Wednesday 13 June 2012

Forthcoming books to look forward to from Bloomsbury


The Geneva Trap is the latest book in the series to feature Liz Carlyle by Stella Rimington and is due to be published in July 2012.  Geneva, 2012.  When a Russian intelligence officer approaches MI5 with vital information about the imminent cyber-sabotage of an Anglo-American Defence programme, he refuses to talk to anyone but Liz Carlyle.  But who is he, and what is his connection to the British agent?  At a tracking station in Nevada, US Navy officers watch in horror as one of their unmanned drones plummets out of the sky, and panic spreads through the British and American Intelligence services.  Is this a Russian plot to disable the West's defences?  Or is the threat coming from elsewhere?  As Liz and her team hunt for a mole inside the MOD, the trail leads them from Geneva, to Marseilles and into a labyrinth of international intrigue, in a race against time to stop the Cold War heating up once again...

A humid summer night in Gibraltar.  Lawyer Spike Sanguinetti arrives home to find an old friend, Solomon Hassan, waiting on his doorstep.  Solomon is on the run.  A Spanish girl has been found with her throat cut on a beach in Tangiers and he is accused of her murder.  He has managed to skip across the Straits but the Moroccan authorities want him back.  Spike travels to Tangiers to try to delay Solomon's extradition, and there meets a beautiful Bedouin girl.  Zahra is investigating the disappearance of her father, a trail which leads mysteriously back to Solomon.  Questioning how well he really knows his friend, Spike finds himself drawn into a dangerous game of secrets, corruption and murderous lies. Shadow of the Rock is the debut novel by Thomas Mogford and is due to be published in August 2012.

The Sound of things Falling is by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and is due to be published in November 2012.  No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde than disaffected young Colombian lawyer Antonio Yammara realises that his new friend has a secret, or rather several secrets.  Antonio's fascination with the life of ex-pilot Ricardo Laverde begins by casual acquaintance in a seedy Bogota billiard hall and grows until the day Ricardo receives a cassette tape in an unmarked envelope.  Asking Antonio to find him somewhere private to play it, they go to a library.  The first time he glances up from his seat in the next booth, Antonio sees tears running down Laverde's cheeks; the next, the ex-pilot has gone.  Shortly afterwards, Ricardo is shot dead on a street corner in Bogota by a guy on the back of a motorbike and Antonio is caught in the hail of bullets.  Lucky to survive, and more out of love with life than ever, he starts asking questions until the questions become an obsession that leads him to Laverde's daughter.  His troubled investigation leads all the way back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped a whole generation of Colombians in a living nightmare of fear and random death.


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