Monday 14 May 2018

Books to Look Forward to From Quercus, Riverrun and Maclehose Press


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July 2018

Captain Damian Seeker has gone north. Charged with preparing the way for the rule of the major generals, he is now under the command of Colonel Robert Lilburne at York. But when Lilburne orders him to a small village on the North York moors with details of the stringent new anti-Royalist laws, Seeker finds that what should be a routine visit will reveal a plot to rival anything in scheming London.  An invitation to dinner at the house of local businessman Matthew Pullan lifts the lid on the bubbling cauldron of grudges and resentment that is Faithly village. The local constable, drunk on the tiny bit of power he holds, using it to avenge old resentments. The hated lord of the manor, the last of a staunchly Royalist family who has managed to avoid suspicion of treachery - for now. The vicar on trial for his job and his home, accused of ungodly acts. And the Pullans themselves, proudly Puritan but disillusioned with Cromwell's government, respected and despised in Faithly in equal measure. The man for whom this unlikely gathering was organised - The Trier, the enforcer of Puritan morality for the local villages - hasn't shown up. And by the end of the night, on of those gathered around Matthew Pullan's table will be fatally poisoned.  Seeker must find out the motive behind the death - mushroom misidentification, petty revenge, or part of a larger plot against Cromwell's government in the north? But who in Faithly, if anyone, can he trust? And when the most painful part of his past reappears after eleven years, will the Seeker meet his match? Destroying Angel is by S G Maclean

Believe Me is by J P Delenay.  I'm just an actress. I wanted to stand on a stage and have people applaud. How on earth did I get into all this?Claire Wright likes to play other people. A struggling British actress, in New York without a green card, Claire needs work. She takes the only part she's offered: as a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers, hired to entrap straying husbands, catching them on tape with their seductive propositions. The rules?  Never hit on them directly. Make it clear you're available, but they have to proposition you, not the other way around. The firm is after evidence, not entrapment. The innocent should have nothing to hide.  Then the game changes.  When the police start investigating one of Claire's targets for murdering his wife - and potentially others too - they ask her to help lure their suspect into a confession. Claire can do this. She assumes a voice and an attitude, something from an old film noir. A master class in deception. But who's deceiving who?  And that's when Claire realises she's playing the deadliest role of her life. 

July 1983, Essex. Fox Farm is, thanks to two corpses, neither picturesque nor peaceful. The body in its kitchen belongs to eminent historian Christopher Cliff, who has taken his own life with an antique shotgun. The second, found on the property boundary, remains unidentified.  DI Nick Lowry's summer is neither sleepy nor serene. And the two deaths are just the half of it. The fact County Chief Merrydown was a college friend of Cliff's means Lowry is now, in turn, under scrutiny from his severely stressed and singularly unsympathetic boss, Sparks.  To catalyse his investigation, Lowry enlists the services of DC Daniel Kenton and WPC Jane Gabriel. Gabriel needs direction, if she is to begin a career as a detective. While Kenton, who appears solely focused on beginning a relationship with Gabriel, needs distraction.  Both the heat and the investigation soon intensify. The team find themselves interrogating enigmatic neighbours, antiques merchants, jilted lovers and wronged relatives; all the while negotiating the caprices of Sparks - whose attitudes remain as dated as Fox Farm's antiques.  Only when they fully open their eyes and minds will they begin to unpick a web of rural rituals, dodgy dealings and fragmented families - and uncover not just one murder, but two.  Yellowhammer is by James Henry.

Stick Together is by Sophie Hénaff.  After their successful solving of three cold cases exposing corruption at the very highest level of the Paris police force, Anne Capestan's squad of misfits and no-hopers should be in a celebratory mood. However, now despised by their colleagues at 36 quai des Orfevres and worried for their future, morale has never been lower among the members of the Awkward Squad.and  Capestan does her best to motivate her troops, but even she cannot maintain a cheerful facade when she has to investigate the murder of Commissaire Serge Rufus, the father of her ex-husband. Worse, it soon appears that his murder is linked to two other victims, both of whom were warned by the killer before they struck . . .

August 2018

After an attempted assassination of a prominent minister goes spectacularly wrong, No sooner has Akyl Borubaev been reinstated as an Inspector in the Bishkek Murder Squad than he's suspended for alleged serious crimes against the state. Akyl is a fugitive from his former colleagues and involved with one of Kyrgyzstan's most dangerous criminals.  On the run, caught up in an illegal scheme that can only end badly, it's time for Akyl to take a stand for everything he believes in.  An Autumn Hunting is by Tom Callaghan.


A Summer of Murder is by Oliver Bottini.  When the fire brigade is called to a burning shed in the Black Forest idyll of Kirchzarten, a volunteer is killed as a weapons cache beneath it explodes. Louise Boni, back with Freiburg Kripo after treatment and recuperation for her alcoholism, is assigned to the task force dealing with this case. The meagre evidence they have points to a possible connection with German neo-Nazis or illegal arms dealers from the former Yugoslavia, while the arrival of secret service agents suggests more is at stake. For Louise to solve the riddle she needs to overcome the ghosts of her past that continue to haunt her.

September 2018

'Island of the Lost was the isle's name long before the hospital was built. In winter, they say the fog falls so heavy there that you can't see your hand in front of your face. Storms rage so forcefully you can be blown from the cliffs. Once St. Christina's was built, the name took on a new meaning. Very few who went into that place ever left.'


Christmas day, and DCI Tom Reynolds receives an alarming call. A mass grave has been discovered on Oilean na Caillte, the island which housed the controversial psychiatric institution St. Christina's. The hospital has been closed for decades and onsite graves were tragically common. Reynolds thinks his adversarial boss is handing him a cold case to side line him.  But then it transpires another body has been discovered amongst the dead - one of the doctors who went missing from the hospital in mysterious circumstances forty years ago. He appears to have been brutally murdered.  As events take a sudden turn, nothing can prepare Reynolds and his team for what they are about to discover once they arrive on the island . . . The Darkest Place is by Jo Spain. 

Alain Delambre is a 57-year-old former HR executive, drained by four years of hopeless unemployment.  All he is offered are small, demoralizing jobs. He has reached his very lowest ebb, and can see no way out.  So when a major company finally invites him to an interview, Alain Delambre is ready to do anything, borrow money, shame his wife and his daughters and even participate in the ultimate recruitment test: a role-playing game that involves hostage-taking.  Alain Delambre commits body and soul in this struggle to regain his dignity.  But if he suddenly realised that the dice had been loaded against him from the start, his fury would be limitless.  And what began as a role-play game could quickly become a bloodbath. Inhuman Resources is by Pierre Lemaitre.

October 2018

Leave No Trace is by Mindy Mejia. Ten years after a boy and his father went missing in the wilderness of Minnesota's Boundary Waters, the boy - who is no longer a boy - walks back out of the forest. He is violent and uncommunicative. The authorities take him to Congdon Mental Institution in Duluth, on the edge of mighty Lake Superior.There, language therapist Maya Stark is given the task of making a connection with this boy/man who came back from the dead. But their celebrity patient tries to escape and refuses to answer any questions about his father or the last ten years of his life. In many ways he is old far beyond his years; in others, still a child.  But Maya, who was abandoned by her own mother, has secrets, too. And as she's drawn closer to this enigmatic boy, she'll risk everything to reunite him with his father who has disappeared from the known world - but at what cost to herself?

The Burning House is by Neil Spring.  It was a victimless crime...  Estate Agent Clara is struggling to make a sale. With her abusive ex-husband on the brink of finding where she's hiding, she needs to make a commission soon or lose her chance to escape.  Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness has remained unsold for years, and Clara is sure that an 'innocent' fire will force the price down. But the perfect crime soon turns into the perfect nightmare: there was a witness, a stranger in the village, and he's not going to let Clara get away with it…. 

When one Israeli citizen disappears from Charles de Gaulle airport with a woman in a red dress, you could put it down to youthful indiscretion.   When a second from the same flight is disappeared from his hotel room by a girl with a gun, you might just have a diplomatic crisis on your hands.  Enter Colonel Abadi, recently appointed head of the special branch of Unit 8200, Israel's most secretive intelligence service.  His only allies are his deputy back in Israel, the dazzling and hot-headed Lieutenant Orianna Talmor, and a hungover French detective, hung out to dry by his superiors.  Together they face a squad of ruthless Chinese commandos who have no qualms about leaving Paris littered with bodies.  And then there are their enemies in the Paris establishment and the labyrinthine, back-stabbing Israeli intelligence community.  All in all, it could be a long night.  A Long Night in Paris by Dov Aflon.

November 2018

Bloodline is by Nigel McCrery. When Isabel, a British university student, travels to a remote Spanish town it isn't only to enjoy the atmosphere. It's also to trace how and why her family name might have derived from the town, a quest her father, Sebastian made nine years ago, not long before his death in a car accident. But as Isabel, aided by local guide Mauricio, starts digging into her family's possible links with Alarcon, she's unprepared for the dark secrets uncovered; secrets that the current ruling nobility of Alarcon are keen to keep buried.Ten days into her stay in Alarcon, Isabel mysteriously disappears, presumed dead. Inspector Mark Lapslie and DC Emma Bradbury are sent out to investigate alongside the local Spanish police. A possible gangland link is suspected - Isabel's stepfather in Valencia is a retired British gangster and a mob-hitman from Malaga is identified in Alarcon at the time of Isabel's disappearance. But Mauricio, suspects the Mayor's son, Dario, is the real culprit - to uncover the truth, Lapslie and Bradbury must delve into the murky, chequered past of Isabel's gangland stepfather while also following in her footsteps through Alarcon's dark and tempestuous history.

Clare Cassidy is no stranger to murder. As a literature teacher specialising in the Gothic writer RM Holland, she teaches a short course on it every year. Then Clare's life and work collide tragically when one of her colleagues is found dead, a line from an RM Holland story by her body. The investigating police detective is convinced the writer's works somehow hold the key to the case.  Not knowing who to trust, and afraid that the killer is someone she knows, Clare confides her darkest suspicions and fears about the case to her journal. Then one day she notices some other writing in the diary. Writing that isn't hers...  The Stranger Diaries is by Elly Griffiths.

December 2018

Village of Lost Girls is by Augustín Martínez.  Five years after their disappearance, the village of Monteperdido still mourns the loss of Ana and Lucia, two eleven-year-old friends who left school one afternoon and were never seen again. Now, Ana reappears unexpectedly inside a crashed car, wounded but alive and next to the body of a man.While the people of the village struggle to comprehend the startling turn of events, the case reopens and a race against time begins to discover the identity of the dead man and who was behind the girls' kidnapping. Most importantly, where is Lucia and is she still alive? Inspector Sara Campos and her boss Santiago Bain, who are called in from Madrid's head office, are forced to work with the local police. Five years ago fatal mistakes were made in the investigation conducted after the girls first vanished, and this mustn't happen again. But Monteperdido has rules of its own.


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