The G8 conference is about to open in Gleneagles, Scotland, during the first week of July 2005. Hundreds of thousands of anti-glob­al­iza­tion activists are heading to Edinburgh to protest.

Edinburgh cop, DI John Rebus, is about the only police officer in Britain who’s not on G8 duty. He’s been sidelined because of his propensity for pissing off his superiors. Instead, he gets involved in two different in­ves­ti­ga­tions.

A Labour MP plunged to his death from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. Suicide or murder? Why does Rebus keep getting the …continue.

For centuries, carefully selected historians have mys­te­ri­ous­ly received a book that contains only a picture of a dragon holding a placard that says, Drakulya. Three gen­er­a­tions of one family have followed the trail of those books: the narrator as a teenager in the 1970s, her graduate student parents in the 1950s, and her mother’s father in the 1930s.

The trail has led them from the Pyrenees to the Balkans and Istanbul, from libraries to monas­ter­ies to remote mountain villages. The narrative moves back and forth across the three gen­er­a­tions, as each …continue.

Third in the Walker Papers series of urban fantasies.

Joanne Walker discovered six months ago that she’s a powerful shaman, and she’s not happy about it. She’s an officer in the Seattle Police Department and a former mechanic, and being a woo-woo shaman does not fit with her self image. She’s contrary and stubborn and her de­ter­mi­na­tion not to accept her new state leads to big problems.

The people that she’s close to are going into comas. In her blundering ignorance when she first came into her powers, she un­wit­ting­ly awakened an …continue.

Rae Newborn has struggled with depression for decades. The death a year ago of her second husband and their young daughter drove her to attempt suicide. Now she’s moved to Folly, a small island in the San Juans that she inherited from Desmond Newborn, her grand­fa­ther’s brother.

Desmond went off to the First World War and came back broken by shell shock. He bought Folly in the 1920s and built a house with his own hands, then dis­ap­peared after the house burned down.

All alone on Folly, Rae starts rebuilding the …continue.

In the Seventies and Eighties, Tom Sharpe was a best­selling author in Britain, pumping out a dozen hilarious satires, marked by their savagery. His particular targets were apartheid, the British class system, and political cor­rect­ness. Then he dried up, producing only three books in the last twenty years.

Wilt in Nowhere is his fourth book about Henry Wilt, a lecturer at a third-rate community college, married to the formidable Eva and father of four ghastly quadru­plets. Eva takes the girls to America to stay with her rich uncle in Tennessee. Henry goes …continue.

The latest book from the 1632 series; this one is the long awaited sequel to 1633. The premise of the series is that through some mysterious alien event, a small West Virginian town is sent back to Germany in 1631, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, utterly changing the course of history. The Americans ally themselves with King Gustav Adolf of Sweden, forming the United States of Europe.

The authors adeptly juggle a series of plots that were set in motion in the earlier book. The town …continue.

Roddy Doyle has visited Paula Spencer twice before. First in The Family, a BBC TV serial; then in The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Ten years on from the last book, Paula is a recovering alcoholic who only recently crawled out of the bottle. The boom years of the Celtic Tiger have passed her by: Paula continues to clean Dublin offices and houses for a living. Her youngest two children are still at home. Jack is fine but Leanne is heading towards alcoholism herself. Her other son, John Paul, is estranged and …continue.

In Elizabeth George’s previous book, With No One As Witness, a senior police officer’s pregnant wife is gunned down in London by a 12-year-old boy in an apparently random act. This book tells the story of how that shooting came to happen.

The three Campbell children are abandoned on their aunt’s doorstep by their feckless grand­moth­er, months before the shooting. They are mixed-race children with deep-seated damage: their alcoholic father was killed in front of them a few years ago and their mother has long been …continue.

Cederholm clearly explains the CSS techniques required to build a "bul­let­proof" website: one that is robust in the face of text resizing, window resizing, disabled images, etc, with minimal, se­man­ti­cal­ly correct markup that works across all the major browsers.

Anyone who’s serious about building a modern website should read this book.

Cederholm builds up his examples, one step at a time, in a clear manner. For the shorter examples, he tends to show the entire CSS or XHTML again and again, with the latest changes high­light­ed in orange. …continue.