Critical Mass, Sara Paretsky

V.I. Warshawski, or Vic to her friends is drawn into the investigation of a missing meth addict and her genius son.

Vic’s long term friend Dr. Lotty Herschel shares a past with the missing woman’s grandmother who refused point blank to let her grandson Martin go to college. What seems like a simple addict on the run case turns complicated as Vic uncovers connections between the great grand mother and a nobel winning Austrian scientist who worked on the Manhattan project and her investigation is ruffling some pretty high level feathers…

The Carpet People, Terry Pratchett

When Terry Pratchett was seventeen he wrote a version of this story, it ran as a serial in the Childrens Circle section of the Bucks Free Press where young Pratchett worked and was published as a longer novel in 1971. Who else but Pratchett (who went on to create the discworld series) could set an entire story inside a carpet?

Various tribes live within the carpet, power hungry Mouls, cerebral Wights, and Munrungs who while not power hungry do love a good skirmish, but every carpet dweller is in awe of ‘Fray’. It sweeps across the carpet, flattening settlements without warning and setting two brothers and their tribe off on the adventure of a lifetime. Laced with the trademark humour of the disc world novels and illustrated by the author, good clean fun.