Contains four classic stories featuring Thomas the Tank Engine which can be read along with the included compact disc.

In August, 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton, renowned explorer set sail with 27 men on his ship The Endurance. His plan was to be the first expedition to cross the Antarctic continent. Marooned on four feet of ice, in over 8,000 feet deep water, Shackleton and his crew survived some 635 days and nights, without proper shelter or rations, enduring the harshest conditions imaginable.

After a chance encounter with assassin Yassen Gregorovich in the South of France, teenage spy Alex Rider investigates international pop star and philanthropist Damian Cray whose new video game venture hides sinister motives involving Air Force One, nuclear missiles, and the international drug trade.

After recovering from a near fatal gunshot wound, teenage spy Alex Rider embarks on a new mission to stop a group of eco-terrorists from sabotaging the launch of the first outer space hotel.

While working with the Australian Secret Service on a dangerous mission, teenaged spy Alex Rider uncovers information about his parents.

Once a blacksmith, now famous and respected as a newspaperman, Valentine Clark knows everyone who is anyone in the racing world. Aged, confused, blind and dying, he harbors a daunting secret that he is desperate to be rid of.

The "hilt" of Francis's delightful 35th thriller refers to the jewel-encrusted, solid gold handle of the ceremonial sword of Scotland's would-be king, Bonnie Prince Charlie. A descendant of the Scottish earl to whom the prince gave the hilt, narrator Alexander Kinloch lives in an unelectrified bothy in the Scottish mountains, supporting himself through his paintings. Al's keen visual sense allows him to draw the faces of the four thugs who beat him...

In Eastvale, a young Middle Eastern boy is found dead, his body stuffed in a wheelbarrow on the East Side Estate. Detective Superintendent Banks and his team know they must tread carefully to solve this sensitive case. But tensions rise when they learn that the victim was stabbed somewhere else and dumped. Who is the boy, and where did he come from? Then, in a decayed area of Eastvale scheduled for redevelopment, a heroin addict is found dead. Was...

Recently recruited and trained as a special agent by M16, the British secret service, 14-year-old West Londoner Alex Rider is sent to infiltrate an ulta-private school where the rich and powerful send their uncontrollable, rebellious sons. What he discovers in the mountaintop fortress of the campus are enough armed guards to repel an invasion-and new classmates who have become eerie copies of each other in their compliantattitudes and actions.

"On a warm summer night, an attractive woman hurtles north in a blue Peugeot with a hastily scrawled address in her pocket, while, back in London, a desperate man leaves an urgent late-night phone message on his brother's answering machine. By sunrise the next morning, the woman is found inside her car along an otherwise peaceful country lane, shot, execution-style, through the head." "Welcome to the idyllic Yorkshire Dales, where Detective Inspector...