her father is a soothsayer, playing a dangerous game playing on the mixed loyalties and furious rivalries between welsh princes and English lords. For two hundred years, the Welsh people have lain under the English yoke, dreaming of independence. And finally it looks as though the charismatic Owain Glyndwr may be the man legend tralks of. In the walls of Sleeper’s Castle, Catrin finds herself caught in the middle of a doomed war as she is called upon to foretell Wales’s destiny… And what she sees, is blood and war coming closer…Hay, 2015. Miranda has moved to Sleeper’s Castle to escape and grieve. Slowly she feels herself coming to life in the solitude of the mountains. But every time she closes her eyes her dreams become more vivid. And she makes a connection with a young girl, who’s screaming, who’s reaching out… who only Miranda can help. Is she losing herself to time?

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As Europe buckles under Nazi occupation, Maisie Dobbs investigates a possible murder that threatens devastating repercussions for Britain's war efforts in this latest installment in the New York Times bestselling mystery series. October 1941. While on a delivery, young Freddie Hackett, a message runner for a government office, witnesses an argument that ends in murder. Crouching in the doorway of a bombed-out house, Freddie waits until the coast is clear. But when he arrives at the delivery address, he’s shocked to come face to face with the killer. Dismissed by the police when he attempts to report the crime, Freddie goes in search of a woman he once met when delivering a message: Maisie Dobbs. While Maisie believes the boy and wants to help, she must maintain extreme caution: she’s working secretly for the Special Operations Executive, assessing candidates for crucial work with the French resistance. Her two worlds collide when she spots the killer in a place she least expects. She soon realizes she’s been pulled into the orbit of a man who has his own reasons to kill—reasons that go back to the last war. As Maisie becomes entangled in a power struggle between Britain’s intelligence efforts in France and the work of Free French agents operating across Europe, she must also contend with the lingering question of Freddie Hackett’s state of mind. What she uncovers could hold disastrous consequences for all involved in this compelling chapter of the “series that seems to get better with every entry” (Wall Street Journal).

P.I. Jeri Howard is hired to bring a wayward teenager home from Paris. When she arrives, she finds that 18-year-old Darcy is there to meet the French family who sheltered her grandmother, as a girl, from the Nazis. But back home in California, Darcy stumbles on evidence that Nazism is alive and well in the terrifying present. And Jeri has the deadly work of trying to extricate from the frightening consequences of her discovery.

Wire in the blood: "Young girls are disappearing around the country. Everyone assumes they are teenage runaways, headed for the city and bright lights. They vanish without trace - society's disposable children. There is nothing to connect them to each other, let alone the killer whose charming manner hides a warped and sick mind. Nobody moves around inside the messy heads of serial killers like Dr. Tony Hill. Now heading up the recently founded National Profiling Task Force, he sets his team an exercise: they are given the details of thirty missing teenagers and ask to use their new techniques to discover whether there is a sinister link between any of the cases. Only one officer, Shaz Bowman, comes up with a concrete theory, but it is ridiculed by the rest of her group...until a killer murders and mutilates one of their number. Could Bowman's outrageous suspicion possibly be true?"