Showing results by author "M. J. Trow" in All Categories

The Second World War ended over seventy-five years ago and yet it holds a lasting fascination for millions. Most school children worldwide have studied it but it is unlikely that they would have learned any of the fascinating facts to be found in The Ultimate World War Two Trivia Book. Funny, heart-breaking and downright borderline unbelievable, the snippets in this book are perfect for dropping into conversations to amaze and amuse your friends. You might also find yourself becoming the king or queen of the pub trivia quiz when you have knowledge of Winkie the Pigeon, the Battle of the ...

The derelict house on the edge of the sleepy seaside town was a haven for courting couples, down-and-outs - and someone with altogether more sinister intentions. It was there that they found the corpse of 17-year-old Jenny Hyde. She'd been strangled.

Peter Maxwell didn't want to attend the GNVQ course. He didn't want to get mixed up in murder either - but perhaps it was all part of death's rich tapestry. And while a disparate gathering of teachers was breaking ice upstairs at the Carnforth Centre, someone else was in the basement - breaking skulls. But what the killer couldn't have foreseen was that one of the victims was an old flame of Maxwell's. So now it was personal. And when 'Mad Max' takes something personally, he doesn't get madder - he gets results.

THE END OF ROMAN BRITAIN CONCLUDES. Did the Romans leave Britain, or did Britain leave Rome? The death throes of Rome are resounding in every corner of the Empire. The rebellion of Magnus Maximus has come to a bloody end and Britannia now knows only suffering, standing at the edge of calamity, with each new disaster shaking the fragile foundations of a neglected province. The soldiers who remain are growing increasingly seditious with the incompetence and failures of their masters. While some seek to curb this dissent, more ambitious men will try to exploit it for their own ends. Justinus ...

THE END OF ROMAN BRITAIN CONTINUES. ‘We are the watchmen; the keepers of the flame.’ Britannia in the late fourth century is a wild, dark place and the Pax Romana that has held for three hundred years is crumbling. Justinus Coelius is commander of the Wall and he is facing invasion from Saxons and treachery from within. Leocadius Honorius is consul of Londinium, but his fragile grasp on his lifestyle is broken when he plays dice with the wrong people. Vitalis Celatius just wants a quiet, peaceful life but his sister Conchessa is desperate to find her husband who has fallen foul of the ...

THE END OF ROMAN BRITAIN BEGINS. The story opens in 367 AD. Four soldiers - Justinus, Paternus, Leocadius and Vitalis - are out hunting for food supplies at an outpost of Hadrian's Wall, when the Wall comes under attack. The four find their fort destroyed, their comrades killed, and Paternus is unable to find his wife and son. As they run south to Eboracum, they realize that this is no ordinary border raid. Ranged against the Romans at the edge of the world are four different peoples, and they have banded together under a mysterious leader who wears a silver mask and uses the name ...

The War is over, Britain has fallen. It wasn't necessarily that Britain had lost the Second World War. In fact, the Citizen Survivors would disagree whether they had simply bowed out, if it was still raging on somewhere else, or whether the whole thing was simply an unfortunate misunderstanding that they were better off having no part of. Citizen Survivors: The Red Book is a nightmarish black comedy, retelling history's most famous 'what if?’ - Not only what if Britain lost World War Two, but what would that mean for those who survived? The Red Book is a dystopian anthology containing ...

World of Britannia forms the historical background to the Britannia trilogy. The arrival of Rome’s legions, first under Julius Caesar, then Aulius Plautius in the first century is well documented, but the end of Roman rule in Britain remains forever in shadow, ‘illuminated’ only by contradiction and legend. The action of the Britannia series spans the period 367-415AD, the beginning of what historians, with some justification, used to call the Dark Ages. It was the twilight of a civilisation that had lasted for nearly five hundred years and Britain would never be the same again. This ...

Was Britain's Thermopylae really fought over a tennis court? What happened in Canada during the invasion of Winnipeg? How did the Night Witches terrify and torment the Axis? Was Hitler actually sent to spy on the Nazis by the army? Who was the schoolgirl who helped win the Battle of Britain? Truth, they say, is the first casualty of war. You will have to decide how many such casualties occur in this book, the third in the Weird War series. Amber rooms worth a fortune, the spear that pierced Christ's side, deadly female snipers and Lucille Ball's spooky teeth, it's all here for the ...

October, 1900. University College, London. When the spread-eagled body of one of her students is discovered in her rented room shortly after attending one of her lectures, Dr. Margaret Murray is disinclined to accept the official verdict of suicide and is determined to find out how and why the girl really died.

History teacher Peter 'Mad Max' Maxwell, a bit of a maverick, is sent on a short-term swap with another teacher at a nearby private school, Grimonds.

When Peter Maxwell attends a school reunion of the class of '65, all is not as it seems among his old chums. They are career men, family men - but the years have taken their toll, and the seething tensions of the school years surface in unlikely ways. At the end of the reunion weekend, a man is dead, hanging from the bell rope of the old school. When a second death occurs, Maxwell finds himself in the midst of a murder investigation. What is the secret that has been lurking under Maxwell's nose all these years - and could he be on the murderer's list for killing number three?

April 1865. Having been an eyewitness to the assassination of President Lincoln, Matthew Grand, a former captain of the 3rd Cavalry of the Potomac, has come to London on an undercover assignment to hunt down the assassin's coconspirators. Ambitious young journalist Jim Batchelor has been charged with writing a feature article on the visiting American. Both men are distracted from their missions by the discovery of a body in London's Soho district.

As Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High and a new father, Peter "Mad Max" Maxwell is a very busy man. Despite this, he still finds time for some amateur sleuthing, even though his policewoman "Significant Other", DS Jacquie Carpenter, has decided that, this time, he's leaving any murder investigations to her. But how can he refuse when the school photographer asks for his help after accidentally photographing a murder on the beach?

With girlfriend DS Jacquie Carpenter back at work, and baby Nolan rapidly growing into a feisty toddler, Peter "Mad Max" Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form at Leightford High, hires an au pair. But one afternoon Max returns home to find that the exotic Juanita seems to have disappeared into thin air. Meanwhile, two walkers are surprised and disturbed when their Border collie digs up an arm on Dead Man's Point.

It is 1879, and the young Detective Sergeant Sholto Lestrade has his work cut out for him as he investigates mysterious goings-on at "Lord" George Sanger's Circus. First, the best juggler in Europe is shot in full view of a thousand people. Then Huge Hughie the dwarf dies an agonising death whilst performing the Ether Trick. Finally, the Great Bolus dies by swallowing the wrong sword. And all of this comes after two bodies are found with multiple slashes.

The year is 1888 and Jack the Ripper terrorises the East End of London; all the victims are found in Whitechapel – but Scotland Yard has to look into another suspicious death, that of Edmund Gurney in Brighton. Foremost amongst the Yard’s top men is young Inspector Sholto Lestrade. It is to his lot that a number of unsolved cases fall – cases that include the murder of a former Whitechapel prostitue, and that of Gurney.

It is a puzzle that has faced Scotland Yard from the beginning - whose was the limbless body found among the foundations? And in the murderous world of Sholto Lestrade, one question is invariably followed by another - what do a lecherous rector, a devious speculator and a plagiarist novelist all have in common? Answer: they're all dead - each of them with a bloody space where his head used to be. And six others are to join them before our intrepid inspector brings the perpetrator to book.

November, 1583. Desperate not to let the Protestant Low Countries fall into the hands of the Catholic Spain, the Queen’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, orders Cambridge scholar and novice spy, Christopher Marlowe, to assist the beleaguered Dutch leader, William the Silent, whose court is a hotbed of intrigue and treachery. However, travelling in disguise as part of a troupe of Egyptian players, Marlowe encounters trouble even before he reaches Dutch shores.

March, 1587. Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine has opened at the Rose Theatre. But the play is almost shut down on its opening night. For a member of the audience, Eleanor Merchant, lies dead, hit by a musket ball fired from the stage. The man with his finger on the trigger? A bit-part player named Will Shakespeare. Convinced of Shakespeare’s innocence, Marlowe determines to find out what really happened. When a second body is found floating in the River Thames, it becomes clear that Eleanor Merchant’s death was no accident and that something deeper and darker is afoot. And why is the Queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, taking a close personal interest in the case?