Maxima Library

The new novel by Maxim Jakubowski, the “King of the Erotic Thriller” (The Times)

A young Italian woman flees her home in Rome and gets involved with the wrong man in Paris.

Cornelia, the fearless stripper and killer for hire, who proved such a hit in previous novels, is back and on another mission to kill.

As the two women’s paths intersect, an English crime writer down on his luck is mistaken for a private eye and goes on a quest for a missing person.

From New York to Paris, and then on a thrilling journey through Barcelona, Tangiers, Venice and then finally to a small medieval town outside Rome, the waltz with darkness of the three characters in search of love, lust and redemption becomes ever more poignant and mysterious.

Sexy, sad, breathless, a memorable tale of lost souls caught in a spider’s web of their own making.

The writing is a joy, dancing nimbly between the erotic and the thriller. There will be many books this year, screaming for your attention, few will satisfy you on every level like this amazing book.

An anthology of stories

The city is at the centre of all good crime writing: Los Angeles has Raymond Chandler, Chicago has Sara Paretsky and Mexico City has Paco Taibo. London has the contributors to London Noir who explore the dark underbelly of London and celebrate the triple by-passed heart of England's capital city. They reveal London to be a city of mayhem and depravity not to be recommended to tourists from Miami!

An anthology of stories

Following the huge success of the previous BBM collections comes the latest batch of stories from the UK's top-flight crime writers. Alongside an "Inspector Morse" story from Colin Dexter and a "Rumpole" tale from John Mortimer, is Jake Arnott's first short story and a wealth of exclusive stories from some of Britain's most exciting up-and-coming young crime writers. An ideal present for anyone who has ever enjoyed a good murder-mystery, "The Best British Mysteries 2006" will cause many sleepless nights of avid page turning!

Thirty-five short stories from the top names in British crime fiction, by the likes of Lee Child, Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith, Jake Arnott, Val McDermid, and more.

This edition of Maxim Jakubowski’s Best New Erotica series auspiciously appears with a new collection of fiction from forty-eight artisans of the sensual. Selected from stories by more than 4,000 authors of erotica from around the world, these artful excursions into the libido represent the current states of desire in Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and France. In this third new volume of voluptuary pursuits, tales by popular talents in the arts of titillation like Michel Faber, Michael Crawley, M. Christian, O’Neil De Noux, Alison Tyler, and Cara Bruce stand alongside stories from promising newcomers to the field of erotic fiction. All of them nonetheless share a standard of excellence and elegance that takes their often humorous, sometimes dark, and always original fictions far beyond tired conventions. So it is that John Grant presents “The Adventures of Thomas the Rock Star in the Court of the Queen of Faery,” while Cheyenne Blue depicts the misadventures of a city girl in “Cactus Ass.” Then, too, there’s Dawn O’Hara’s “London Derrière.” Claire Tristram serves up “Tomatoes: A Love Story in Three Parts” while Susannah Indigo offers the combination of “Bacon, Lola and Tomato,” as Mark Ramsden relishes what’s “Truly Scrumptious.”

Here in one marvellous volume, is the cream of erotic writing from all the corners of the globe. Maxim Jakubowski has gathered together unexpurgated delights, new and unpublished gems, and classic masterpieces seldom seen before.

Come play in a garden of exotic and erotic writing, with origins ranging from France and Germany to Japan and New Zealand, from Russia to the United States and Canada.

Pulp fiction has been looked down on as a guilty pleasure, but it offers the perfect form of entertainment: the very best storytelling filled with action, surprises, sound and fury. In short, all the exhiliration of a roller-coaster ride. The 1920s in America saw the proliferation of hundreds of dubiously named but thrillingly entertaining pulp magazines in America: Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces. It was in these luridly-coloured publications, printed on the cheapest pulp paper, that the first gems began to appear. The one golden rule for writers of pulp fiction was to adhere to the art of storytelling. Each story had to have a beginning, an end, economically-etched characters, but plenty going on, both in terms of action and emotions. Pulp magazines were the TV of their day, plucking readers from drab lives and planting them firmly in thrilling make-believe, successors...