Stylish, atmospheric psychological police thriller featuring detectives Cardinal and Delorme

It's January. A freak warm front, rolling north all the way from Texas, slips across the Great Lakes and covers Ontario. In a matter of hours, the entire population of Algonquin Bay has emerged to stroll the streets in spring jackets. But the warm front brings with it a dense blanket of fog -- and a sudden increase in the murder rate. It looks like the first victim has been raped and strangled by an obsessed former boyfriend. The only trouble is he's also an officer of the RCMP. The second body -- or body parts -- is discovered soon afterwards in the fogbound woods and this time, the victim is a US citizen which means the RCMP have to be called in. And with one of their number under suspicion for murder, the Horsemen are in no mood to co-operate.

This is the long-awaited twenty-first novel in the number one bestselling series featuring Richard Sharpe. In the winter of 1811 the war seemed lost. All Spain has fallen to the French, except for Cadiz which is now the Spanish capital and is under siege. Wellington and his British army are in Portugal, waiting for spring to spark the war to life again. Richard Sharpe and his company are part of a small expeditionary force sent to break a bridge across the River Guadiana. What begins as a brilliant piece of soldiering turns into disaster, thanks to the brutal savagery of the French Colonel Vandal who is leading his battalion to join the siege of Cadiz. Sharpe extricates a handful of men from the debacle and is driven south into the threatened city. There, in Cadiz, he discovers more than one enemy. Many Spaniards doubt Britain's motives and believe their future would be brighter if they made peace with the French, and one of them, a baleful priest, secures a powerful weapon to break the British alliance. He will use a beautiful whore and the letters she received from a wealthy man. The priest will use blackmail, and Sharpe must defeat him in a sinister war of knife and treachery in the dark alleys of the city. Yet the alliance will only survive if the French siege can be lifted. An allied army marches from the city to take on the more powerful French and, once again, a brilliant piece of soldiering turns to disaster, this time because the Spanish refuse to fight. A small British force is trapped by a French army, and the only hope now lies with the outnumbered redcoats who, on a hill beside the sea, refuse to admit defeat. And there, in the sweltering horror of Barossa, Sharpe finds Colonel Vandal again. "Sharpe's Fury" is based on the real events of the winter of 1811 that led to the extraordinary victory of Barossa, the battle which saw the British capture the first French eagle of the Napoleonic Wars.

Hybrids was the outstanding winner of the Children's Book Writing Competition run in conjunction with Saga Magazine. A budding writer since he was very young, author David Thorpe received a complimentary copy of Saga on his 50th birthday, the copy that just happened to feature a competition to discover a strong new voice in children’s book writing. The response was staggering – almost 900 entries were received and read, whittled down to a longlist of fifteen, and then a final shortlist of three before Hybrids was picked as overall winner.
Orange-prize winning author Helen Dunmore – one of the competition judges – says of Hybrids: “The writing is sharp, the dialogue good, and the action pacey and page-turning. But there’s a real depth to this story, too. Like all good fiction, it makes the reader see the world in a different light.”
Publishing News says: “What singles out Hybrids is its well-crafted characters and finely spun tension. It’s an impressive debut and clearly demonstrates why it beat nearly 900 other manuscripts to win a HarperCollins/Saga magazine writing competition. I certainly look forward to seeing what other ideas David Thorpe has to explore in the future.”