It was the perfect murder. There were no suspects and the trail had gone cold. Then writer Krystian Bala retold the story in chilling detail in his first novel. Not so clever. The police took note, and earlier this month he was jailed for 25 years
By Elizabeth Day
It seems curious, given the circumstances, that Krystian Bala should feel the need to be polite. When a man is serving 25 years for murder, you do not expect him to apologize for smoking a cigarette.

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He Jing-han keeps the bagua quan tradition alive in Taiwan
By Jules Quartly
Taiwan is a repository of martial arts that originated in China. Self-defense was necessary for early settlers from China and this flow of martial artists and related knowledge into the country turned into a flood after World War II.

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The institute does away with conventional textbooks, favoring instead a curriculum that has produced competition-winning chefs and highly motivated students
By Ho Yi
The rain was pouring Monday afternoon, but that didn't dampen the excitement and anticipation pervading the well-equipped kitchen at the Taipei Kai-Ping Culinary School (台北市開平餐飲學校). Ten international teams of high school students from Taiwan, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, the Philippines and New Caledonia prepared for the International Secondary School Culinary Challenge rehearsal competition.

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[ MOTORING ]:
The scooter, which turns heads quietly, also uses electricity sparingly - saving money and the environment
By Adrian Tempany
In the months following the July 7 terror attacks on London's public transport system, the city began to resemble a city preparing not for the Olympics but for Wacky Races. The stream of cyclists puffing their way through the capital were joined by an odd procession of rollerbladers, skaters and dizzy scooter virgins. As one seasoned biker friend put it: "the bomb-dodgers have arrived."

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[ HARDCOVER: US ]: After a death, an old statue of the Virgin Mary must pass to a member of the younger generation, leading the Doyles to explore privilege and prejudice
By JANET MASLIN
To appreciate the silken agility with which Ann Patchett constructs her fiction, consider the way the opening sequence in her new novel, Run, invokes the Virgin Mary. On the book's first page Patchett reveals that one of her story's central characters, Bernadette Doyle, died two weeks earlier. Now Bernadette's sisters have arrived to grapple with a family tradition.

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[ HARDCOVER: US ]: After nearly two decades as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan publishes his memoir - but ends up talking more about others than himself
By DAVID LEONHARDT
In 1944 a draft board in downtown Manhattan rejected Alan Greenspan, then a recent high school graduate, for military service because he had a spot on his lung that looked like it might be tuberculosis. So Greenspan, suddenly without a plan for the future, auditioned to play clarinet for the trumpeter Henry Jerome's traveling big band.

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SOFT COVER:
FICTION

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