Найти книгу: "The Wild Geese"

Meg Langslow and Michael's house is serving as the marshalling point for the annual Caerphilly holiday parade. The theme is The Twelve Days of Christmas, and it features twelve drummers from the school's marching band, eleven bagpipers, ten leaping lords costumed in medieval finery from the college's drama department, and so on. There are also assorted floats, a live nativity scene on a flatbed truck, the three wise men on Caerphilly Zoo camels, and Santa in a bright-red horse-drawn sleigh. As the organizer, Meg's job is already hard enough, but when her nephew Eric, wide-eyed and ashen-faced, whispers Something's wrong with Santa…, things take a tragic turn. It turns out that the local curmudgeon, whose beard and belly made him a natural for the role, has been murdered. Now it's up to Meg and Chief Burke, who is playing one of the wise men, to tackle a two-fold mission: solve the murder and save Christmas.

This modern classic, written in 1913, was the source for the highly acclaimed film, The Mistress In The Wild Geese , prominent Japanese novelist Ogai Mori offers a poignant story of unfulfilled love, set against the background of the dizzying social change accompanying the fall of the Meiji regime. The young heroine, Otama, is forced by poverty to become a moneylender's mistress. She is surrounded by skillfully-drawn characters—her weak-willed father, her virile and calculating lover (and his suspicious wife), and the handsome student who is both the object of her desire and the symbol of her rescue—as well as a colorful procession of Meiji era figures—geisha, students, entertainers, unscrupulous matchmakers, shopkeepers, and greedy landladies.Like those around her, and like the wild geese of the titles, Otama yearns for the freedom of flight. Her dawning consciousness of her predicament brings the novel to a touching climax.