Guy Smith: 100 books

The Welsh coast basks in summer tranquility. Then the 'drownings' begin. But not until the monstrous crustaceans crawl ashore, their pincers poised for destruction, does the world understand the threat it faces. A seafood cocktail for the strongest stomachs.

The Girls Listened Intently. The wetlands were silver and shadow in the moonlight. The salt marsh grasses rustled. Out on the mudflats, curlews called mournfully. The Girl Shivered. The incoming tide trickled and lapped up hidden creeks. Soon the wildfowl would be winging down, the waders feeding...

They lurched out of the water - moon-driven, coldly mad in their need to destroy, to kill, to eat. In their hundreds, huge and evil, they crawled, waving their claws of death, feeling their way towards their prey...

Mel Timberley, professional lorry driver, swerves to avoid a hare and crashes into Claerwen Reservoir, polluting the entire water supply of Birmingham with the most deadly weedkiller ever created. Ron Blythe was the chemist who helped to create the spray and now, with thousands of people suffering...

Centuries have passed since that terrible night of reckoning, but still the dark shadow hangs over a Scottish valley. Bob Coyle believes that his home town is menaced by a new centre for disposing of nuclear waste - a lethally dangerous project he calls 'Holocaust'. Yet his efforts to alert the people...

Number thirteen Schooner Street was a typical terraced house in an up-and-coming area of south London - or so John and Leah Strike thought when they first moved in with their children. But then he nightmares started - vivid, harrowing images of gruesome violence that tore into their consciousness...

Relentlessly, silently, the snow fell, shrouding the hills. Already the village was completely cut off, no on able to get out, no help able to get in. Well stocked up with food and fuel, they should have been able to survive. But this time everything was different. This time there was something more...

It the ruined castle in the Highlands is a blatant tourist trap, its dungeons stuffed with fake horrors. The Werewolf, the Cannibal, the Torturer, the Executioner, the Vampire … all are worked by electricity for cheap thrills. At first. But real evil has lurked for centuries beneath the vaults....

Mingo Junction, a working-class town in the upper Ohio River Valley, has a rich mix of ethnicities and races with a history going back to the Mingo Indians, including visits from George Washington in the 1770s. Early settlement came as the coal mining industry flourished, followed by iron and steel foundries...

Ann Rawsthorne takes up her new appointment as arts teacher at a private school in the Highlands of Scotland, expecting a quiet and lonely time. She finds life is anything but quiet, with boys falling into bogs and dying on the games field, none of which is helped one jot by the headmaster, who seems...

This text is designed to help managers who have to deal with a complex environment, and who are often presented with "ready-made" solutions as to how to best organize their firm, to best use information technology. The book presents a simple and attractive framework within which managers...

The slowly decaying corpse lay on the bed in the Kremlin. The icy silence of a news blackout lending a chilling unreality to an occasion of monumental significance. For the Russian leader is dead. A shape, blacker than the shadows; a thing that smelled of putrefacation and emanated a coldness beyond...

The 1970s have largely been overlooked in scholarly studies of the Cuban Revolution, or, at the very least, dismissed simply as a period of “Sovietization” characterized by widespread bureaucratization, institutionalization, and adherence to Soviet orthodoxy. Consequently, scant research exists...

Slowly the snake slithered over his helpless body. Eyes, cold and unblinking, stared into his eyes. The long, long body dragged heavily across his throat. As he gulped in terror he could feel the dry rasp of scales against his Adam's Apple. Then, the sudden searing strike, the teeth sharp in his...