New Releases by Tanya Allan

Many have become accustomed to the excellent stories from the pen of Tanya Allan. In this new offering, as she quickly approaches an amazing 100 novels, we get another of her great coppers vs villains escapades which we are all familiar with. Retired Detective Chief Inspector from the Metrolopitan Police, Greg Marchant - grieving his wife''s recent passing - is unexpectedly notified that he has an inheritance waiting for him in the wilds of New Mexico. He may move to the distant Southwest of America, but once a copper - always a copper. What follows is a complex interaction with a series of villains and drug lords... and to no one''s surprise... he is joined in his adventures by a feisty, beautiful younger widow who is as at home changing a head gasket on a V12 engine as she is in a pretty sun dress. Our retired London Detective unravels crooked police, unsolved murders from the past and drug smuggling - all the while discovering that while he and our pretty mechanic have both lost spouses, they both might have a lot more life left to share. While you may not find any of Tanya''s famous TG heroines, this well conceived action mystery - come love story - will keep you up late, turning the pages on your tablet to find out who did what next! Out of Death''s Shadow will keep anyone who likes a good police action story totally entertained. Let''s hope that just perhaps Detective Marchant isn''t as retired as we think, and just maybe we haven''t seen the last of our ocean-crossing copper and grease monkey Kathy. This book is highly recommended for all.

The Sergeant posted the officers to their beats and patrols, handing Sandi a copy of a message. "Go see Mrs Delaney at that address. Sort her out, there''s a good girl," he said. She read the message. Mrs Delaney was an elderly lady who was allegedly suffering from dementia. Police would receive an average of eight calls a week from her, and each time it involved little green men or strange animals. "Sarge, she''s a nutter!" she complained. "She has a problem, go see her and make sure it''s only in her mind. Assume nothing." What was it really like policing the East End of London in the 1970s?What was it like for those women who now had parity (on paper) with their male colleagues and so were expected to do the same ''job'' - just like the men?How tough was it to exist in what was a Man''s World up until the beginning of that decade?The 1970s was a time of great change. Sir Robert Mark was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and took it as a personal crusade to stamp out corruption within the ranks.The pay had yet to be reviewed and brought into line with other professions, so there was a huge drain of men and women seeking better remuneration for less risk on a daily basis.''Best Practice'' was not yet a phrase used in earnest by employers, especially within a police force that paid poorly and expected long hours and great commitment from those employed to protect the Metropolis. It was hardly surprising that there were a few who sought to improve their financial lot but unauthorised means.Indeed, some practices were simply bad at best and borderline criminal at worst. Attitudes and values had to be urgently reshaped, not by those who had worked their way up within the existing system, but by those now joining and preparing to be tomorrow''s commanders.Sandi Arnold was just one such young woman who faced the automatic stereotype that - ''all police women are lesbians'' or ''all police women can''t do the job properly''.She is thrown into the deep end and expected not just to swim, but to swim as well as the men, if not better. Women often had to work twice as hard just to be accepted.Join her on her journey along with a host of characters - some good, some bad and some simply hilarious. Watch as she deals with dead bodies, fleeing flashers and little old ladies being plagued by ''little green men''.Laugh with her at some of the silliest situations, cry with her when the man she loves is the victim of a terrorist attack and is feared dead. Share her frustrations and her successes. Most of all, try to understand how things were.In the days before political correctness, the language is earthy and understandable, but above all, it is as real as it can be. This is a work of fiction, but in name only!

Mike Gilbert was an old soldier who had served his nation well. Invalided out of the army after a landmine ripped apart his vehicle, killing his friends and effectively ending his career, Mike struggled in civilian life.Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is common-place these days, and Mike found himself in a Combat Fatigue unit in South East England, as the dreams he experienced started affecting his every moment. The dreams - of a weird world so far from reality and yet too close for comfort.Mike had fought humans all his career, but the enemy of his dreams were anything but human.Their name was the word that human parents used to scare the children - an onomatopoeic word. They wanted a word to describe them, so they raised their arms, formed claws with the hands and made a roaring noise - the noise they believed a monster would make.They were called the "Yruar".Not that these humans spoke English, had they done so, the word could be literally translated as ''Monster''.Nobody thought the Yruar were intelligent enough to have a name for themselves. That was mistake number one.Nobody thought they were intelligent enough to realise the humans were taking their land.That was mistake number two.Once they took the land, drained it, built their houses, sowed their crops and trees into it, nobody thought they''d be prepared to fight to recover the land that had been stolen.That was mistake number three.The war had been doing on for many years and neither side was winning.The humans were constructors - the constructed dwellings, machines (crude ones), tools, books, weapons, farms and systems of administration. They could read and write and they didn''t believe the Yruar were anything other than beasts.They fought the Yruar with weapons.The Yruar called themselves a word that literally translated would be the ''people''. They did not construct anything. Rather, they used their environment as a partner not as a consumer. They lived in harmony with everything that surrounded them and until humans arrived, they were strangers to extreme violence.The Yruar had to adapt or the crazy humans would annihilate them. They learned from their mistakes and developed weapons from the flora and fauna amongst which they lived. One of these weapons was an innocuous-looking fungus that was spherical and possessed spores that, when released, caused serious psychotic episodes in any unfortunate creature (human or otherwise) that might ingest some.One human warrior called Kara ingested spores on two separate occasions. She ended up in a field hospital in which there was more likelihood of dying of infection or disease then on the front line of battle.Nobody knew the psychotic properties of the spores. Nobody told her that weird things could happen. Nobody knew that somehow the mind of an old soldier called Mike in a hospital bed in England managed to find its way into her mind when both were asleep.Nobody knew that the event would change the future forever.

The Russians have taken Berlin. Hitler is dead! The War in Europe is over. Germany and the Axis powers have surrendered. The war in the Pacific still goes on, but it seems a forgotten war as Europe tastes peace for the first time since 1939.The world is a very different place and much of it is in turmoil. Old orders are crumbling and new orders are rising from the ashes. The Allies now face the monumental task of managing that peace. Ruined cities, no infrastructure of any kind, displaced persons with no home and even less hope wander abroad. Small pockets of fanatical Nazis still offered futile resistance.Of the Allied agent who had successfully delivered Henry Fotheringham to Switzerland, there was no trace. A senior British officer travels to that sector and liaises with the US army. Brigadier William Knox is searching for a girl he knows as Rachel Harper - codenamed ''Bluebird'' who was last known to have been in the hands of the Gestapo in Berlin. Her photograph is circulated, as well as an artist''s impression of the agent who helped Henry. The expectation is that she was executed by Hitler''s thugs.At a US Army checkpoint, a man called Grigor is stopped and detained. It is suspected he is the missing Allied agent as described by Henry, so the Brigadier is informed and transportation is laid on. Marcus Flavius lands in England to meet with the Brigadier. Finally, is this someone who might be able to assist in getting Marcus to the valley? Is he a man to whom he can share his remarkable story?From the Romans to the Vikings; through the Tudors and sailing the seas under a Spanish flag, Marcus has seen so much. Was King Arthur real? Was he truly a King, and did he really have a round table?Who knows?Marcus Flavius does, but will he tell?

Just how long can you live knowing you are living a lie?For most of us, we never will know because we never have to be anything other than what we were born to be.For some of us, despite knowing we are living a lie, we just get on and live the life that has been given to us rather than live the one we would dearly like. We do this because it is too costly, too dangerous, too difficult, wildly impractical or simply impossible. The Award is about one such person. Having resigned himself to a life he would not have chosen had he been given the opportunity, Matthew Gibson hid the truth deep inside and lived the lie very successfully. Indeed, he became so good at it, he almost forgot it was a lie....................until that which was hidden could no longer remain out of sight. It is exposed in an unusual way. For a man who allowed the prisoner within a brief freedom in the books he wrote in her name, the success draws an award, and one that he felt he had to accept. Encouraged to collect it in person, he realised that the person to whom it was given is not the lie he has been living.Despite all the reasons in the world not to face the truth - too costly, too many to hurt, too dangerous, too impractical and damn near impossible, he decided to face the truth and see what would happen.Most of us are spared such a decision.Ask yourself - if this was you, who would stand by you? How would you cope? Would you actually do it?In this story, Tanya Allan creates no mysterious aliens, no devious spies or hardened criminals to thwart; no magical transformations and a real risk of not even having a happy ending. Instead, the people she introduces are very real in so many ways. There''s probably a little bit of each of us in one or other of them. Serious introspection into what makes us tick reveals attitudes and values of which even we might be ashamed, while other might make us cry.Some serious questions are asked, I wonder how well you would answer them.......

In the final episode of this first series of books in which we follow Krista and Talia on their adventures across time and space..........it''s not easy persuading two great powers to back down and make peace, especially when the actual reasons for making war in the first place have long been forgotten. Those in power, on both sides, have got into the habit of ruling, and ruling in a certain way. Even if they wanted to change, none of them really possess the first idea of how best to do it. They certainly weren''t going to be the first, so peace has got to be the first item on any agendaSo, as Ghart and Larillion were stuck in a stale-mate situation, with both sides facing increasing social pressure to change of deal with the very real prospect of revolution by a down-trodden soldiery and civilian populations.Change was already happening, quietly and behind the social scenes in Ghart. The women were initiating change through quietly pressurising their men and persuading them of the type of change they thought was both appropriate and fair.Larillion, however, needs some catalyst to initiate the right sort of change, but at present there was no way in and no agents upon whom they could rely.Talia realises that one of them must go, and her experience and gifts make her the logical choice - the only choice.They hit on a plan that follows a crafty double bluff after a large scale military operation. However, it requires the Ghartian army to hold and to press home an attack against an increasingly desperate Larillion army.Will everyone hold their nerve, and if so, will she manage to stir the right sort of response?

Excerpt #1 of Captain''s Report, Training Ship QTE 909XDay 1. I am Second Officer Qazark Hrillam. As the ranking senior officer to survive the catastrophe, I hereby assume command of the wrecked ship QTE909X and surviving crew and trainees. We number twenty-eight individuals. So began the log of the acting captain of a stricken space ship forced by an unknown catastrophe to crash on an uncharted planet in an uncharted sector of space. In the incident, many of the crew were lost, and then, as if they had not been through enough, others were thrown out of the craft as it crashed on the apparently deserted and scorched planet. Clearly, the survival of those left alive was now a priority. Only then would they consider searching for the lost.+ + + +Not too far away, a young woman becomes conscious but finds herself naked and stranded in a desert with no personal effects or any memory of who she is or how she managed to get here, wherever that might be.The situation worsens - she discovers that the planet upon which she is on has two suns and it appears she is very much alone. Without any memory, she is unaware that two suns are not usual, but something inside her muddled mind tells her that all is not well. However, in that mind, it seems that someone or something has permitted or added survival skills that are essential for this environment. She also feels that perhaps she had not always been female - but with time and no memory of not being female, this feeling passes.She manages to locate food and water, and even constructs some crude weapons of which a stone-age hunter would be justly proud.She encounters some local fauna that are not exactly friendly, and then a naked man walks into her little camp in a worse state than the one she had been in. He at least knows his name is Gareth, but like the girl, there is a lot missing - including any survival skills.At least she is not alone, but she finds that although capable of thinking, whoever took her memory also took her power of speech.Survival was now going to be a challenge, and once that could be accomplished, she knew she wanted to find some answers...........any answers.The problem would be to form the appropriate questions.

Miles Martin watched helplessly as his world came crashing down. He felt it was unfair and unreasonable, as, finally, his inner self was able to express herself through the medium of writing.Miles was turning sixty and his wife of almost forty years - Ann - had given him an impossible ultimatum - "Either she goes or I do!""She" was not "another woman", but Miles'' alter ego and Muse - Miranda Martin. Miranda had several excellent novels published under her name (as Miles would claim there wasn''t a creative bone in HIS body).The problem had arisen through success. Miranda wasn''t exactly hitting the big time, but was selling books in such numbers that she received a hefty income and was far better known than Ann would have liked. Ann had been happy, no, not exactly happy, but ''suffered'' Miranda in small doses and under severely restricted conditions. For a person convinced he''d spent the last sixty years in the wrong body, these conditions proved neither possible nor reasonable.Ann didn''t see it that way and walked out.Miles was devastated. Oh, the children weren''t children any more, as both were now married and were living their lives, both abroad as it happened, so practically and financially it wasn''t a disaster. The devastation was emotional.Then came the letter from the solicitor.As a teenager, Miles, it seems, had bared his soul to his mother''s Uncle Freddie. Freddie was the black sheep of the family by being gay. It just wasn''t done in the 1930s and 40s. Young Miles had spoken to him about being ''different''. Freddie and Miles were not the same, but both felt that their differences were a burden in an unsympathetic society. Freddie subsequently died, leaving Miles with no one he could talk to.When Freddie died, the family discovered he left a trust fund for any in his family who might need help becoming the person they ought to have been. Clearly, Freddie had Miles in mind, but worded it suitably vaguely so as to spare him embarrassment had he ''got better''!Miles had two choices - slide down a slippery slope of self pity and deny her life, or realise Miranda in truth and light.Miranda won!But it wasn''t going to be easy.

Is there life out there?What with Roswell, Area 51 and reports from pilots, astronauts, police officers and thousands of ordinary people, the answer might just be - maybe.For Corporal Jan Fintry of the Ghartian infantry serving in the front line against the Larillion army, he neither knows nor cares about the possibility of little green (or any other colour) beings in flying saucers, cups or even plates!As he stared out across the icy waste that was the no-man''s-land between the entrenched positions of both armies, it would be fair to say that very few men on the planet Thurion had ever considered the question.He, and all his comrades would have been surprised to ascertain that their presence on this icy planet was not an accident of genetics, or evolution, or even of creation, but a deliberate act by ancient academics of an advanced race conducting an experiment. Jan and all his predecessors were the descendants of a small group of humans taken from Earth at the time of the Great Ice Age, many millennia ago.Those responsible for the act had long since died, but their descendants had problems of their own, and the discovery of Thurion and the embattled occupants posed a potential answer to their own peculiar problem.Their problem was that their race was dying. It was not dying from disease or war, but of complacency and boredom. They had long since removed the need to procreate by physical contact, so genders were a thing of the past. They had lost war, competition, and aggression. They had achieved a level of knowledge, science, technology and medicine that Humans might simply gasp in wonder. Their mental powers knew few bounds, and yet they were dying.They were so comfortable that they had lost all drive to do anything but simply exist. The few that cared enough to do something realised that a catalyst was urgently needed to give them back what they''d lost.That catalyst needed to be tested - where better than on Thurion.Thurion - a planet with only one inhabited continent with a population sharing a common language and lineage, but had polarised into two factions that had been embroiled in a state of war that had been lasting two centuries and showed no sign of abating. Their culture was equally stagnant as their own, but for entirely different factors. A society that revered women, and yet refused them any form of equality with men in the management of daily life, except for the more mundane home matters. A planet that was only now coming out of the ice age and yet socially was The catalyst - a highly intelligent and technically brilliant engineer called Douglas Wright - a human male who is past is sell-by date. Diagnosed as suffering from the latter stages of terminal cancer, Douglas sits by a pond near his home and weeps for a life lost. Briefly he meets an attractive young woman who hands him an envelope and promptly disappears.Realising that for a man of Douglas'' skills and experience, on Thurion he would soon become like a one-eyed man in the Kingdom of the Blind - a king. This would not address their own problem. They reasoned that the catalyst needed a challenge to be truly tested and put under pressure. Moments later, the man called Douglas died and a young woman with no memory awakened - stark naked in a snow drift in no-man''s land'' - in the sights of Corporal Jan Fintry''s rifle - a very long way away from planet Earth.The Catalyst had arrived.

1944 - German occupied Norway - a female agent is detained by the Germans after a tip off by a traitor in the resistance. Taken to Berlin after the local Gestapo fail to get her to divulge anything, she comes under the control of SS Sturmbannfuehrer (SS Major) Ernst Fausbender, feared interrogator and scourge of resistance fighters across the occupied zone. However, appearing to be on her last legs, Fausbender leaves her for the last time before personally executing her. When he and a warrant officer return to her cell, they are doubly surprised, for not only has she gone, but a very large and fit young man wearing many muscles and no clothes at all is in her cell. He takes out both men, killing Fausbender and escaping in the other German''s uniform.Of the mysterious female prisoner, there is no sign. Strangely, there is a link to an event that happened 1800 years previously..............................................Centurion Marcus Flavius is despatched by the Emperor Hadrian to seek out the secret of eternal life. Based on vague rumours and tales, and one map of a valley location many weeks'' march into the mountains of the east, the ailing emperor is determined to ascertain whether there is any truth to the tales.Marcus is selected for being one of the best. Taking with him a Greek friend, a foreign guide and a trusted century, they battle vast distances, ill-disposed adversaries with no love of Rome or their soldiers and extremes of climates. Against the odds they find the valley, but it seems the rumours were untrue.Or were they?The people of the valley were not only expecting them, but knew their quest. In the valley Marcus meets a beautiful Priestess - Shalama. She is the closest thing to female perfection he could ever hope to meet, and there is chemistry between them.The valley is invaded and the Romans intervene, defeating the raiders. Marcus decided to leave empty handed before he falls for the lure of the valley and he fears losing his freedom to choose.Shalama gives him a gift - an elixir, with strict instructions and dire warnings if the instructions are not followed.Intending to take his prize to his emperor, they start the long journey back. Only an attack in a desert and a mortal wound means that Marcus may not make it. His second in command, not knowing the instructions or warnings, administers the elixir and saves his life. The Centurion now looks forward to a long life.................... a very, very, very long life..... Or, should that be a great many lives?

Along with many others, from many nations, Louis Anderson is a young Englishman swept into the war in September 1939. Volunteering for his father''s old regiment, the Royal Artillery, he finds himself in the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1940, experiencing the Phoney War as a Lance-Bombardier.Seconded to a concert party, the able gymnast finds the audiences of soldiers aren''t interested in watching feats of physical skill, preferring instead to ogle an attractive girl. However, real girls aren''t permitted close to the potential front line, so, being slight in stature and able to pass as an attractive female, he is persuaded to alter his act to that of a female vocalist. He is completely convincing, which causes a few problems, not least to Louis himself.No one took into account the speed of the German Blitzkrieg, or Louis''s hidden nature. A chance meeting with an elderly Romany woman leaves him with a strange ring and a very different future, particularly after the Germans'' rapid advance cuts off the party''s escape route to Dunkirk. Forced to dump their trucks and uniforms, the party don civilian attire to pose as a travelling troupe of players in an attempt to find a route through to the coast and escape. However, the invading Germans have other ideas, and require the troupe to entertain a Panzer Regiment. Louis, with no male civilian attire, finds himself in an awkward predicament. At that moment, Louis ceases to be, and Louisa takes over, but for how long?