A powerful story of grief, hope and an epic love, from the Russian-born author of internationally bestselling novels, TULLY and ROAD TO PARADISE. The world at war … two people in love. Tatiana is eighteen years old and pregnant when she miraculously escapes war-torn Leningrad to the West, believing herself to be a widow. Her husband, Major Alexander Belov, a decorated hero of the Soviet Union, has been arrested by Stalin's infamous secret police and is awaiting imminent death as a traitor and a spy. Tatiana begins her new life in America. In wartime New York City she finds work, friends and a life beyond her dreams. However, her grief is inescapable and she keeps hearing Alexander calling out to her. Meanwhile, Alexander faces the greatest danger he's ever known. An American trapped in Russia since adolescence, he has been serving in the Red Army and posing as a Soviet citizen to protect himself. For him, Russia's war is not over, and both victory and defeat will mean certain death. As the Second World War moves into its spectacular close, Tatiana and Alexander are surrounded by the ghosts of their past and each other. They must struggle against destiny and despair as they find themselves in the fight of their lives. A master of the historical epic, Paullina Simons takes us on a journey across continents, time, and the entire breadth of human emotion, to create a heartrendingly beautiful love story that will live on long after the final page is turned.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted tale of a troubled Moscow printworks . Frank Reid had been born and brought up in Moscow. His father had emigrated there in the 1870s and started a print-works which, by 1913, had shrunk from what it was when Frank inherited it. In that same year, to add to his troubles, Frank’s wife Nellie caught the train back home to England, without explanation. How is a reasonable man like Frank to cope? How should he keep his house running? Should he consult the Anglican chaplain’s wife? Should he listen to the Tolstoyan advice of his chief book-keeper? How do people live together, and what happens when, sometimes, they don’t?

The whole of the magnificent Riftwar Cycle by bestselling author Raymond E. Feist, master of magic and adventure, now available in ebook Jimmy the Hand, boy thief of Krondor, lived in the shadows of the city. The sewers were his byways and a flea-ridden, rat-infested cellar his home. Although gifted beyond his peers, he was still but a nimble street urchin, a pickpocket with potential. Until the day he met Prince Arutha. Aiding the Prince in his rescue of Princess Anita from imprisonment by Duke Guy du Bas-Tyra, Jimmy runs afoul of Black Guy's secret police. Given the choice of disappearing on his own or in a weighted barrel at the bottom of Krondor's harbor, Jimmy flees the only home he's ever known, venturing south to the relatively safe haven of Land's End. Suspecting that the rural villagers have never encountered a lad with his talent and nose for finding wealth—other people's wealth—he's fairly optimistic about his broadening horizons. But Jimmy is completely unprepared for what greets him. For Land's End is home to others who tread the crooked path, and more, to a much darker secret: a dangerous presence unknown even to the local thieves and smugglers. And Jimmy's youthful bravado and courage will plunge him deep into the maw of chaos and even—if he isn't careful—death.

Winner of the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year…’Reginald Hill is on stunning form…the climax is devastating’ Marcel Berlins, The Times When Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel witnesses a bizarre murder across the street from his own back garden, he is quite sure who the culprit is. After all, he’s got to believe what he sees with his own eyes. But what exactly does he see? And is he mistaken? Peter Pascoe thinks so. Dalziel senses the doubters around him, which only strengthens his resolve. To make matters worse, he’s being pestered by an anonymous letter-writer, threatening suicide. Worse still, Pascoe seems intent on reminding him of the fact. Meanwhile, the effervescent Eileen Chung is directing the Mystery Plays. And who does she have in mind for God? Daziel, of course. He shouldn’t have too much difficulty acting the part…

‘Humour and topicality along a cold enigmatic trail of murder’ Observer Life is on the up for Patrick Aldermann: his Great Aunt Florence has collapsed into her rose bed leaving him Rosemont House with its splendid gardens. But when his boss, ‘Dandy’ Dick Elgood, suggests to Peter Pascoe that Aldermann is a murderer – then later retracts the accusation – the detective inspector is left with a thorny problem. Not only have the police already dug up some interesting information about Aldermann’s beautiful wife; it also appears that his rapid promotion has been helped by the convenient deaths of some of his colleagues…

‘One of the modern masters of the police procedural’ Sunday Telegraph Peter Pascoe is in shock. A weekend in the country with old friends turns into a nightmare when he finds three of them dead and the missing fourth a prime suspect in the eyes of the local police. They want his cooperation, but Superintendent Dalziel needs him back in Yorkshire where a string of unsolved burglaries looks like turning nasty. As events unfold, though, the two cases seem to be getting entwined…

A compelling portrait of 1960s America that takes as its starting point the brutal events of 11 March 1963, the day on which the lives of three complete strangers – a black handyman, an Italian-American carpenter and a second-generation Jewish housewife – collided in the leafy Boston suburb of Belmont. These three people did not know one another, but, by the end of the day, the housewife had been raped and strangled, the handyman had been arrested on suspicion of being the notorious Boston Strangler, and the real Boston Strangler – carpenter Al DeSalvo – had returned home to his wife and children. It was not until two years later that DeSalvo admitted to the gruesomely violent murders of thirteen women. Also unwittingly drawn into the drama were one-year-old Sebastian Junger's own family, who posed for a photograph with DeSalvo the day after the Belmont strangling, at the completion of his work on their studio. Taking the chilling family snap as his inspiration, Junger explores the worlds of the three protagonists and, in so doing, creates a portrait of America in the 1960s that touches on the historic themes of the era: the assassination of JFK, the rise of the immigrants and the troubling race relations that prefigured the death of Martin Luther King. This new work by Sebastian Junger, the acclaimed author of ‘Perfect Storm’ and ‘Fire’, is as enlightening as it is haunting. Taking as its foundation the events that shocked a quiet community in 1963, ‘A Death in Belmont’ expands to encompass an entire nation at a time of extraordinary social turmoil.

Dark, intense and utterly compelling, Black Dog was an extraordinary first novel from a writer who has rapidly become the most promising crime author to emerge in the genre in years. ‘Where Cooper stood was remote and isolated… but the smell that lingered under the trees was of blood’ The long hot Peak District summer came to an end when they found Laura Vernon's body. But for local policeman Ben Cooper the work has just begun. His community is hiding a young girl’s killer and a past as dark as the Derbyshire night. It seems Laura was the keeper of secrets beyond her years and, in a case where no-one is innocent, everyone is a suspect. But Cooper’s local knowledge and instincts are about to face an even greater challenge. The ambitious DC Diane Fry has been called in from another division, a woman as ruthless as she is attractive…

A death in the family-from-hell bring Detectives Fry and Cooper to a remote and unfriendly rural community in their fourth psychological thriller. 'And as it grew dark, Withens became almost entirely silent. Except for the screaming.' A small village in the Peak District, Withens is troubled by theft and vandalism, mostly generated by local family-from-hell, the Oxleys. Now it is the focus of a murder investigation – a man's body has been found on the bleak moors nearby, and the man is an Oxley. To crack the case, DC Ben Cooper must break open the delinquent clan. His boss, DS Diane Fry, is also in Withens. Grim new evidence has turned up in the case of a missing student but her parents refuse to believe she could be dead. The darkness in Withens's heart is growing. And things are only going to get nastier…

The book beaches were made for. The Balcon sisters are London's paparazzi darlings. Serena, the country's most beautiful actress, Venetia the glamorous designer, Camilla the rising political star and Cate the feisty magazine editor. They have wealth, privilege and sizzling sex lives. But money doesn't buy you love. When their aristocratic and tyrannical father Oswald Balcon is found dead, the finger of suspicion points towards his glamorous daughters and their dazzling lives. Suddenly we find that beneath the ritzy fa?ade of the Balcon family lies a web of deceit and betrayal that hides a thirty-year-old secret that threatens to destroy them all. From the sun drenched beaches of Mustique to Manhattan's elite society circuit. From the exclusive fashion houses of Milan to the star-studded streets of Cannes, the Balcon Sisters play out their lives in a whirl of glitz and the ultra chic. But as tragedy and danger stalks each one of them, the scene is set for a stunning climax.

A stunning and poignant account of an extraordinary teacher's determination from the author of the #1 Sunday Times bestsellers The Tiger's Child and One Child. Jadie never spoke, never laughed, never cried. She spent every waking hour locked in her own private world of shadows. But nothing in Torey Hayden's experience had prepared her for the nightmare Jadie revealed to her when finally persuaded to break her self-imposed silence. It was a story too painful, too horrific for Hayden's professional colleagues to acknowledge. But Torey Hayden could not close her ears… or her heart. A little girl was trapped in a living hell of unspeakable memories. And it would take every ounce of courage, compassion, and love that one remarkable teacher possessed to rid the "Ghost Girl" of the malevolent spirits that haunted her.

From the author of Sunday Times bestsellers One Child and Ghost Girl comes a heartbreaking story of one teacher's determination to turn a chaotic group of damaged children into a family. They were all just "somebody else's kids" – four problem children placed in Torey Hayden's class because nobody knew what else to do with them. They were a motley group of kids in great pain: a small boy who echoed other people's words and repeated weather forecast; a beautiful seven-year-old girl brain damaged by savage parental beatings; an angry ten-year-old who had watched his stepmother murder his father; a shy twelve-year-old who had been cast out of Catholic school when she became pregnant. But they shared one thing in common: a remarkable teacher who would never stop caring – and who would share with them the love and understanding they had never known to help them become a family.

3 women. 1 wedding. Whose big day is it anyway…? Grab your big hat and pearls for the funniest read of the year, a must-read for fans of Carole Matthews and Jane Green. Molly Foster's daughter Jess is getting married… To Molly's delight - and surprise. And with Molly's show featuring a wedding countdown, the whole town of Wells-next-the Sea is ecstatic - even as Molly worries that groom-to-be Max's commitment may not be all it seems… Meanwhile, Jess's control freak step-mother Marnie is determined to turn the event into a chi-chi society bash - a world away from the day that Jess envisaged. But does Jess really know what she wants? Especially when she meets the gorgeous Oliver… Though there's no going back now - is there? Can Jess take back control of her wedding - or will the mothers of the bride run the show?

The stunning conclusion to a powerful epic fantasy from the worldwide bestselling author of the Saga of the Pliocene Exile. For sixteen years King Conrig Ironcrown has ruled High Blenholme, battling both to preserve the Sovereignty he ruthlessly established over the four provinces of the island kingdom and to repel the invading Salka monsters that threaten them all. His hope for the future is his heir, Prince Orrion, whose betrothal to a princess of the province of Didion should assure the future peace of High Blenholme. But Orrion has no interest in the girl, and is determined to marry instead his childhood sweetheart, Lady Nyla. Orrion's madcap twin, Corodon, dreams up a scheme to keep Orry and Nyla together by asking the supernatural Beaconfolk, who appear as lights in the sky, for a magical intercession. The twins are unaware that the Beaconfolk are fighting their own battle with others of their kind; to them all humans, even princes, are but pawns to be used in their own conflict. Their granting of Orrion's wish comes in a manner the twins far from expected, and precipitates chaotic infighting amongst the folk of High Blenholme. As battles rage both on the ground and in the sky, the only hopes for peace can be found deep in King Conrig’s murky past. His former spy, Deveron Austrey, has secret magical powers and no love for the Beaconfolk. And while many of his subjects no longer remember the King's first wife, Maudrayne, she has never forgotten that her son is the true heir to the throne of High Blenholme.

Book twelve of the celebrated Deverry series, an epic fantasy rooted in Celtic mythology that intricately interweaves human and elven history over several hundred years. The powerful dweomermaster Nevyn has been reincarnated, but young Neb knows nothing of his previous life. Orphaned following a cholera epidemic, Neb and his younger brother arrive at the desolate farm of their last living relative and soon learn that a worse plague lurks beyond the western border of Deverry. The savage Horsekin tribes, spurred on by their new goddess, Alshandra, are raiding the villages and taking slaves as the first step in their plans to destroy both the nomadic Westfolk and the Deverrian farmers. Neb finds love and danger as he and his soulmate Branna are drawn inexorably into a war for the survival of the kingdom itself. Although they have powerful allies in the Westfolk dweomermasters Dallandra and Salamander, they are also facing mighty enemies, enemies that they have fought before in the past lives that they no longer remember… Intricately interweaving human and elvish history over several hundred years, Katharine Kerr's enthralling and moving tale of extraordinary characters living their many lives through exceptional times is epic fantasy on truly a grand scale.

When TV talkshow host Elias Claymore is accused of raping a 19-year-old girl he turns to his friend Alex Sadaka to defend him. But Alex has a fight on his hands, for Claymore – a former Black Power activist – is anything but squeaky clean and this time even the DNA evidence is stacked against him. Forced to share the defence with a lawyer from Claymore’s insurance firm, Alex must battle his way through jury tampering, conflicts of interest and vicious hate mail to uncover the truth. With Claymore a vulnerable target in prison and the prosecution scenting blood, Alex knows that time is running out. Could it be that this time there is No Way Out? Prepare to lose sleep with this breakneck thriller for fans of John Grisham and Jeff Abbott.

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.

Build Machine Learning models with a sound statistical understanding. About This Book ? Learn about the statistics behind powerful predictive models with p-value, ANOVA, and F- statistics. ? Implement statistical computations programmatically for supervised and unsupervised learning through K-means clustering. ? Master the statistical aspect of Machine Learning with the help of this example-rich guide to R and Python. Who This Book Is For This book is intended for developers with little to no background in statistics, who want to implement Machine Learning in their systems. Some programming knowledge in R or Python will be useful. What You Will Learn ? Understand the Statistical and Machine Learning fundamentals necessary to build models ? Understand the major differences and parallels between the statistical way and the Machine Learning way to solve problems ? Learn how to prepare data and feed models by using the appropriate Machine Learning algorithms from the more-than-adequate R and Python packages ? Analyze the results and tune the model appropriately to your own predictive goals ? Understand the concepts of required statistics for Machine Learning ? Introduce yourself to necessary fundamentals required for building supervised & unsupervised deep learning models ? Learn reinforcement learning and its application in the field of artificial intelligence domain In Detail Complex statistics in Machine Learning worry a lot of developers. Knowing statistics helps you build strong Machine Learning models that are optimized for a given problem statement. This book will teach you all it takes to perform complex statistical computations required for Machine Learning. You will gain information on statistics behind supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and more. Understand the real-world examples that discuss the statistical side of Machine Learning and familiarize yourself with it. You will also design programs for performing tasks such as model, parameter fitting, regression, classification, density collection, and more. By the end of the book, you will have mastered the required statistics for Machine Learning and will be able to apply your new skills to any sort of industry problem. Style and approach This practical, step-by-step guide will give you an understanding of the Statistical and Machine Learning fundamentals you'll need to build models.

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.

Harness the power of Scala to program Spark and analyze tonnes of data in the blink of an eye! About This Book ? Learn Scala’s sophisticated type system that combines Functional Programming and object-oriented concepts ? Work on a wide array of applications, from simple batch jobs to stream processing and machine learning ? Explore the most common as well as some complex use-cases to perform large-scale data analysis with Spark Who This Book Is For Anyone who wishes to learn how to perform data analysis by harnessing the power of Spark will find this book extremely useful. No knowledge of Spark or Scala is assumed, although prior programming experience (especially with other JVM languages) will be useful to pick up concepts quicker. What You Will Learn ? Understand object-oriented & functional programming concepts of Scala ? In-depth understanding of Scala collection APIs ? Work with RDD and DataFrame to learn Spark’s core abstractions ? Analysing structured and unstructured data using SparkSQL and GraphX ? Scalable and fault-tolerant streaming application development using Spark structured streaming ? Learn machine-learning best practices for classification, regression, dimensionality reduction, and recommendation system to build predictive models with widely used algorithms in Spark MLlib & ML ? Build clustering models to cluster a vast amount of data ? Understand tuning, debugging, and monitoring Spark applications ? Deploy Spark applications on real clusters in Standalone, Mesos, and YARN In Detail Scala has been observing wide adoption over the past few years, especially in the field of data science and analytics. Spark, built on Scala, has gained a lot of recognition and is being used widely in productions. Thus, if you want to leverage the power of Scala and Spark to make sense of big data, this book is for you. The first part introduces you to Scala, helping you understand the object-oriented and functional programming concepts needed for Spark application development. It then moves on to Spark to cover the basic abstractions using RDD and DataFrame. This will help you develop scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications by analyzing structured and unstructured data using SparkSQL, GraphX, and Spark structured streaming. Finally, the book moves on to some advanced topics, such as monitoring, configuration, debugging, testing, and deployment. You will also learn how to develop Spark applications using SparkR and PySpark APIs, interactive data analytics using Zeppelin, and in-memory data processing with Alluxio. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of Spark, and you will be able to perform full-stack data analytics with a feel that no amount of data is too big. Style and approach Filled with practical examples and use cases, this book will hot only help you get up and running with Spark, but will also take you farther down the road to becoming a data scientist.