Henry Twyst, eighteenth Duke of Chellingworth, is convinced his mother is losing her marbles. She claims to have seen a corpse on the dining-room floor, but all she has to prove it is a bloodied bobble hat. Worried enough to retain the women of the WISE Enquiries Agency -- one is Welsh, one Irish, one Scottish and one English -- Henry wants the strange matter explained away. But the truth of what happened at the Chellingworth Estate, set in the rolling...

"The mayor of the noisy city of La Paz institutes new laws forbidding all singing, but a brave little rooster decides he must sing, despite the progressively severe punishments he receives for continuing to crow. The silenced populace, invigorated by the rooster's bravery, ousts the tyrannical mayor and returns their city to its free and clamorous state."

"From an adventurous and discerning new voice reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane, a captivating portrait of a community eking out its living in a coastal landscape as stark and storied as it is beautiful. Before arriving in Newlyn, a Cornish fishing village at the end of the railway line, Lamorna Ash was told that no fisherman would want a girl joining an expedition. Weeks later, the only female on board a trawler called the Filadelfia, she is heading...

At the Cotton Drifting Festival, Shion convinces Keiichi to sneak into a sacred storehouse with Miyo and Jirou. They ask him to keep it a secret, because if anyone finds out, all four of them will most likely be killed or sacrificed as part of the village's ritual

"After twenty years, Leo Pizzola has come back to his native village of Santo Fico, still single and still looking for a way to get rich. Sitting high above the sea in a remote part of Tuscany, the town is as poor as it was on the day Leo left. No tourist buses stop there. No guidebooks mention the Miracle and the Mystery of their blessed little church, which once held so much promise as a tourist attraction. Instead the broken fountain in the center...

On the Montacute estate in 1596 England, thirteen-year-old, fatherless Cess has always been an outcast but when her best friend becomes the latest boy to mysteriously disappear, the villagers accuse her of witchcraft--and she learns that they may be right.

Christmas, 1924. Lady Eleanor Swift has received a rather unexpected invitation to the village Christmas party in the tiny, rural hamlet of Derrydee in the west of Ireland. Eleanor is thrilled about exploring her ancestral roots at her late uncle's estate and spending the festive season in a castle. Packing Gladstone the bulldog's coziest Christmas jumper, they set off to the Emerald Isle with her butler Clifford in tow. Arriving late at night, Eleanor...