Reading Age: 5 to 12 Years

How easy is it for a man to simply disappear? When rural banker Richard Harper is reported missing, DSS John (Archie) Baldrick and DC Ben Travers are drawn into the increasingly complex details of the man's life. Would Harper really have chosen to leave his seriously ill wife, a...nd abandon his pregnant girlfriend? Or is there a real threat behind the abusive emails he'd been receiving from disgruntled and desperate clients in the wake of the GFC? Archie's marriage is rocky and his two teenage daughters are giving him all sorts of trouble. By contrast, the frail but beautiful Helena Harper and her magnificent house offer an oasis of calm as Archie struggles to discover who is responsible for her husband's disappearance. Has he really been abducted, tortured or killed? Or is Richard Harper himself behind everything that has happened? Archie and Travers ultimately face a race against time as the case descends into a bewildering morass of obsession, violence and murder. "
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Tension rises in a hospital clinical coding office when beautiful Keely doesn't turn up for work. Everyone is worried. Or are they? Is Keely seen as a love rival by Emily who likes the handsome Nick and wants him to ask her out? Or is she unpopular because of someone's audit resu...lts? Then there's the manager's position, soon to be advertised. Keely is highly qualified and could get the job. Perhaps their current manager is worried she's not going to be rehired. Keely's best friend, Julie, faces danger while trying to unravel what has happened to her friend
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From the prize-winning author of Ring of Steel, a gripping history of the First World War's longest and most terrible siege In the autumn of 1914 Europe was at war. The battling powers had already suffered casualties on a scale previously unimaginable. On both the Western and Eas...tern fronts elaborate war plans lay in ruins and had been discarded in favour of desperate improvisation. In the West this resulted in the remorseless world of the trenches; in the East all eyes were focused on the old, beleaguered Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl.The siege that unfolded at Przemysl was the longest of the whole war. In the defence of the fortress and the struggle to relieve it Austria-Hungary suffered some 800,000 casualties. Almost unknown in the West, this was one of the great turning points of the conflict. If the Russians had broken through they could have invaded Central Europe, but by the time the fortress fell their strength was so sapped they could go no further.Alexander Watson, prize-winning author of Ring of Steel, has written one of the great epics of the First World War. Comparable to Stalingrad in 1942-3, Przemysl shaped the course of Europe's future. Neither Russians nor Austro-Hungarians ever recovered from their disasters. Using a huge range of sources, Watson brilliantly recreates a world of long-gone empires, broken armies and a cut-off community sliding into chaos. The siege was central to the war itself, but also a chilling harbinger of what would engulf the entire region in the coming decades, as nationalism, anti-semitism and an exterminatory fury took hold.
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No recent scientific enterprise has been so alluring, terrifying, and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. How intelligent are the best of today's AI programs? To what extent can we entrust them with decisions that affect our lives?... How human-like do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us in most, if not all, human endeavours? From leading AI researcher and award-winning author Melanie Mitchell comes a knowledgeable and captivating account of modern-day artificial intelligence. Flavoured with personal stories and a twist of humor, Artificial Intelligence illuminates the workings of machines that mimic human learning, perception, language, creativity and common sense. Weaving together advances in AI with cognitive science and philosophy, Mitchell probes the extent to which today's 'smart' machines can actually think or understand, and whether AI requires such elusive human qualities in order to be reliable, trustworthy and beneficial. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans provides readers with an accessible, entertaining, and clear-eyed view of the AI landscape, what the field has actually accomplished, how much further it has to go, and what it means for all of our futures.
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