This book covers the fundamentals of machine learning with Python in a concise and dynamic manner. It covers data mining and large-scale machine learning using Apache Spark. About This Book ? Take your first steps in the world of data science by understanding the tools and techniques of data analysis ? Train efficient Machine Learning models in Python using the supervised and unsupervised learning methods ? Learn how to use Apache Spark for processing Big Data efficiently Who This Book Is For If you are a budding data scientist or a data analyst who wants to analyze and gain actionable insights from data using Python, this book is for you. Programmers with some experience in Python who want to enter the lucrative world of Data Science will also find this book to be very useful, but you don't need to be an expert Python coder or mathematician to get the most from this book. What You Will Learn ? Learn how to clean your data and ready it for analysis ? Implement the popular clustering and regression methods in Python ? Train efficient machine learning models using decision trees and random forests ? Visualize the results of your analysis using Python’s Matplotlib library ? Use Apache Spark’s MLlib package to perform machine learning on large datasets In Detail Join Frank Kane, who worked on Amazon and IMDb’s machine learning algorithms, as he guides you on your first steps into the world of data science. Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning gives you the tools that you need to understand and explore the core topics in the field, and the confidence and practice to build and analyze your own machine learning models. With the help of interesting and easy-to-follow practical examples, Frank Kane explains potentially complex topics such as Bayesian methods and K-means clustering in a way that anybody can understand them. Based on Frank’s successful data science course, Hands-On Data Science and Python Machine Learning empowers you to conduct data analysis and perform efficient machine learning using Python. Let Frank help you unearth the value in your data using the various data mining and data analysis techniques available in Python, and to develop efficient predictive models to predict future results. You will also learn how to perform large-scale machine learning on Big Data using Apache Spark. The book covers preparing your data for analysis, training machine learning models, and visualizing the final data analysis. Style and approach This comprehensive book is a perfect blend of theory and hands-on code examples in Python which can be used for your reference at any time.

This book is your guide to exploring the possibilities in the field of deep learning, making use of Google's TensorFlow. You will learn about convolutional neural networks, and logistic regression while training models for deep learning to gain key insights into your data. About This Book ? Explore various possibilities with deep learning and gain amazing insights from data using Google’s brainchild-- TensorFlow ? Want to learn what more can be done with deep learning? Explore various neural networks with the help of this comprehensive guide ? Rich in concepts, advanced guide on deep learning that will give you background to innovate in your environment Who This Book Is For If you are a data scientist who performs machine learning on a regular basis, are familiar with deep neural networks, and now want to gain expertise in working with convoluted neural networks, then this book is for you. Some familiarity with C++ or Python is assumed. What You Will Learn ? Set up your computing environment and install TensorFlow ? Build simple TensorFlow graphs for everyday computations ? Apply logistic regression for classification with TensorFlow ? Design and train a multilayer neural network with TensorFlow ? Intuitively understand convolutional neural networks for image recognition ? Bootstrap a neural network from simple to more accurate models ? See how to use TensorFlow with other types of networks ? Program networks with SciKit-Flow, a high-level interface to TensorFlow In Detail Dan Van Boxel’s Deep Learning with TensorFlow is based on Dan’s best-selling TensorFlow video course. With deep learning going mainstream, making sense of data and getting accurate results using deep networks is possible. Dan Van Boxel will be your guide to exploring the possibilities with deep learning; he will enable you to understand data like never before. With the efficiency and simplicity of TensorFlow, you will be able to process your data and gain insights that will change how you look at data. With Dan’s guidance, you will dig deeper into the hidden layers of abstraction using raw data. Dan then shows you various complex algorithms for deep learning and various examples that use these deep neural networks. You will also learn how to train your machine to craft new features to make sense of deeper layers of data. In this book, Dan shares his knowledge across topics such as logistic regression, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, training deep networks, and high level interfaces. With the help of novel practical examples, you will become an ace at advanced multilayer networks, image recognition, and beyond. Style and Approach This book is your go-to guide to becoming a deep learning expert in your organization. Dan helps you evaluate common and not-so-common deep neural networks with the help of insightful examples that you can relate to, and show how they can be exploited in the real world with complex raw data.

Learn everything you need to build highly scalable, robust web applications using Angular release 4 About This Book ? Apply best practices and design patterns to achieve higher scalability in your Angular applications ? Understand the latest features of Angular and create your own components ? Get acquainted with powerful, advanced techniques in Angular to build professional web applications Who This Book Is For This book is for JavaScript developers with some prior exposure to Angular, at least through basic examples. We assume that you’ve got working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. What You Will Learn ? Implement asynchronous programming using Angular ? Beautify your application with the UI components built to the material design specification ? Secure your web application from unauthorized users ? Create complex forms, taking full advantage of 2-way data binding ? Test your Angular applications using the Jasmine and Protractor frameworks for better efficiency ? Learn how to integrate Angular with Bootstrap to create compelling web applications ? Use Angular built-in classes to apply animation in your app In Detail Got some experience of Angular under your belt? Want to learn everything about using advanced features for developing websites? This book is everything you need for the deep understanding of Angular that will set you apart from the developer crowd. Angular has introduced a new way to build applications. Creating complex and rich web applications, with a lighter resource footprint, has never been easier or faster. Angular is now at release 4, with significant changes through previous versions. This book has been written and tested for Angular release 4. Angular is a mature technology, and you'll likely have applications built with earlier versions. This book starts by showing you best practices and approaches to migrating your existing Angular applications so that you can be immediately up-to-date. You will take an in-depth look at components and see how to control the user journey in your applications by implementing routing and navigation. You will learn how to work with asynchronous programming by using Observables. To easily build applications that look great, you will learn all about template syntax and how to beautify applications with Material Design. Mastering forms and data binding will further speed up your application development time. Learning about managing services and animations will help you to progressively enhance your applications. Next you’ll use native directives to integrate Bootstrap with Angular. You will see the best ways to test your application with the leading options such as Jasmine and Protractor. At the end of the book, you’ll learn how to apply design patterns in Angular, and see the benefits they will bring to your development. Style and approach This book provides comprehensive coverage of all aspects of development with Angular. You will learn about all the most powerful Angular concepts, with examples and best practices. This book is everything you need for the deep understanding of Angular that will set you apart from the developer crowd.

Develop deep neural networks in Theano with practical code examples for image classification, machine translation, reinforcement agents, or generative models. About This Book ? Learn Theano basics and evaluate your mathematical expressions faster and in an efficient manner ? Learn the design patterns of deep neural architectures to build efficient and powerful networks on your datasets ? Apply your knowledge to concrete fields such as image classification, object detection, chatbots, machine translation, reinforcement agents, or generative models. Who This Book Is For This book is indented to provide a full overview of deep learning. From the beginner in deep learning and artificial intelligence, to the data scientist who wants to become familiar with Theano and its supporting libraries, or have an extended understanding of deep neural nets. Some basic skills in Python programming and computer science will help, as well as skills in elementary algebra and calculus. What You Will Learn ? Get familiar with Theano and deep learning ? Provide examples in supervised, unsupervised, generative, or reinforcement learning. ? Discover the main principles for designing efficient deep learning nets: convolutions, residual connections, and recurrent connections. ? Use Theano on real-world computer vision datasets, such as for digit classification and image classification. ? Extend the use of Theano to natural language processing tasks, for chatbots or machine translation ? Cover artificial intelligence-driven strategies to enable a robot to solve games or learn from an environment ? Generate synthetic data that looks real with generative modeling ? Become familiar with Lasagne and Keras, two frameworks built on top of Theano In Detail This book offers a complete overview of Deep Learning with Theano, a Python-based library that makes optimizing numerical expressions and deep learning models easy on CPU or GPU. The book provides some practical code examples that help the beginner understand how easy it is to build complex neural networks, while more experimented data scientists will appreciate the reach of the book, addressing supervised and unsupervised learning, generative models, reinforcement learning in the fields of image recognition, natural language processing, or game strategy. The book also discusses image recognition tasks that range from simple digit recognition, image classification, object localization, image segmentation, to image captioning. Natural language processing examples include text generation, chatbots, machine translation, and question answering. The last example deals with generating random data that looks real and solving games such as in the Open-AI gym. At the end, this book sums up the best -performing nets for each task. While early research results were based on deep stacks of neural layers, in particular, convolutional layers, the book presents the principles that improved the efficiency of these architectures, in order to help the reader build new custom nets. Style and approach It is an easy-to-follow example book that teaches you how to perform fast, efficient computations in Python. Starting with the very basics-NumPy, installing Theano, this book will take you to the smooth journey of implementing Theano for advanced computations for machine learning and deep learning.

This unique book provides you with a wealth of tips, tricks, best practices, and answers to the day-to-day questions that programmers face in their careers. It is split into three parts: Coder Skills, Freelancer Skills, and Career Skills, providing the knowledge you need to get ahead in programming. About This Book ? Over 50 essays with practical advice on improving your programming career ? Practical focus gives solutions to common problems, and methods to become a better coder ? Includes advice for existing programmers and those wanting to begin a career in programming Who This Book Is For This book is useful for programmers of any ability or discipline. It has advice for those thinking about beginning a career in programming, those already working as a fully employed programmer, and for those working as freelance developers. What You Will Learn ? Improve your soft skills to become a better and happier coder ? Learn to be a better developer ? Grow your freelance development business ? Improve your development career ? Learn the best approaches to breaking down complex topics ? Have the confidence to charge what you're worth as a freelancer ? Succeed in developer job interviews In Detail This is an all-purpose toolkit for your programming career. It has been built by Jordan Hudgens over a lifetime of coding and teaching coding. It helps you identify the key questions and stumbling blocks that programmers encounter, and gives you the answers to them! It is a comprehensive guide containing more than 50 insights that you can use to improve your work, and to give advice in your career. The book is split up into three topic areas: Coder Skills, Freelancer Skills, and Career Skills, each containing a wealth of practical advice. Coder Skills contains advice for people starting out, or those who are already working in a programming role but want to improve their skills. It includes such subjects as: how to study and understand complex topics, and getting past skill plateaus when learning new languages. Freelancer Skills contains advice for developers working as freelancers or with freelancers. It includes such subjects as: knowing when to fire a client, and tips for taking over legacy applications. Career Skills contains advice for building a successful career as a developer. It includes such subjects as: how to improve your programming techniques, and interview guides and developer salary negotiation strategies. Style and approach This unique book provides over 50 insightful essays full of practical advice for improving your programming career. The book is split into three broad sections covering different aspects of a developer's career. Each essay is self-contained and can be read individually, or in chunks.

Build scalable, reliable, and cost-effective applications with a serverless architecture About This Book ? Design a real-world serverless application from scratch ? Learn about AWS Lambda function and how to use Lambda functions to glue other AWS Services ? Use the Java programming language and well-known design patterns. Although Java is used for the examples in this book, the concept is applicable across all languages ? Learn to migrate your JAX-RS application to AWS Lambda and API Gateway Who This Book Is For This book is for developers and software architects who are interested in designing on the back end. Since the book uses Java to teach concepts, knowledge of Java is required. What You Will Learn ? Learn to form microservices from bigger Softwares ? Orchestrate and scale microservices ? Design and set up the data flow between cloud services and custom business logic ? Get to grips with cloud provider’s APIs, limitations, and known issues ? Migrate existing Java applications to a serverless architecture ? Acquire deployment strategies ? Build a highly available and scalable data persistence layer ? Unravel cost optimization techniques In Detail Over the past years, all kind of companies from start-ups to giant enterprises started their move to public cloud providers in order to save their costs and reduce the operation effort needed to keep their shops open. Now it is even possible to craft a complex software system consisting of many independent micro-functions that will run only when they are needed without needing to maintain individual servers. The focus of this book is to design serverless architectures, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, along with decision factors to consider. You will learn how to design a serverless application, get to know that key points of services that serverless applications are based on, and known issues and solutions. The book addresses key challenges such as how to slice out the core functionality of the software to be distributed in different cloud services and cloud functions. It covers basic and advanced usage of these services, testing and securing the serverless software, automating deployment, and more. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with knowledge of new tools and techniques to keep up with this evolution in the IT industry. Style and approach The book takes a pragmatic approach, showing you all the examples you need to build efficient serverless applications.

A practical guide to help you undertand the ability of Apache jMeter to load and performance test various server types in a more efficient way. About This Book ? Use jMeter to create and run tests to improve the performance of your webpages and applications ? Learn to build a test plan for your websites and analyze the results ? Unleash the power of various features and changes introduced in Apache jMeter 3.0 Who This Book Is For This book is for software professionals who want to understand and improve the performance of their applications with Apache jMeter. What You Will Learn ? See why performance testing is necessary and learn how to set up JMeter ? Record and test with JMeter ? Handle various form inputs in JMeter and parse results during testing ? Manage user sessions in web applications in the context of a JMeter test ? Monitor JMeter results in real time ? Perform distributed testing with JMeter ? Get acquainted with helpful tips and best practices for working with JMeter In Detail JMeter is a Java application designed to load and test performance for web application. JMeter extends to improve the functioning of various other static and dynamic resources. This book is a great starting point to learn about JMeter. It covers the new features introduced with JMeter 3 and enables you to dive deep into the new techniques needed for measuring your website performance. The book starts with the basics of performance testing and guides you through recording your first test scenario, before diving deeper into JMeter. You will also learn how to configure JMeter and browsers to help record test plans. Moving on, you will learn how to capture form submission in JMeter, dive into managing sessions with JMeter and see how to leverage some of the components provided by JMeter to handle web application HTTP sessions. You will also learn how JMeter can help monitor tests in real-time. Further, you will go in depth into distributed testing and see how to leverage the capabilities of JMeter to accomplish this. You will get acquainted with some tips and best practices with regard to performance testing. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to take full advantage of the real power behind Apache JMeter. Style and approach The book is a practical guide starting with introducing the readers to the importance of automated testing. It will then be a beginner’s journey from getting introduced to Apache jMeter to an in-detail discussion of more advanced features and possibilities with it.

Use scikit-learn to apply machine learning to real-world problems About This Book ? Master popular machine learning models including k-nearest neighbors, random forests, logistic regression, k-means, naive Bayes, and artificial neural networks ? Learn how to build and evaluate performance of efficient models using scikit-learn ? Practical guide to master your basics and learn from real life applications of machine learning Who This Book Is For This book is intended for software engineers who want to understand how common machine learning algorithms work and develop an intuition for how to use them, and for data scientists who want to learn about the scikit-learn API. Familiarity with machine learning fundamentals and Python are helpful, but not required. What You Will Learn ? Review fundamental concepts such as bias and variance ? Extract features from categorical variables, text, and images ? Predict the values of continuous variables using linear regression and K Nearest Neighbors ? Classify documents and images using logistic regression and support vector machines ? Create ensembles of estimators using bagging and boosting techniques ? Discover hidden structures in data using K-Means clustering ? Evaluate the performance of machine learning systems in common tasks In Detail Machine learning is the buzzword bringing computer science and statistics together to build smart and efficient models. Using powerful algorithms and techniques offered by machine learning you can automate any analytical model. This book examines a variety of machine learning models including popular machine learning algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, naive Bayes, k-means, decision trees, and artificial neural networks. It discusses data preprocessing, hyperparameter optimization, and ensemble methods. You will build systems that classify documents, recognize images, detect ads, and more. You will learn to use scikit-learn’s API to extract features from categorical variables, text and images; evaluate model performance, and develop an intuition for how to improve your model’s performance. By the end of this book, you will master all required concepts of scikit-learn to build efficient models at work to carry out advanced tasks with the practical approach. Style and approach This book is motivated by the belief that you do not understand something until you can describe it simply. Work through toy problems to develop your understanding of the learning algorithms and models, then apply your learnings to real-life problems.

A guide to mastering Visual Studio 2017 About This Book ? Focus on coding with the new, improved, and powerful tools of VS 2017 ? Master improved debugging and unit testing support capabilities ? Accelerate cloud development with the built-in Azure tools Who This Book Is For .NET Developers who would like to master the new features of VS 2017, and would like to delve into newer areas such as cloud computing, would benefit from this book. Basic knowledge of previous versions of Visual Studio is assumed. What You Will Learn ? Learn what's new in the Visual Studio 2017 IDE, C# 7.0, and how it will help developers to improve their productivity ? Learn the workloads and components of the new installation wizard and how to use the online and offline installer ? Build stunning Windows apps using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) tools ? Get familiar with .NET Core and learn how to build apps targeting this new framework ? Explore everything about NuGet packages ? Debug and test your applications using Visual Studio 2017 ? Accelerate cloud development with Microsoft Azure ? Integrate Visual Studio with most popular source control repositories, such as TFS and GitHub In Detail Visual Studio 2017 is the all-new IDE released by Microsoft for developers, targeting Microsoft and other platforms to build stunning Windows and web apps. Learning how to effectively use this technology can enhance your productivity while simplifying your most common tasks, allowing you more time to focus on your project. With this book, you will learn not only what VS2017 offers, but also what it takes to put it to work for your projects. Visual Studio 2017 is packed with improvements that increase productivity, and this book will get you started with the new features introduced in Visual Studio 2017 IDE and C# 7.0. Next, you will learn to use XAML tools to build classic WPF apps, and UWP tools to build apps targeting Windows 10. Later, you will learn about .NET Core and then explore NuGet, the package manager for the Microsoft development platform. Then, you will familiarize yourself with the debugging and live unit testing techniques that comes with the IDE. Finally, you'll adapt Microsoft's implementation of cloud computing with Azure, and the Visual Studio integration with Source Control repositories. Style and approach This comprehensive guide covers the advanced features of Visual Studio 2017, and communicates them through a practical approach to explore the underlying concepts of how, when, and why to use it.

Leverage the power of Python to collect, process, and mine deep insights from social media data About This Book ? Acquire data from various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, GitHub, and more ? Analyze and extract actionable insights from your social data using various Python tools ? A highly practical guide to conducting efficient social media analytics at scale Who This Book Is For If you are a programmer or a data analyst familiar with the Python programming language and want to perform analyses of your social data to acquire valuable business insights, this book is for you. The book does not assume any prior knowledge of any data analysis tool or process. What You Will Learn ? Understand the basics of social media mining ? Use PyMongo to clean, store, and access data in MongoDB ? Understand user reactions and emotion detection on Facebook ? Perform Twitter sentiment analysis and entity recognition using Python ? Analyze video and campaign performance on YouTube ? Mine popular trends on GitHub and predict the next big technology ? Extract conversational topics on public internet forums ? Analyze user interests on Pinterest ? Perform large-scale social media analytics on the cloud In Detail Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Pinterest, and YouTube have become part of everyday life in a big way. However, these complex and noisy data streams pose a potent challenge to everyone when it comes to harnessing them properly and benefiting from them. This book will introduce you to the concept of social media analytics, and how you can leverage its capabilities to empower your business. Right from acquiring data from various social networking sources such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and social forums, you will see how to clean data and make it ready for analytical operations using various Python APIs. This book explains how to structure the clean data obtained and store in MongoDB using PyMongo. You will also perform web scraping and visualize data using Scrappy and Beautifulsoup. Finally, you will be introduced to different techniques to perform analytics at scale for your social data on the cloud, using Python and Spark. By the end of this book, you will be able to utilize the power of Python to gain valuable insights from social media data and use them to enhance your business processes. Style and approach This book follows a step-by-step approach to teach readers the concepts of social media analytics using the Python programming language. To explain various data analysis processes, real-world datasets are used wherever required.

A Sunday Times Bestseller ‘O’Brien cleverly intertwines the personal and political in this enjoyable, gripping tale.’ -The Times Her children or her crown France, 1399: The Duke of Brittany is dead and his widow, Joanna of Navarre, has inherited control of their land – a testament to her intellect, integrity and political prowess. Then comes an unprecedented proposal from Henry IV, King of England. The price of becoming his Queen? Abandoning her homeland, leaving her children and sacrificing her independence. Henry's hold on the crown is unsteady and war is brewing. With the constant threat of rebellion, Henry will trust no-one – not even his new Queen. Crossing the channel is a dangerous prospect. But the union between Joanna and Henry would bring the chance of a vital alliance between two proud states – if they will allow it. One question. Two paths. A choice that will make history. Praise for The Queen’s Choice ‘A gem of a subject … O’Brien is a terrific storyteller’ - Daily Telegraph ‘Joanna of Navarre is the feisty heroine in Anne O’Brien’s fast-paced historical novel The Queen’s Choice.’ -Good Housekeeping ‘A gripping story of love, heartache and political intrigue.’ -Woman & Home ‘Packed with drama, danger, romance and history.’ -Pam Norfolk, for the Press Association ‘A gripping historical drama.’ -Bella www.anneobrien.co.uk @anne_obrien

Billy and Gracie Myers don’t believe in magic. Not even at Christmastime. They don’t believe in ghosts. Not even when they discover a haunted house in the woods behind their home. Filomena Albright lives in that house, and maybe, just maybe, she can bring a little magic into their lives—and their father’s. Evan Myers is overworked and stressed out, steering his chain of sporting-goods stores through the hectic pre-holiday retail season while raising his young son and daughter single-handedly. He has no time to think, let alone think about the woman who has taken up residence in the mysterious house through the forest. But when Gracie’s preschool teacher warns Evan that he’d better get some help, he turns to the Daddy School—and Filomena. That she dazzles him with her intelligence, her energy, and her beauty is irrelevant. She’ll be gone with the new year. For now, though, for these few weeks before Christmas, maybe she can be everything Evan and his children need her to be. Christmas is a time of magic, after all.

Sami Fontaine wanted a baby more than anything. But she didn't want a husband! Where could she find a man willing to father a child without gaining a wife? The solution was simple: advertise... When gorgeous Noah Hawke turned up on her doorstep, Sami knew she'd found the perfect man. Only Noah wasn't reporting for baby-making duties: he'd been hired to watch over Sami. And the very best way to protect her was to marry her!

With her family business to run, Kat Bennet doesn't have time for love - until a sexy stranger comes into her life! Kat quickly discovers that Daniel West has a hidden reason for being in town, and she's roped into helping him with his assignment. Working closely with Kat, Daniel realizes he wants her as his bride - but will she say yes when he reveals his secret agenda?

Pilgrim Cove—where love can be as powerful as the ocean next door. On the surface, Pilgrim Cove seems like any other coastal town. Picturesque and peaceful with long stretches of unspoiled beach, fresh ocean breezes and the sense of time passing slowly. However…. …only in Pilgrim Cove live a group of friends called the ROMEOs whose sole aim to take care of the town. …only in Pilgrim Cove stands a unique house right on the beach. Sea View House. A very special place—some say magical—to the people who reside there each season. …and only in Pilgrim Cove, are strangers welcomed while everyone else takes a front row seat as a love story unfolds. No Ordinary Summer is the second of the four-book Pilgrim Cove series. Fun is what Shelley Anderson is trying to provide for her two young children when she rents the first floor of Sea View House a year after a painful divorce. The kids haven’t been adjusting well, and the house is perfect. She’s not sure about perfection, however, after she meets Daniel Stone, the man who’s renting the top floor of the house. A man who’s trying to find his balance after losing his wife. Her neighbor definitely wants to be left alone. He’s less than thrilled by the instant rapport between his beautiful golden retriever and her two active kids. And he’s definitely shaken by the rapport that springs up between himself and Shelley. When Shelley’s ex shows up, threatening to take the kids, Shelley must protect her little family while also protecting her budding happiness with Dan. With their painful pasts, will Shelley and Daniel find the courage to love again? It’s a question only they can answer.

Bride for hire? Money couldn't buy love, but would it buy Adam Tate a wife? Claire needed a plane ticket home, and money to help her sister. Adam promised to help–on the condition that Claire became his wife and mother to his two-year-old son, Jamie! Adam was rich, charming and gorgeous. And the deal was simple: one short wedding ceremony, and Claire's problems would be over! Financially, at least. But she knew Adam would be a hard man to walk away from. Was Claire ready to promise her heart for better, for worse…forever? "Ms Duke captivates readers with…intense passion, a strong emotional conflict and endearing characters." –Romantic Times

In love with her boss Efficient but decidedly drab. Not any longer. Isabel Peabody has repressed her true self for long enough, and her workaholic boss, Gabriel Parish, is about to get the shock of his life. Reluctantly agreeing to play the part of his "wife" for a week to secure a business deal, Izzy is about to transform herself from top executive assistant to a living, breathing?seductive–woman. Could she hope to persuade Gabriel to ease up on work and learn to have a little fun instead?

Finding Mr Right Kit, Susannah, Alison– Single, successful and not searching for husbands–but love finds them anyway! Persuading a millionaire to part with a fortune seemed like mission impossible. Even if it was in the public interest, it was going to be tough–especially as the man in question turned out to be Marcus Herrington…Susannah's first love. Eight years ago, Marc had stormed out of her life, believing she was having another man's baby. Convincing him otherwise, while sweet-talking him into helping a worthy cause, would be tricky. Even more so when Marc insisted negotiations take place in the bedroom! Suddenly Susannah was struggling to remember that the playboy assignment was business, not pleasure!

AND MOMMY MAKES THREE In her seventeenth summer Darcy Beckett discovered true love. So she gave herself, body and soul, to hell-raising ranch hand Joe Tyler. Darcy saw a future of babies and bliss. But her grandfather saw red–and sent Darcy packing. Away from the ranch–and into a monied but loveless marriage. Now, ten years later, her grandfather's will has brought Darcy back to the ranch. Back to Joe. And to his adorable six-year-old son, who wanted a mommy for Christmas. Darcy secretly pined for the rakish cowboy and his enchanting little sidekick. But she and Joe had grown worlds apart. And only a miracle–or the True Love Ranch–could give their hungry hearts a home….

A young man, broken down in the fog, witnesses a murder he is asked to conceal… A full-length novel adapted by Charles Osborne from Agatha Christie’s acclaimed play. When a stranger runs his car into a ditch in dense fog in South Wales and makes his way to an isolated house, he discovers a woman standing over the dead body of her wheelchair-bound husband, gun in her hand. She admits to murder, and the unexpected guest offers to help her concoct a cover story. But is it possible that Laura Warwick did not commit the murder after all? If so, who is she shielding? The victim’s young half-brother or his dying matriarchal mother? Laura’s lover? Perhaps the father of the little boy killed in an accident for which Warwick was responsible? The house seems full of possible suspects… THE UNEXPECTED GUEST is considered to be one of the finest of Christie’s plays. Hailed as ‘another Mousetrap’ when it opened on 12 August 1958 in the West End, it ran for 604 performances over the succeeding 18 months and has been staged many times around the world over the last 40 years.

A full-length Hercule Poirot novel, adapted from Agatha Christie’s stage play by Charles Osborne Sir Claud Amory’s revolutionary new formula for a powerful explosive is stolen. Locking his house-guests in the library, Sir Claud switches off the lights to allow the thief to replace the formula, no questions asked. When the lights come on, he is dead, and Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings have to unravel a tangle of family feuds, old flames and suspicious foreigners to find the killer and prevent a global catastrophe. BLACK COFFEE was Agatha Christie’s first play*, originally performed in 1930 and made into a now rarely-seen film the following year. Combining her typically beguiling plot and sparkling dialogue with his own faithful narrative, Charles Osborne’s novelisation is ‘A worthy addition to the Christie canon’ (The Spectator)