Late one night, two teachers investigate a mysterious flashing light in the sports pavilion. There, among the tennis racquets, they discover the body of an unpopular games mistress. Can there really be a link between a Middle Eastern revolution and an English girl's school? Julia Upjohn knows something. She also knows that without Hercule Poirot's help, she might be the next victim of a cold-hearted killer.

It is a perfect world - conformity and happiness are a way of life. But for Jonas, things are different. While his friends are selected to be doctors or teachers, Jonas is sent to an old, tired man - The Giver - where he begins to discover the dark secrets that lie beneath the surface of his world. Jonas is about to undertake an incredible and impossible journey....

Jerry Renault, freshman, honest and straightforward, is singled out as a potential non-conformist by Archie Costello, leader of the Vigils. For this high school Mafia, public victimisation is the name of the game and absolute control is gained by humiliating fellow students into conformity through initiation tests devised by corrupt Archie. When one of the masters enlists the help of the Vigils in a fund-raising event, it becomes terrifyingly clear that Jerry hasn't a chance.

In 1933 Betty Roland went to Moscow with her lover Guido Baracchi, a member of the Australian Communist Party. Roland broke all the rules and stayed for fifteen months, sharing a room with fellow Australian writer, Katharine Susannah Pritchard. Her diary details the excitement of her introduction to Russian theatre and her life in Moscow. She has a few priveleges which almost compensate for the bedbugs and the fierce Russian winter. As Roland smuggles literature through Nazi Germany or stands in endless queues at thirty below zero, she experiences the false dawn of Stalin's new revolution. When she leaves in 1934, Stalin closes the country to the West.