Readings.com.au: Readings Recommends: Crime Fiction

The Payback

Dennis Milne is a man with a past, and a past that involves murder. A former cop, he’s earned his living killing the bad guys – drug-dealers, corrupt business men - people who, in his opinion, deserve to die. For the past two days, he’s been in Manila, waiting for his next Target: a young woman who’s made herself some poor life-choices, and some even worse enemies.DI Tina Boyd is a woman on a mission. Tough, spiky and determined, she’s looking for the man she holds responsible for the death of her lover. She knows he’s ruthless. She knows he’s dangerous. But he’s in Manila, and she’s determined to find and kill him – before he kills her.Two cops with pasts that haunt them - and a present that could see them both dead. They are about to meet. And when they do, it’s payback time …

Already Gone

Jake Reese is an ordinary guy with an ordinary job, trying to block out the memory of his violent past by planning for the future with his new wife, Diane. But the past has a habit of refusing to stay buried… When two men attack Jake in a car park and cut off his ring finger, he tries to dismiss it as an unlucky case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when events take a more sinister turn and Diane goes missing, Jake knows he can no longer hide from the truth. As he embarks on a mission to find Diane, Jake finds himself dragged back into the life he thought he had walked away from forever and the days ahead begin to unfold in terrifying ways…

The Leopard

In the depths of winter, two young women are found dead, both drowned in their own blood. Inspector Harry Hole, deeply traumatised by an investigation that threatened the lives of those he holds most dear, initially wants nothing to do with the case but his instincts take over when a prominent MP is found brutally murdered.

The victims appear completely unconnected to one another, but it’s not long before Harry makes a discovery: the women all spent the night in the same isolated mountain hostel. And someone is picking off the guests, one by one...

This is the eighth book in the Harry Hole series.

Murder And Redemption

Syd Fielding is on a fishing trip when he hears a horrifying scream ... What he doesn′t yet know is that a young man is being fed to a saltwater crocodile. So begins MURDER AND REDEMPTION, an absorbing crime novel which follows in the traditions of Jon Cleary and Peter Temple. Moody and atmospheric, this novel takes us across the vast expanse of Western Australia, against a canvas of red iron ore mines, green seas, bulk ore carriers, ports, brothels, drugs and gangland violence.

Having survived a brutal childhood in Bindoon orphanage, a tour in Vietnam and a spiral into alcoholism, Syd Fielding is now a detective sergeant in Geraldton. But when two men from the same cargo ship are murdered, he is drawn into the murky world of drug trafficking through WA′s mining towns. His investigation takes him alarmingly close to home and he is forced to realise that even the people he loves may not be what they seem...

Death Comes To Pemberley

The year is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the Pemberley nursery, Elizabeth's beloved sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live within seventeen miles, the ordered and secure life of Pemberley seems unassailable, and Elizabeth's happiness in her marriage is complete. But their peace is threatened and old sins and misunderstandings are rekindled on the eve of the annual autumn ball. The Darcys and their guests are preparing to retire for the night when a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley's wild woodland, and as it pulls up, Lydia Wickham, an uninvited guest, tumbles out, screaming that her husband has been murdered.

In a pitch-perfect recreation of the world of Pride and Prejudice, P.D. James elegantly fuses her lifelong passion for the work of Jane Austen with her talent for writing detective fiction. She weaves a compelling story, combining a sensitive insight into the happy but threatened marriage of the Darcys and the excitement and suspense of a brilliantly crafted detective story.

Death Comes to Pemberley enshrines the qualities her readers have come to expect: psychological and emotional richness of characterisation, vivid evocation of place, and a credible and superbly structured plot, in a powerful and distinguished work of fiction.

Explosive Eighteen

The exciting new installment in the adventures of Stephanie Plum - it's gonna be dynamite!

Bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is used to danger and adventure; they follow her at every turn. But when international murder hits dangerously close to home, this could be more explosive than exciting...

Once Stephanie steps on the plane from Hawaii to Newark, she hopes to put her hellish holiday behind her. But when her seatmate mysteriously disappears during the stopover in LA - to be found later in a garbage can - things are only going to get worse. Only one other person has seen the missing photograph the dead man was supposed to be carrying - and it just so happens to be Stephanie Plum. Now she's the target, and she doesn't want to end up in a garbage can... More to the point, she still has to deal with the fallout from Hawaii. Both the men in her life refuse to talk about it and all Stephanie will say is... It's complicated.

No. 1 bestselling author Janet Evanovich is the recipient of the Crime Writers' Association's John Creasey Memorial, Last Laugh and Silver Dagger awards, as well as the Left Coast Crime's Lefty award, and is the two-time recipient of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's Dilys award. She lives in New Hampshire, where she is at work on her next Stephanie Plum adventure. Visit her website: http://www.evanovich.com.

Guilt

‘A cool, patient voice that draws the reader in. Von Schirach…has the talent to dazzle.’ - New York Times Book Review

A private boys’ school that harbours a gang of teenage exorcists.
A drug deal that goes bizarrely awry when a dog gets involved.
A couple who like to swing – until one partner hits the wall.
A brutal gang rape whose perpetrators are known but cannot be convicted.

Crimes, bad decisions, accidents and breaking points; acts of savagery, betrayal and self-sacrifice. In these stories Ferdinand von Schirach, one of Germany’s most prominent defence lawyers, presents the case for human fallibility. Calmly, rationally, he reveals to us the weave of circumstance that may trap our fellow citizen in his, or her, destiny. In doing so he shows us the criminal in ourselves.

The Bomber

Seven days. Three killings. And one woman who knows too much…

Crime reporter Annika Bengtzon is woken by a phonecall in the early hours of a wintry morning. An explosion has ripped apart the Olympic Stadium. And a victim has been blown to pieces.

As Annika delves into the details of the bombing and the background of the victim, there is a second explosion. These chilling crimes could be her biggest news story yet.

When her police source reveals they are hot on the heels of The Bomber, Annika is guaranteed an exclusive with her name on it. But it soon becomes clear that she has uncovered too much, as she finds herself the target of a deranged serial killer…

The Betrayal Of Trust

Freak weather and flash floods all over southern England. Lafferton is underwater and there is a landslip on the Moor... when the rain drains away the grave of a girl who went missing fifteenyears before is uncovered, and Simon Serailler is called in to investigate...

The Hidden Assassins

As Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon investigates a faceless corpse unearthed on a municipal dump, Seville is rocked by a massive explosion. An apartment block is destroyed, and when it′s discovered that its basement housed a mosque everybody′s terrorist fears are confirmed.

Panic sweeps the city, more bodies are dragged from rubble, the climate of fear infects everyone and terror invades the domestic life of flamboyant judge Calderon and the troubled mind of Consuelo, Falcon′s one-time lover.

With the media and political pressure intensifying, Falcon realizes all is not as it appears. But as he comes close to cracking a conspiracy, he discovers an even more terrifying plot - and the race is on to prevent a catastrophe far beyond Spain′s borders.

The Trinity Six

Still breathing, an aging man is declared dead in the middle of the night. The staff′s silence is bought, as his body is smuggled out of the hospital and away to a new life. An obituary describes Edward Crane as a ′resourceful career diplomat′. This much, at least, was true. His life, and disappearance, could solve the many unanswered questions still surrounding the infamous Cambridge spy ring.

Nearly two decades on, debt-ridden academic Samuel Gaddis needs a new project to help support his daughter after his latest book fails to make an impact. When a journalist friend asks for his help in researching a story which could rock the foundation of politics from London to Moscow, he can scarcely believe his luck. Within hours, she is dead, apparently from a sudden heart attack.

For both love and money, Sam takes over her investigation. He moves through a continent still echoing with decades of disinformation orchestrated from both sides of the Iron Curtain. While the world may have changed, when lies are all that keep the fragile peace, the truth is of no use to anyone with the power to hide it...

The Impossible Dead

Malcolm Fox and his team from Internal Affairs have been sent to Fife to investigate whether fellow cops covered up for a corrupt colleague, Detective Paul Carter. But what should be a simple job is soon complicated by intimations of conspiracy and cover-up - and a brutal murder, a murder committed with a weapon that should not even exist.

The spiralling investigation takes Fox back in time to 1985, a year of turmoil in British political life. Terrorists intent on a split between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom were becoming more brazen and ruthless, sending letter-bombs and poisonous spores to government offices, plotting kidnaps and murder and trying to stay one step ahead of the spies sent to flush them out.

Fox has a duty to get at the truth, while the body count rises, the clock starts ticking and he fights for his professional and personal life.

The Blackhouse

A brutal killing has taken place on Scotland's most remote island. Detective Fin Macleod is sent from Edinburgh to investigate. For Lewis-born Macleod, the case represents a journey both home and into his past.

But something lurks beneath the close-knit, God-fearing facade of the Lewis community. Something primal. As Fin investigates, old secrets are unearthed, and soon he, the hunter, becomes the hunted.

The Blackhouse is a crime novel of rare power and vision. Peter May has crafted a page-turning murder mystery that explores the darkness in our soul, and just how difficult it is to escape the past.

The Night Season

A city on flood alert, a killer on the rampage.

Heavy rains have burst the banks of the Willamette River; several people have died in the furiously rising waters ... but the latest victim didn't drown: She was killed before she went into the water. Soon, other victims are found, and Police Detective Archie Sheridan realizes that Portland has a new serial killer on its hands.

Reporter Susan Ward is on the story, but she's also got other leads to chase, and some secrets can be too frightening for prying eyes... With Archie following a bizarre trail of evidence, and Susan close behind, the pair must unearth the identity of a vicious murderer, and uncover the truth behind a mystery more than sixty years old ...

V Is For Vengeance

This is the latest unputdownable Kinsey Millhone mystery - The Sopranos meets The Thomas Crown Affair . Las Vegas, 1986. A young college graduate is murdered when he is unable to pay back a loan funded by notorious criminal Lorenzo Dante. Two years later private investigator Kinsey Millhone finds herself assisting to apprehend a shoplifter - Audrey Vance - in a shopping centre. Events take a much darker turn when Audrey's body is discovered beneath the Cold Spring Bridge, a local suicide spot. Unable to believe she took her own life, Audrey's fiance Marvin Striker hires Kinsey to investigate. It soon emerges that the shoplifter had become caught up in a much larger operation. Meanwhile Lorenzo Dante has begun to grow weary of his life in organised crime and frustrated with his violent and impulsive younger brother Cappi. While the police net begins to close in on him, Dante meets the beautiful Nora, who exerts a powerful pull over the gangster. As Kinsey's enquiries reach a dramatic head, it becomes clear that she and Dante have one thing in common - they must be careful who they trust...

Phantoms Of Breslau

It is 1919 in Breslau. The hideously battered bodies of four young sailors are discovered on an island in the River Oder. When Criminal Assistant Mock arrives at the scene to investigate, he discovers a note addressed to him, asking him to confess his sins and to become a believer. As he endeavours to piece together the elements of this brutal crime, Mock combs the brothels and drinking dens of Breslau and is drawn into an insidious game: it seems that anyone he questions during the course of the investigation is destined to become the murderer's next victim. Ultimately he uncovers a secret society which has the Inspector himself clearly in its sights.

Dark, sophisticated and uncompromising, the distinctive Breslau series has already received broad critical acclaim. Phantoms of Breslau confirms Criminal Assistant Mock as surely the most outrageous and original detective in crime fiction.

The Bloody Meadow

Captain Alexei Korolev returns...

Following his investigations in The Holy Thief, which implicated those at the very top of authority in Soviet Russia, Captain Alexei Korolev finds himself decorated and hailed as an example to all Soviet workers. But Korolev lives in an uneasy peace – his new-found knowledge is dangerous, and if it is discovered what his real actions were during the case, he will face deportation to the frozen camps of the far north.

But when the knock on the door comes, in the dead of night, it is not Siberia Korolev is destined for. Instead, Colonel Rodinov of the NKVD security service asks the detective to look into the suspected suicide of a young woman: Maria Alexandovna Lenskaya – Masha, a model citizen. Korolev is unnerved to learn that Masha had been of interest to Ezhov, the feared Commissar for State Security. Ezhov himself wants the matter looked into.

And when the detective arrives on the set for Bloody Meadow, in the bleak, battle-scarred Ukraine, he soon discovers that there is more to Masha's death than meets the eye...

Red Mist

The new Kay Scarpetta from the world's #1 bestselling crime writer.

Determined to find out what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months earlier, Kay Scarpetta travels to the Georgia Prison for Women, where an inmate has information not only on Fielding, but also on a string of grisly killings. The murder of an Atlanta family years ago, a young woman on death row, and the inexplicable deaths of homeless people as far away as California seem unrelated. But Scarpetta discovers connections that compel her to conclude that what she thought ended with Fielding's death and an attempt on her own life is only the beginning of something far more destructive: a terrifying terrain of conspiracy and potential terrorism on an international scale. And she is the only one who can stop it.

Bad Signs

A dark and dramatic tale of two brothers on the run from the law...

Orphaned by an act of senseless violence that took their mother from them, half-brothers Clarence Luckman and Elliott Danziger have been raised in state institutions, unaware of any world outside. But their lives take a sudden turn when they are seized as hostages by a convicted killer en route to death row.

Earl Sheridan is a psychopath of the worst kind, but he has the potential to change the boys' lives forever. As the trio set off on a frenetic escape from the law through California and Texas, the two brothers must come to terms with the ever-growing tide of violence that follows in their wake - something that forces them to make a choice about their lives and their relationship to one another.

Set in the 1960s, BAD SIGNS is a tale of the darkness within all of us, the inherent hope for salvation and the ultimate consequences of evil. It returns to the haunting ground covered in the award-winning, international bestseller, A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS.

Killed At The Whim Of A Hat

When crime reporter Jimm Juree is forced to follow her family from Chiang Mai to a fishing village on the Gulf of Siam, she's convinced her career is over. Her journalism will surely dwindle to reports on the annual monsoon-induced floods, for what crimes could possibly happen in such an out-of-the-way place? Answer: plenty. A local palm oil plantation owner and his worker are excavating a well. They dig down six feet and hit metal. It turns out to be the roof of an old Volkswagen combi, which, once unearthed, is found to contain two skeletons - one of them wearing a hat. A monk is murdered in Lang Suan, the nearest town. There is apparently no motive for the killing and no suspects are found. But there are odd connections between this killing and several others. Suddenly Jimm's new life becomes somewhat more promising - and a great deal more dangerous.

The Lincoln Lawyer Novels

The Lincoln Lawyer

For Mickey Haller, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence, it's about negotiation and manipulation. When he gets hired by a Beverly Hills rich boy arrested for assault, Mickey sees a franchise case: a long, expensive trial with maximum billable hours - until it puts him face-to-face with pure evil and with a man who may truly be innocent. For a lawyer who has always gone for the easy score, getting justice means risking everything.

The Brass Verdict

When a former colleague is murdered, Mickey inherits his biggest case yet: defending a Hollywood producer accused of killing his wife and her lover. Haller scrambles to prepare for trial, and learns that the killer may be coming for him next. Enter LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, who will do whatever it takes to crack the case, including using Mickey as bait. As danger quickly mounts, these two loners realize that their only chance is to work together.

The Reversal

Mickey is recruited to prosecute the high-profile retrial of Jason Jessup, a convicted child killer, exonerated after twenty-four years by new DNA evidence. Convinced Jessup is guilty, Haller brings in Harry Bosch as his investigator. With their key witness missing, and the odds and evidence against them, Bosch and Haller must nail a sadistic killer before he kills again.

A former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Connelly is the author of more than a dozen acclaimed Harry Bosch thrillers and several courtroom dramas featuring Mickey Haller, as well as stand-alone bestsellers such as The Poet. Michael Connelly is a former President of the Mystery Writers of America. His books have been translated into 31 languages and have won numerous awards. He lives with his family in Tampa, Florida.

The House Of Silk: The New Sherlock Holmes Novel

The first official new Sherlock Holmes mystery, written by global bestseller Anthony Horowitz.

Bestselling novelist and Holmes expert Anthony Horowitz will bring the great man to life again for a new generation of readers. As the creator of Foyle, Anthony has already displayed his talent for plotting and characterisation. Having been a lifelong fan of Conan Doyle's novels, he was the perfect choice to return to the original stories and create a new mystery for Holmes and Watson.

Interest in Holmes has never been higher than right now. A blockbusting movie adaptation has coincided with the BBC's intriguing modern update and both successes are to be repeated this Spring.

Horowitz says: 'I fell in love with the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was 16 and I've read them many times since. My aim is to produce a first-rate mystery for a modern audience while remaining absolutely true to the spirit of the original.'

Anthony Horowitz is a TV screenwriter, with credits including the BAFTA-winning Foyle's War, Midsomer Murders and Poirot. He is also the author of a string of bestselling children's books, including the Alex Rider series. He lives in London.

Derek Jacobi is one England's most distinguished contemporary actors, having made his name with commanding performances on TV, stage and screen, memorably in the BBC TV series I, Claudius. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his role of Alan Turing in the TV series Breaking the Code. Other notable TV work includes the series Cadfael. His film work ranges from The Day of the Jackal to Gladiator and Gosford Park. He has read several audio books for Orion, including The Book of Dead Days. He was knighted in 1992.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Then the town's peace is shattered when someone tries to kill the reclusive Ott, another young woman goes missing, and the town's drug dealer is murdered. Woven through the tautly written murder story is the unspoken secret that hangs over the lives of two men – one black, one white.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a masterful crime novel, sizzling with deep Southern menace, and distinguished by brilliant plotting and unforgettable characters.

Cold Harbour

A routine mission ends in icy terror for OSS agent Craig Osborne, as he floats helplessly in the sea off the coast of Brittany. The rumble of engines should signal rescue ...

But it is a German warship which appears out of the fog--hauling Osborne to safety and preparing him for the fight.

As the time of invasion approaches, the Allies are ready to play their dirtiest trick: dispatching a highly trained killer behind German lines in a disguised E-boat with the name LILI MARLENE emblazoned on its prow ...

Believing The Lie

Elizabeth George's masterly new novel sees Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley back centre stage in an intricate crime drama.

Detective Inspector Lynley is approached by business magnate Brian Fairclough for a confidential review - not a formal investigation - of the circumstances of his nephew's demise. The coroner's verdict is accidental death.

Still grieving for his murdered wife, Lynley has personal reasons for welcoming a spell away from London. He heads to the wild beauty of the Lake District, with Deborah and Simon St James to provide cover for his inquiries. Barbara Havers, back at base, makes her own unique contribution to the case, distracted only by Isabelle's ambitions to improve her Detective Sergeant's appearance.

When he comes to know the various members of the extended Fairclough dynasty, Lynley finds many possible motives for murder, and uncovers layers of deceit and betrayal that expose the lies at the heart of the Cumbrian community.

Cell 8

A cheap crooner by the name of John Schwarz earns his keep on a ferry between Sweden and Finland, singing evergreens for drunken passengers. One night, he loses his temper with a man harassing women in the crowd, beating him unconscious. As drunken brawls are commonplace on the Baltic cruising ferries, no one raises an eyebrow.

No one, that is, but Detective Ewert Grens. Concerned by the details of the case report, Grens can't help but think someone capable of such violence must have a history of it. As a precaution, he orders Schwarz arrested: one that is seemingly justified when Schwarz provides such resistance that he has to be sedated.

Suspicion turns to shock when Grens discovers that John Schwarz does not exist. When he learns that the man in his custody is in fact John Meyer Frey – an American citizen from Marcusville, Ohio – he is even more astonished. John Meyer Frey cannot be sitting in front of him: John Meyer Frey died on Death Row the previous year.

This mystery will initiate the most remarkable criminal investigation of Ewert Grens career, the reverberations of which will reach the highest tier of international politics, and blow the worldwide debate on the death penalty wide open.

Prague Fatale: A Bernie Gunther Novel

No extra details available for this item.Philip Kerr's sequence of historical thrillers featuring private detective Bernie Gunther forms a body of work comparable to the great series of the two masters of the genre, Len Deighton and John le Carre. The Berlin Noir Trilogy quickly established Kerr and Gunther as the perfect combination of writer, character, setting and genre.

These gritty, noir thrillers, narrated in Gunther's wry, sardonic voice, range all over Europe and beyond. They span a 20-year period from the mid-30s to the mid-50s, covering the build up to World War 2, the war itself and finally its bitter aftermath.

With impeccable research that is accurate in every detail yet never interferes with narrative pace, Philip Kerr has created an epic series of thrillers that deserve all the praise that has been heaped upon them.

Prague Fatale is Bernie Gunther's eighth outing. Set in Prague in 1942, it delivers all the fast-paced and quick-witted action that we have come to expect from Philip Kerr. It is an outstanding thriller by a writer at the top of his game.

The Fear Index

A chilling contemporary thriller from Robert Harris set in the competitive world of high finance

Dr Max Hoffman is a legend. A physicist once employed on the Large Hadron Collider, he now uses a revolutionary and highly secret system of computer algorithms to trade on the world’s financial markets. None of his rivals is sure how he does it, but somehow Hoffman’s hedge fund – built around the standard measure of market volatility: the VIX or “Fear Index” – generates astonishing returns for his investors. Late one night, in his house beside Lake Geneva, an intruder disturbs Hoffman and his wife while they are asleep. This terrifying moment is the start of Robert Harris’s new novel – a story just as compelling and timely as his most recent contemporary thriller, THE GHOST. Over the next 48 hours, as the markets edge towards another great crash, Hoffman’s world disintegrates. But who is trying to destroy him?

The Secret In Their Eyes

Part haunting crime thriller, part love story, the gripping tale that inspired the Oscar-winning best foreign film makes its eagerly-awaited debut in English.

Determined to put to rest his obsession with the decades-old brutal murder of a beautiful young woman, former detective Benjamin Chaparro sets out to write a book about it. As he reaches into the past and the lives of others who became entangled in the case, from the husband who never recovered from losing the love of his life to the brilliant intern who is now a respected judge, he recalls the beginning of his own private drama -- a long unrequited love.

Vividly evoking 1970s Buenos Aires and the dark underpinnings of Argentina′s ′Dirty War′, THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES takes on the question of justice -- what it really means and in whose hands it belongs.

′A story that leaves you breathless ...′ EL LIBERAL

′A startling psychological mystery -- about the secrets of a country corroded by state terror,and the secrets of a heart so suffocated that it cannot utter its simple, pure desire.′Michael Greenberg, author of BEG, BORROW, STEAL

The Crowded Grave

Bruno's day has not started well. The Saint Denis Chief of Police is busy. A French/Spanish summit to be held in a local chateau is threatened by Basque separatists, and animal rights campaigners are causing havoc attacking local foie gras farms. Up to his ears with ETA and PETA, he's not even had time for lunch. And it's about to get worse.

A local archaeological team, digging for evidence of prehistoric man, unearths a well-preserved skeleton. Yet it's a lot more recent than they'd hoped – boasting a Swatch on its wrist and a bullet-hole in its skull. Bruno senses a link between the two activist groups and the mystery corpse.

With an influx of visitors making Saint Denis almost as crowded as the excavation's grave, the key appears to lie with one of these outsiders. Dealing with this unknown aspect, Bruno must think fast and keep his wits about him. Especially as the answer may lie a little closer to home.

The Crowded Grave marks the welcome return of the delightful Bruno, Chief of Police. Martin Walker serves up a sense-stirring portrait of the culture, camaraderie and culinary customs of French country life, accompanying this with a wonderfully satisfying and intoxicating mystery.

Feast Day Of Fools

Another violent and lyrical crime novel from the master, set in the harshly beautiful landscape of south Texas where Sherrif Hackberry Holland (hero of RAIN GODS) is facing more drug-fuelled murder and mayhem from across the Mexican border.

Sheriff Hackberry Holland patrols a small Southwest Texas border town with a deep and abiding respect for the citizens in his care. Still mourning the loss of his cherished wife and locked in a perilous almost-romance with his Deputy Pam Tibbs, a woman many decades his junior, Hackberry feeds off of the deeds of evil men to keep his own demons at bay.

When alcoholic ex-boxer Danny Boy Lorca witnesses a man tortured to death in the desert and reports it, Hack s investigation leads him to the home of Anton Ling, who is known for sheltering illegals. Ling denies having seen the victims or perpetrators, but there is something in her steely demeanour and aristocratic beauty that compels Hackberry to return to her home again and again as the investigation unfolds. Could it be that the Sheriff is so taken in by this creature who reminds him of his deceased wife, that he would ignore the possibility that she is just as dangerous as the men she harbours?

Whispering Death

Hal Challis is in trouble at home and abroad: carpeted by the boss for speaking out about police budget cuts; missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas on a study tour.

But there’s plenty to keep his mind off his problems. A rapist in a police uniform stalks Challis’s Peninsula beat, there is a serial armed robber headed in his direction and a home invasion that’s a little too close to home. Not to mention a very clever, very mysterious female cat burglar who may or may not be planning something on Challis’s patch.

Meanwhile, at the Waterloo Police Station, Challis finds his offsiders have their own issues. Scobie Sutton, still struggling with his wife’s depression, seems to be headed for a career crisis; and something very interesting is going on between Constable Pam Murphy and Jeanne Schiff, the feisty young sergeant on secondment from the Sex Crimes Unit.

In his sixth Peninsula murder mystery, Garry Disher keeps the tension and intrigue ramped up exquisitely on multiple fronts, while he takes his regular characters in compelling new directions. Disher is a grand master of the police procedural, operating at the peak of his craft.

Sorry

Four childhood friends, leaving their 20s and out of luck. Kris just got fired; he′ll never be a journalist now. Tamara never had a steady job, and she′s just given custody of her daughter to her former lover. Wolf′s girlfriend has died of an overdose. Frauke′s mother has been put in an asylum and she′s freaked. They′re a disaffected bunch of losers, going nowhere.

Then during one reckless drunken evening, they come up with a joke of an idea. Everyone in the world--large corporations, businessmen, lovers--behaves shittily to someone, and rarely do they apologise. The friends decide to set up an agency that, for a flat fee, does the apologising and makes things right. The agency, which they call Sorry, becomes a runaway success. Sorry visits injured party after injured party and offers the right apology, along with financial compensation. Soon the four former down-and-outs are living almost like millionaires in a beautiful old large villa looking out over Berlin′s Wannsee River. But all of this comes to a screeching halt on the day Wolf goes to an apartment on the instructions of a new client. Seeing the door ajar, Wolf walks in and finds a woman hanging from a wall, with one nail driven through her hands and one through her forehead.

What follows is a sequence of events--kidnapping, torture, more deaths--that gradually declare themselves as a bewildering and intensifying psychological game of cat-and-mouse. After reading the shattering climax of this book, nobody will ever say ′Sorry′ in quite the same way again.

The Litigators

THE LITIGATORS is a tremendously entertaining romp, filled with the kind of courtroom strategies, theatrics and suspense that have made John Grisham the world's favourite storyteller.

Oscar Finley: street cop turned street lawyer.

Wally Figg: expert hustler and ambulance-chaser.

David Zinc: Harvard Law School graduate.

Together, this unlikely trio make up Finley & Figg: specialists in injury claims, quickie divorces and DUIs. None of them has ever faced a jury in federal court. But they are about to take on one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the States.

David gave up his lucrative career at Chicago's leading law firm for this: the chance to help the little guy stand up to the big corporations.

But if Finley & Figg have right on their side, why do his new partners feel the need to carry guns in their briefcases David thought he was used to cut-throat law from his days at Rogan Rothberg, but this is something else.

He knows he was right to get out. He just may live to regret his new choice of firm...

John Grisham is the author of twenty-three novels, one work of non-fiction, and one collection of short stories. His works are translated into thirty-eight languages. He lives in Virginia and Mississippi.

The Drop: Harry Bosch Mystery 15

Harry Bosch is facing the end of the line. He's been put on the DROP - Deferred Retirement Option Plan - and given three years before his retirement is enforced. Seeing the end of the mission coming, he's anxious for cases. He doesn't have to wait long. First a cold case gets a DNA hit for a rape and murder which points the finger at a 29-year-old convicted rapist who was only eight at the time of the murder. Then a city councilman's son is found dead - fallen or pushed from a hotel window - and he insists on Bosch taking the case despite the two men's history of enmity. The cases are unrelated but they twist around each other like the double helix of a DNA strand. One leads to the discovery of a killer operating in the city for as many as three decades; the other to a deep political conspiracy that reached back into the dark history of the police department.

The Death Relic

The New World, 1545 . . .
Vanquished by the Spanish Empire, little remains of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. From the ashes of their cities, a unified legend emerges: the Christians who conquered them possessed a mysterious object, an artifact so powerful-so deadly-that it was known throughout the Americas as 'the death relic.'

Yucatan Peninsula, present day . . .
When Maria Pelati's research team disappears in Mexico, Jonathon Payne and David Jones embark on a perilous mission to find the missing archaeologists. The duo quickly finds a link between the group's work and its recent disappearance. Following the clues left behind, the duo tries to solve one of the darkest mysteries of the new world, but their quest for the relic might cost them their lives.

PRAISE FOR CHRIS KUZNESKI

'Excellent! High stakes, fast action, vibrant characters . . . Not to be missed!'
LEE CHILD

'Think Indiana Jones and The Da Vinci Code and you're in Kuzneski-land'
SUNDAY SPORT

Bloodstream

Lapped by the gentle waters of Locust Lake, the small resort town of Tranquility, Maine, seems like the perfect spot for Dr Claire Elliot to shelter her adolescent son, Noah, from the temptations of the big city and the lingering memory of his father′s death. And she′s hopeful that she can earn the trust of the town as she builds a new practice. But all her plans unravel with the onset of winter when a rash of teenage violence, far more deadly than anything she′d encountered in the city, erupts in the local school.

As she tries to find a medical explanation for this murderous epidemic, Claire stumbles upon an insidious evil which has blighted the town′s past and threatens its future. Fearful that Noah, too, is at risk, she must race to prove her theory before everything she loves is destroyed.

The Sixth Man

After alleged serial killer Edgar Roy is apprehended and locked away in a psychiatric unit, private investigators Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are called in by Roy's lawyer – an old friend of Sean King – to look into the case. But their investigation is derailed before it begins: while en route to their first meeting with the lawyer, King and Maxwell discover his dead body.

A rash of terrifying events begins to unfold and it is up to King and Maxwell to uncover the truth: is Roy a killer or not? But the more they dig into his past, the more they are bombarded with obstacles, half-truths, and dead ends that make filtering the facts nearly impossible. As each new theory brings a new revelation, King and Maxwell will be pushed to the limit. Could this deadly case be the one that leaves the duo permanently parted?

Perfect People

All they wanted was a healthy child... What they got was the perfect nightmare.

I CAN ERADICATE ALL DISEASES...

John and Naomi Klaesson are devastated after the death of their child from a rare genetic disorder. More than anything they want another, but the chances of their next child being born with the same defect are high.

I CAN GIVE YOU THE CHILD YOU HAVE ALWAYS WANTED...

Then they hear about Doctor Leo Dettore. He has methods that can spare them the heartache of ever losing another child to any disease, and so begins their journey.

I CAN MAKE PERFECT PEOPLE...

They should have known something was wrong when they saw the list. Choose the eye colour, hair, great sporting ability. They can design their child. Now it's too late to turn back. Naomi is pregnant, and already something is wrong...

Angels Of Vengeance

This is the New World. Born of chaos and madness. Remember that if nothing else.

Jed Culver, President Kipper's right hand man, knows that what is right and what is best are rarely the same thing. Can he go against the President's wishes?

Mad Jackson Blackstone, rogue governor of the Republic of Texas, is slowly but surely destroying the new United States of America.

The time has come.

In New York, Caitlin Monroe came within a hair's breadth of vengeance. Is her old nemesis still alive?

Lady Julianne Balwyn is being hunted in the grimy freeport of Darwin. Can she survive long enough to save her friends?

Sofia Pieraro is completely alone, revenge her only reason to stay alive.

This time it's personal. The final battle to save America will not be fought with armies, but the choices of individuals, whose vengeance drives them to make the wrong decisions at the right time.

Midwinter Sacrifice

There are a lot of Scandinavian crime writers riding the Stieg Larsson wave, but Kallentoft really is an exceptional author and a huge Swedish success.

It is the coldest February in recent memory. In the early hours of a particularly freezing night, the body of a man is found hanging from a lone oak tree in the middle of the withered, windswept plains outside Linkoping, Sweden. The young superintendent Malin Fors, a single mother plagued by personal tragedies, is assigned to the case. Together with her colleagues from the Violent Crime Squad at the Linkoping Police Department, she must track down the identity of the man hanging from the tree and the reason he ended up there. And at the same time they must follow in the frigid wake of a killer - a manhunt that takes Malin Fors into the darkest corners of the human heart.

The Unlucky Lottery

A dark family mystery from Hakan Nesser - ‘in the front rank of Swedish crime writers’ (The Times)

Four friends celebrate winning the lottery. Just hours later, one of them – Waldemar Leverkuhn – is found in his home, stabbed to death.

With Chief Inspector Van Veeteren on sabbatical, working in a second hand bookshop, the case is assigned to Inspector Münster. But when another member of the lottery group disappears, as well as Leverkuhn’s neighbour, Münster appeals to Van Veeteren for assistance.

Soon Münster will find himself interviewing the Leverkuhn family, including the eldest – Irene – a resident of a psychiatric clinic. And as he delves deeper into the family’s history, he will discover dark secrets and startling twists, which not only threaten the clarity of the case – but also his life . . .

Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves

At an abandoned Soviet base in the Arctic, the battle to save the world has begun…

THE SECRET BASE
It is a top-secret base known only as Dragon Island. A long-forgotten relic of the Cold War, it houses a weapon of terrible destructive force, a weapon that has just been re-activated… A RENEGADE ARMY
When Dragon Island is seized by a brutal terrorist force calling itself the Army of Thieves, the fate of the world hangs in the balance, and there are no crack units close enough to get there in time to stop the Army setting off the weapon. ONE SMALL TEAM
Except, that is, for a small equipment-testing team up in the Arctic led by a Marine captain named Schofield, call-sign SCARECROW. It’s not a strike force; just a handful of Marines and civilians. It’s not equipped to attack a fortified island held by a vicious army.
But Scarecrow will lead the team in anyway, because someone has to.

THE ULTIMATE HERO IS BACK,
FACING THE ULTIMATE ARMY OF VILLAINS

The Potter's Field

Witty and entertaining, the Montalbano novels by Andrea Camilleri-a master of the Italian detective story-have become favorites of mystery fans everywhere. In this latest installment, an unidentified corpse is found near Vig?ta, a town known for its soil rich with potter's clay. Meanwhile, a woman reports the disappearance of her husband, a Colombian man with Sicilian origins who turns out to be related to a local mobster. Then Inspector Montalbano remembers the story from the Bible-Judas's betrayal, the act of remorse, and the money for the potter's field, where those of unknown or foreign origin are to be buried-and slowly, through myriad betrayals, finds his way to the solution to the crime.

Luther The Calling

Meet DCI John Luther.
He's brilliant. He's intense. He's obsessional.
HE'S DANGEROUS.

DCI John Luther has an extraordinary clearance rate. He commands outstanding loyalty from friends and colleagues. Nobody who ever stood at his side has a bad word to say about him. But Luther seethes with a hidden fury that at times he can barely control. Sometimes it sends him to the brink of madness, making him do things he shouldn't; things way beyond the limits of the law.

Luther: The Calling, the first in a new series of novels featuring DCI John Luther, takes us into Luther's past and into his mind. It is the story of the case that tore his personal and professional relationships apart and propelled him over the precipice. Beyond fury, beyond vengeance. All the way to murder…

Cooking The Books

Corinna Chapman, talented baker and reluctant investigator, is trying very hard to do nothing at all on her holidays. Her gorgeous Daniel is only intermittently at her side (he's roaming the streets tracking down a multi-thousand dollar corporate theft). Jason, her baking offsider, has gone off to learn how to surf. And Kylie and Goss are fulfilling their lives' ambition auditioning for a soapie. It should be a time of quiet reflection for Corinna but quiet reflection doesn't seem to suit her - she's bored.

Scenting a whiff of danger, Corinna accepts an offer from a caterer friend to do the baking for the film set of a new soap called 'Kiss the Bride'. The soapie in which Kylie and Goss have parts. Twists and turns and complications that could only happen to Corinna ensue involving, bizarrely, nursery rhymes and a tiger called Tabitha.

While on the other side of town, a young woman is being unmercifully bullied by her corporate employers - employers who spend a lot of time cooking the books.

The Affair

The new Jack Reacher thriller from the number one bestseller.

March 1997. A woman has her throat cut behind a bar in Carter Crossing, Mississippi. Just down the road is a big army base.Is the murderer a local guy - or is he a soldier?

Jack Reacher, still a major in the military police, is sent in undercover.The county sheriff is a former U.S. Marine - and a stunningly beautiful woman. Her investigation is going nowhere. Is the Pentagon stonewalling her? Or doesn't she really want to find the killer?

The adrenaline-pumping, high-voltage action in The Affair is set just six months before the opening of Killing Floor, and it marks a turning point in Reacher's career. If he does what the army wants, will he be able to live with himself? And if he doesn't, will the army be able to live with him? Is this his last case in uniform?

Reamde

An epic thriller from the unique imagination of one of today's most inventive writers: a wealthy tech entrepreneur is caught in the crossfire of his own online fantasy war game, as Chinese hackers unleash a contagious virus - Reamde.

Across the globe, millions of computer screens flicker with the artfully coded world of T'Rain - an addictive internet role-playing game of fantasy and adventure. But backstreet hackers in China have just unleashed a contagious virus called Reamde, and as it rampages through the gaming world spreading from player to player - holding hard drives hostage in the process - the computer of one powerful and dangerous man is infected, causing the carefully mediated violence of the online world to spill over into reality.

A fast-talking, internet-addicted mafia accountant is brutally silenced by his Russian employers, and Zula - a talented young T'Rain computer programmer - is abducted and bundled on to a private jet. As she is flown across the skies in the company of the terrified boyfriend she broke up with hours before, and a brilliant Hungarian hacker who may be her only hope, she finds herself sucked into a whirl of Chinese Secret Service agents and gun-toting American Survivalists; the Russian criminal underground and al Al-Qaeda cell led by a charismatic Welshman; each a strand of a connected world that devastatingly converges in T'Rain.

An inimitable and compelling thriller that careers from British Columbia to South-West China via Russia and the fantasy world of T'Rain, Reamde is an irresistible epic from the unique imagination of one of today's most individual writers.

Unusual Uses For Olive Oil: A Von Igelfeld Novel

Life is so unfair, and it sends many things to try Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, author of Portuguese Irregular Verbs and pillar of the Institute of Romance Philology in the proud Bavarian city of Regensburg. There is the undeserved rise of his rival (and owner of a one-legged dachshund), Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer; the interminable ramblings of the librarian, Herr Huber; and the condescension of his colleagues with regard to his unmarried state. But when his friend Ophelia Prinzel takes it upon herself to match-make, and duly produces a cheerful heiress with her own Schloss, it appears that the professor's true worth is about to be recognised. Maddening, idiotic and hugely entertaining, von Igelfeld is an inspired comic creation.

Burned

A brutalised victim in the wilds...
A solitary tent is found to contain the body of a half-buried woman. She's been stoned to death. There are lash marks across her back. One of her hands has been cut off.

A lone voice...
Two years earlier online reporter Henning Juul lost his son, Jonas, in a domestic fire. As he returns to work, physically and emotionally scarred, Henning struggles to escape this past and to be taken seriously again as a reporter - by his colleagues, his ex-wife and the police.

A mystery ignited...
Told to cover the story of the woman in the tent, he finds an increasingly dangerous trail and, despite an early arrest, he is convinced that the story is more complex than the police think ...

Bertie Plays The Blues

Once more, we catch up with the delightful goings-on in the fictitious 44 Scotland Street from Alexander McCall Smith. With customary charm and deftness, Alexander McCall Smith gives us another instalment in this popular series, currently running in The Scotsman. Anything could happen to Bertie and the gang, especially with an invitation to one of Scotland’s premier jazz festivals…

The Broken Ones

THE BROKEN ONES is the latest dark, gripping, chilling supernatural tale from a highly talented internationally acclaimed Australian author.

It s the near future and the world has descended into chaos. On the surface, everything looks the same yet the unthinkable has happened...the dead have risen.

Everyone is haunted by a dead relative, friend, spouse, or stranger, and these spirits are unshakable, silent and watching. No one is safe. Governments the world over fail to deal with the epidemic, they begin to lose control of their economies and their resources. Their people. Crime is rife, and murders commonplace. But who is responsible: the ghosts or the people?

Finding out is where Detective Oscar Mariani comes in, although it s nearly impossible to run a department when you can t even see half the suspects. His strike rate is embarrassingly low. Then he stumbles into a case that cuts through his apathy and depression, a case that suggests a ritualistic, brutal serial killer attracted to innocent young women at work and one that, unfortunately for Mariani and his less jaded partner, implicates those in high places. However, if he can solve it, and keep alive himself, he may be able to exorcise his own ghostly shadow, a dead young man who might just have something to say.

Mixing police procedural, suspense and horror, Stephen M Irwin's new book is a compelling, knuckle-whitening ride.

The Retribution

The eagerly anticipated new Tony Hill.

There is one serial killer who has shaped and defined police profiler Tony Hill's life. One serial killer whose evil surpasses all others. One serial killer who has the power to chill him to the bone: Jacko Vance.

And now Jacko is back in Tony's life. Even more twisted and cunning than ever before, he is focused on wreaking revenge on Tony - and DCI Carol Jordan - for the years he has spent in prison.

Tony doesn't know when Jacko will strike, or where. All he knows is that Jacko will cause him to feel fear like he has never known before and devastate his life in ways he cannot imagine...

The Cut

Spero Lucas has a new line of work. Since he returned home after serving in Iraq, he has been doing special investigations for a defence attorney. He's good at it, and he has carved out a niche: recovering stolen property, no questions asked. His cut is forty percent. A high-profile crime boss who has heard of Lucas's speciality hires him to find out who has been stealing from his operation. It's the biggest job Lucas has ever been offered, and he quickly gets a sense of what's going on. But before he can close in on what's been taken, he tangles with a world of men whose amorality and violence leave him reeling. Is any cut worth your family, your lover, your life? Spero Lucas is George Pelecanos's greatest creation, a young man making his place in the world one battle and one mission at a time. The first in a new series of thrillers featuring Spero Lucas, The Cut is the latest confirmation of why George Pelecanos is 'perhaps the greatest living crime writer.' (Stephen King)

Headhunters

Roger Brown has it all: Norway’s most successful headhunter, he is married to a beautiful gallery owner and owns a magnificent house. But he’s also a highly accomplished art thief.

At a gallery opening, his wife introduces him to Clas Greve. Not only is Greve the perfect candidate for a position that Brown is recruiting for; he is also in possession of ‘The Calydonian Boar Hunt’ by Rubens, one of the most sought-after paintings in modern art history.

Roger sees his chance to become financially independent, and starts planning his biggest theft ever. But soon, he runs into trouble – and it’s not financial problems that are threatening to knock him over this time…

About the Author

Jo Nesbo is a musician, songwriter, economist and author. His first crime novel featuring Harry Hole was published in Norway in 1997 and was an instant hit, winning the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel (an accolade shared with Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson). The Leopard, the sixth of Nesbo’s novels to be translated into English, went straight to the top of the bestseller charts in its first week of publication.

Flash And Bones

In the run up to the biggest NASCAR raceweek of the year, Dr Temperance Brennan is called to a landfill site backing onto the Charlotte speedway track in North Carolina. Someone has discovered a barrel of hardened asphalt with a human hand poking through the top.

With the country's press trained on Charlotte, it is up to Tempe to try to release and identify the body in the barrel. But there is more than one potential victim: the brother of a girl who went missing with her boyfriend ten years before comes forward, and the trail he sets in motion leads Tempe to one of America's largest fascist organisations.

But before she can discover anything, the FBI confiscate the body and destroy it. What terrible secret could they be hiding? As tension at the speedway mounts, Tempe tries to unravel the conspiracy of lies surrounding the missing couple, the body in the barrel, and the horrific death at the track of yet another victim...

About the Author

KATHY REICHS is forensic anthropologist for the Offices of the Chief Medical Examiner, State of North Carolina, and for the Laboratorie de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Quebec. A professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she divides her time between Charlotte and Montreal and is a frequent expert witness in criminal trials.

The Charming Quirks Of Others: The Sunday Philosophy Club Book Seven

Isabel Dalhousie, Edinburgh philosopher and curious observer of the behaviour of her fellow man, is approached by a friend at a local boarding school that is planning to appoint a new headmaster; an anonymous letter has arrived suggesting that one of the shortlisted candidates has a compromising past. But which one is it? Isabel is once again drawn into an investigation, and finds herself exploring dilemmas of human weakness and forgiveness. She turns to her fiance Jamie for advice, but he too appears to have something to hide...

Fear Not

A drug addict dead in a basement, a young asylum seeker floating in the harbour, a high profile female bishop stabbed to death in the street. What is the connection?

During a snowy Christmas season in Norway, criminal psychologist and profiler Inger Johanne Vik finds not only her husband and herself but also her autistic daughter drawn into the investigation of a number of disturbing deaths. Her husband, detective Yngvar Stubo, has been dispatched to Bergen to investigate the shocking Christmas Eve murder of a local female bishop. Meanwhile, in Oslo, bodies keep turning up, though the causes of death vary. Befor long, Inger Johanne will incredulously discover something that will link them all.

Anne Holt's Fear Not is a thrilling crime novel that raises questions about religion, human rights, and the very nature of love itself. Anne Holt has the courage to go beyond conventional crime writing and peppers the story with red-hot political issues.

About the Author

Anne Holt is in the vanguard of Scandinavian crime fiction. She spent two years working for the Oslo Police Department before founding her own law firm and going on to serve as Norway's Minister for Justice between 1996 and 1997.

The Hidden Child

Crime writer Erica Falck is shocked to discover a Nazi medal among her late mother′s possessions. Haunted by a childhood of neglect, she resolves to dig deep into her family′s past and finally uncover the reasons why.

Her enquiries lead her to the home of a retired history teacher. He was among her mother′s circle of friends during the Second World War but her questions are met with bizarre and evasive answers. Two days later he meets a violent death. Detective Patrik Hedström, Erica′s husband, is on paternity leave but soon becomes embroiled in the murder investigation. Who would kill so ruthlessly to bury secrets so old?

Reluctantly Erica must read her mother′s wartime diaries. But within the pages is a painful revelation about Erica′s past. Could what little knowledge she has be enough to endanger her husband and newborn baby? The dark past is coming to light, and no one will escape the truth of how they came to be ...

About the Author

Born in 1971, Camilla Leckberg graduated from Gothenburg University of Economics, before moving to Stockholm where she worked for a few years as an economist. However, a course in creative crime writing became the trigger to a drastic change of career. Her first four novels all became Swedish bestsellers. She lives in a suburb of Stockholm, with her husband Micke and her two children.

The Race

Intrepid detective Isaac Bell engages in his most dangerous case yet.

It is 1910, the age of flying machines is still in its infancy, and newspaper publisher Preston Whiteway is offering $50,000 for the first daring aviator to cross America in fewer than fifty days. He is even sponsoring one of the prime candidates – an intrepid aviatrix named Josephine Frost – and that's where Bell, chief investigator for the Van Dorn Detective Agency, comes in.

Frost's violent-tempered husband has just killed her lover and tried to kill her, and he is bound to try again. Bell has tangled with Harry Frost before, and knows the man has made his millions leading gangs of thieves, murders and thugs in every city across the country. He also knows Frost won't be after just his wife, but after Whiteway as well. And Bell knows that if he takes the case, Frost will be after him, too.

Yes, Bell knows all that, but he still has no idea what he has just gotten himself into. Things are not quite what they seem to him – and over the next several weeks, that may well prove to be fatal.

Filled with the intricate plotting and dazzling set pieces that are Cussler's trademarks, The Race is a stunning new novel from the grandmaster of adventure.

PRAISE FOR CLIVE CUSSLER

'The guy I read' TOM CLANCY

'Clive Cussler is hard to beat' DAILY MAIL

'Delivers what it promises' FINANCIAL TIMES

A Trick Of The Light

Hearts are broken, Lillian Dyson carefully underlined in a book. Sweet relationships are dead.

But now Lillian herself is dead. Found among the bleeding hearts and lilacs of Clara Morrow's garden in Three Pines, shattering the celebrations of Clara's solo show at the famed Mus e in Montreal. Chief Inspector Gamache, the head of homicide at the S ret du Qu bec, is called to the tiny Quebec village and there he finds the art world gathered, and with it a world of shading and nuance, a world of shadow and light. Where nothing is as it seems. Behind every smile there lurks a sneer. Inside every sweet relationship there hides a broken heart. And even when facts are slowly exposed, it is no longer clear to Gamache and his team if what they've found is the truth, or simply a trick of the light.

About The Author

Louise Penny is the New York Times bestselling author of five previous Gamache novels, including Still Life, which won the CWA John Creasey Dagger in 2006. Recipient of virtually every existing award for crime fiction, she lives in a small village south of Montreal.

Darkness My Old Friend

From the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Lies, Die for You, and Fragile comes a thriller about broken trust that explores our faith in those we rely on--and how that faith can sustain or shatter us. Willow acts tough, but when she cuts school and sees a man digging up a body while she's in the woods, she takes off running and drops her cell phone. The man brings the phone back and introduces himself as Michael to Willow's mother, who finds herself intrigued despite her daughter's overactive imagination.

Michael's mother disappeared decades ago, and he's hired a retired detective and a psychic to help him find out what happened to her. But the psychic can't help, because all she can see is a man jumping into a river to rescue someone and who is in the process of losing his own life. That man is Jones, who only wants to be left alone after the traumatic incidents of the previous year, in which he admitted his role in the death of a young woman and resigned as Chief of Police. Based in The Hollows, the setting of Fragile, with the same characters spanning both books, these lives collide--in ways they never imagined, with stakes that couldn't be higher--in this complex, spellbinding novel.

The Third Victim

A blood-soaked nursery. A missing baby. A traumatised mother.

When David Cavanaugh hears of this heinous crime, he knows immediately he doesn't want to touch it. The mother's guilt appears obvious, and David and his colleagues expect to be bystanders only to Detective Joe Mannix's disturbing investigation.

So when David is corralled on to the case against his will and appointed Sienna Walker's attorney, he faces the prospect of taking on a challenge he has always refused – defending someone who is guilty.

But there is more to Sienna's story than meets the eye – and David soon realises that she may not just be innocent of killing her daughter, but also the victim of a crime so vast and so clever that securing a 'not guilty' verdict will be close to impossible.

And so he fights on, slowly getting nearer to the real killer and the reason baby Eliza was murdered. But what he does not know is how close danger is creeping to his own front door – and that in the end there will not be two victims – but three.

Rip Off

From the winner of the 2009 Ned Kelly Award comes a sensational new novel

It's November 2007. There's sewage in the big lake at the heart of the soulless city, Canberra, the TABs have been emptied by a deadly horse virus and the longest Federal election campaign of all time still has a fortnight to run.

One-time star detective Brad Chen seems destined for a desk job until someone starts shooting dodgy property developers in Perth and Adelaide. The state coppers he's sent to assist aren't much interested in anything he can do to help out, even when the body counts extends to shonky financial advisers, crooked lawyers and assorted other fraudsters in the eastern capitals. Chen is nonetheless determined to track down the hitman the public is calling a hero.

Rip Off delivers readers another big serve of the solid plotting, witty dialogue and eccentric characters they've come to expect from the Brad Chen series and its Ned Kelly award-winning author.

Gamble: A Dick Francis Novel

As one of the youngest ever winners of the Grand National, Nick 'Foxy' Foxton's career as a world class jockey is on perfect track until a near fatal accident cuts his dream brutally short. But when he returns to Aintree as a spectator years later, nothing can prepare him for what unfolds.

Minutes before the biggest event on the racing calendar, Nick's affable American colleague Herb Kovak is shot at point blank range, the gunman disappearing amongst the stunned crowd. Along with the police, Nick is left baffled as to why anyone would want to kill such an apparently gentle soul.

With the press speculating links to gangland crime and a crumpled note containing a threatening message found in the dead man's coat, Nick begins to doubt how well he really knew Herb. And on discovering Herb had named him as the benefactor of his will, Nick questions why he has been entrusted with the legacy. Is this a generous gift from a friend or is it, in fact, a poisoned chalice?

The Caller

One mild summer evening Lily and her husband are enjoying a meal while their baby daughter sleeps peacefully in her pram beneath a maple tree. But when Lily steps outside she is paralysed with terror. The child is bathed in blood.

Inspector Sejer is called to the hospital to meet the family.Mercifully, the baby is unharmed, but her parents are deeply shaken, and Sejer spends the evening trying to comprehend why anyone would carry out such a sinister prank. Then, just before midnight, somebody rings his doorbell.

The corridor is empty, but the caller has left a small grey envelope on the mat. From his living room window, the inspector watches a figure slip across the car park and disappear into the darkness. Inside the envelope Sejer finds a postcard bearing a short message. Hell begins now.

The Sixth Key

'By the Power of these Keys the Head of the Church will be made the Lord of Hell.'

In late 2011 a cryptic invitation leads a crime novelist to Venice's Island of the Dead. Once there he is captivated by his host's tale, which spans the centuries - but seemingly begins and ends in the dark days of the 1930s . . .

In 1936, a similarly cryptic invitation brings Grail historian Otto Rahn to an apartment in Berlin. Waiting for him inside is Hitler's right-hand man, Heinrich Himmler, and Rahn's life is turned upside down.

For Himmler wants Rahn to locate Les Serpent Rouge, a notorious book of black magic written by Pope Honorius in the 14th century.

Following a trail from Paris down to Carcassone in the South of France, Rahn discovers a web of deceit and murder. Clearly Himmler is not the only powerful figure in search of the grimoire. A shadowy circle of men are watching Rahn's every move, and they will stop at nothing to possess both the book and the legendary Sixth Key that will unlock its terrifying power . . .

Kill Me If You Can

Matthew Bannon, a poor art student living in New York City, finds a leather bag filled with diamonds during a chaotic attack at Grand Central Station. Plans for a worry-free life with his gorgeous girlfriend Katherine fill his thoughts – until he realises that he is being hunted, and that whoever is after him won't stop until they have reclaimed the diamonds and exacted their revenge.

Trailing him is the Ghost, the world's greatest assassin, who has just pulled off his most high-profile hit: killing Walter Zelvas, a top member of the international Diamond Syndicate. There's only one small problem: the diamonds he was supposed to retrieve from Zelvas are missing. Now, the Ghost is on Bannon's trail – but so is a rival assassin who would like nothing more than to make the Ghost disappear for ever.

The Charming Quirks Of Others

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Death In Summer

When newspaper magnate Richard Jewell is found dead at his country estate, clutching a shotgun in his lifeless hands, few see his demise as cause for sorrow. But before long Doctor Quirke and Inspector Hackett realise that, rather than the suspected suicide, "Diamond Dick" has in fact been murdered.

Jewell had made many enemies over the years and suspicion soon falls on one of his biggest rivals. But as Quirke and his assistant Sinclair get to know Jewell's beautiful, enigmatic wife Francoise d'Aubigny, and his fragile sister Dannie, as well as those who work for the family, it gradually becomes clear that all is not as it seems.

As Quirke's investigations return him to the notorious orphanage of St Christopher's, where he once resided, events begin to take a much darker turn. Quirke finds himself reunited with an old enemy and Sinclair receives sinister threats. But what have the shadowy benefactors of St Christopher's to do with it all?

Against the backdrop of 1950's Dublin, Benjamin Black conjures another atmospheric, beguiling mystery.

Ashes

When Sonia Verika, a former actress who takes solace in alcohol and isolation, is pulled from the fire, her body is burned almost beyond recognition. The house she shared with a retired director and a small family of African refugees is entirely destroyed, and she is the only survivor. For her ex-lovers, Police Inspector Chronis Halkidis and Simeon Piertzovanis, a failed lawyer and the landlord of the gutted property, her fate is a heavy reckoning. Reflection gives way to guilt, and then to a fanatical desire to uncover the truth behind the blaze and hold those responsible to account - by any means necessary. But with corruption rife throughout the force, Chronis soon finds his investigation shackled from within. Fuelled by their need for revenge, and by their twin addictions to alcohol and cocaine, Simeon and Chronis must resort increasingly to violence if they are to unmask a conspiracy that unites church and state against the interests of justice. A classic noir thriller, Ashes is unflinching in its examination of the violence and extortion bred by corruption, but at the same time tender in its treatment of human weaknesses, of guilt, addiction and regret.

The Vault

"Don't forget," Chief Inspector Wexford said, "I've lived in a world where the improbable happens all the time." However, the impossible has happened. Inspector Wexford has retired.

In The Vault – a continuation of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series that includes titles like The Monster In The Box – it becomes clear that Wexford misses his job. So he jumps at Detective Superintendent Tom Ede’s offer to recruit him as an adviser on a difficult case: the bodies of two women and a man have been discovered in the old coal hole of a house in St John’s Wood, London. Wexford is intrigued by the case, and wrongly assumes that this new investigative role won’t put his life in danger.

An astonishing 45 years after publication of her first Inspector Reginald Wexford novel, From Doon With Death, Ruth Rendell, remains one of the foremost crime writers of her generation. She is also known as the psychological thriller writer Barbara Vine, and – since her elevation to the UK's House of Lords – as Baroness Rendell of Babergh

Until Thy Wrath Be Past

It is the first thaw of spring and the body of a young woman surfaces in the River Thorne in the far north of Sweden. Rebecka Martinsson is working as a prosecutor in nearby Karuna. Her sleep has been disturbed by haunting visions of a shadowy, accusing figure. Could the body belong to the ghost in her dreams? And where is the dead girl's boyfriend, also reported as missing the previous winter?

Joining forces once again with Police Inspectors Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stalnacke, Rebecka is drawn into an investigation that centres on old rumours about a plane carrying supplies for German troops in 1943 that never arrived. Shame and secrecy shroud the locals' memories of the war, with Sweden's early collaboration with the Nazis still a raw wound. And on the windswept shore of a frozen lake lurks a killer who will kill again to keep the past buried for ever beneath half a century's silent ice and snow.

The Brotherhood

One dead cop, one small island and an impact that will last a lifetime.

Description of book

When Sergeant John White, mentor, saviour and all-round good guy, is murdered during a routine call-out, the tight-knit world of Tasmania Police is rocked to the core.

An already difficult investigation into the death of one of their own becomes steeped in political complexities when the main suspect is identified as Aboriginal and the case, courtesy of the ever-hostile local media, looks set to make Palm Island resemble a Sunday afternoon picnic in comparison. And as the investigation unfolds through the eyes of the sergeant's colleagues, friends, family, enemies and the suspect himself, it becomes clear that there was a great deal more to John White - and the squeaky-clean reputation of the nation's smallest state police service - than ever met the eye.

The Brotherhood is a novel about violence, preconceptions, loyalties, corruption, betrayal and the question a copper should never need to ask: just who can you trust?

Harry Curry: Counsel Of Choice

Ugly. I rascible. I ntolerant. Clever.

From one of our sharpest legal minds comes a brilliant new charac t er, Harry Curry--scion of the establishment and criminal defender extraordinaire. A class traitor, some say.

When Harry′s robust advocacy leads to his suspension for professional misconduct, he teams up reluctantly with Arabella Engineer, an English barrister of Indian descent, struggling for a foothold at the Sydney bar. Together, they wreak havoc in criminal trials involving drug-dealing, terrorism, murder and more.

But can their professional relationship survive when personal matters intervene? Is Harry truly fated to live and work alone?

HARRY CURRY: COUNSEL OF CHOICE is an insightful--and always engaging--romp through a fascinating segment of society, and an exciting debut by a talented insider.

De Luxe

‘Lenny Bartulin is the “dap king” of Sydney crime. Sassy, slick, and deliciously entertaining, De Luxe has all the snap and verve of classic noir, delivered with a smart modern twist.’ P.M. Newton

‘If Philip Marlowe had a long-lost Aussie cousin it would be Jack Susko, who can throw a punch and deliver a one-liner without spilling a drop.’ Michael Robotham

‘With charm and attitude to burn, Jack Susko is your ideal guide through a dangerous world of violence and double-dealing.’ Charles Ardai, Hard Case Crime

For once, Jack Susko is feeling pretty good: his secondhand bookshop is on the up, and the cops haven’t been around in ages. Even his cat, Lois, is being nice to him.

Then one morning a beautiful woman knocks on Jack’s door and hands him an eviction notice. His former boss, a corrupt property developer, asks for help with a particular situation and won’t take no for an answer. Throw in an ex-lover, her jealous boyfriend, half‑a‑dozen Playboy bunnies, a Nazi Luger and, of course, the police, and it’s safe to say that Jack’s favourable winds are quickly turning a little rough.

In his most thrilling and riotous adventure yet, De Luxe finds Jack Susko with all the odds against him … and nothing but bad cards to play.

Turn Of Mind

Dr. Jennifer White’s life-long friend Amanda is dead—murdered. Four of her fingers were surgically removed after death, and Dr. White is the main suspect. But she doesn’t know if she did it.

As dementia takes hold of White, a picture emerges of two proud, forceful women, who were both best friends and formidable adversaries. And of White’s family—her two grown children, her strictness and exactitude. As the police investigation closes in, and her relationships with her children intensify, White searches her ever-fragmented mind for images of herself in Amanda’s house that day. Is her shattered memory preventing her from finding the truth or helping her to hide it?

Turn of Mind is a remarkable debut: literary and thriller, and a stunning exploration of a crumbling reality. Through White’s eloquent, fractured voice, Alice LaPlante examines the frailty of memory and how it defines our very existence.

Split Second

The number-one New York Times bestselling author returns with another pulse-pounding thriller

A serial killer is on the loose, and it's up to FBI agents Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock to bring him down. They soon discover the killer has blood ties to an infamous and now long-dead monster. Savich and Sherlock are joined by agents Lucy Carlyle and Cooper McKnight, and the chase is on.

At the same time, Agent Lucy Carlyle learns from her dying father that her grandfather didn't simply walk away from his family twenty-two years ago: he was, in fact, murdered by his wife. Determined to uncover the truth, Lucy moves into her grandmother's mansion. What she finds is a nightmare. Not only does she discover the truth of what happened all those years ago, but she faces a new mystery, one that has been passed down from mother to daughter for generations.

As the hunt for the killer escalates, Savich realizes he's become the killer's focus, and perhaps the next victim. Only Lucy can stop this madness before it's too late.

PRAISE FOR CATHERINE COULTER

'Bestseller Coulter's riveting thriller opens with a bang . . . Well-developed characters and an expertly paced plot that builds into a breathtaking conclusion.' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

'Coulter's breezy style and nonstop action make this relentlessly readable.' BOOKLIST

Babylon

Read Stephen's guest blog post about the story behind Babylon.

A new novel from the author of the novelisation of Animal Kingdom and the screenwriter of the movie The Boys.

An English backpacker heads north for sun, women and a shot at making a fortune working the prawn trawlers. Mick is looking for adventure, but hitching a ride with the enigmatic Dan leads him into more trouble and depravity than even the most reckless traveller could stomach. As the pair speed their way through the apocalyptic landscape, in a spiral of escalating violence, Dan reveals the world as seen through his eyes, and exposes Mick’s true nature.

A gripping tale of two men—one struggling to become a man and the other with the cruelest of intentions—and a game of psychological cat-and-mouse, Babylon takes you to the edge, and never brings you back.

Stephen Sewell is the author of the novelisation of Animal Kingdom, the screenwriter of the multi-award winning film The Boys, and has won numerous awards for his plays including Three Furies. He was also the script editor on the film Chopper. Captive, the sequel to Babylon, will be published in 2012.

Portrait Of A Spy

′A CROSS BETWEEN JASON BOURNE AND JAMES BOND ... A FABULOUS THRILLER′

DAILY MAIL

EUROPE IS EXPLODING AND ONE MAN MUST FIND OUT WHY

For Gabriel Allon and his wife Chiara, it was supposed to be the start of a romantic weekend in London. But nothing is ever

that simple when you′re an off-duty spy and assassin.

A pair of bombings in Paris and Copenhagen has put him on edge and when Gabriel notices a man exhibiting several traits common to suicide bombers, he follows him into the Covent Garden throng. He′s determined to prevent the carnage he fears is about to take place, but before Gabriel can draw his sidearm, he is knocked to the pavement by two plain-clothes police officers.

A moment later he looks up to find a scene from his nightmares.

From the streets of New York and London, to the unforgiving landscape of the Saudi desert, Gabriel Allon is in a race to the death against a calculating mass-murderer that he dare not lose ...

PRAISE FOR DANIEL SILVA:

′Those in the know are calling him the new John Le Carré.

Those who are reading him can′t put him down.′

CHICAGO SUN TIMES

′A world-class practitioner of spy fiction′

WASHINGTON POST

Rip Tide: A Liz Carlyle Novel

When pirates attack a cargo ship off the Somalian coast and one of them is found to be a British-born Pakistani, alarm bells start ringing at London’s Thames House. MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle is brought in to establish how and why a young British Muslim could go missing from his well-to-do family in Birmingham and end up onboard a pirate skiff in the Indian Ocean, armed with a Kalashnikov.

After an undercover operative connected to the case turns up dead in the shipping office of an NGO in Athens it looks like piracy may be the least of the Service’s problems. Liz and her team must unravel the connections between Pakistan, Greece and Somalia, relying on their wits – and the judicious use of force – to get to the truth. And they don’t have long, as trouble is brewing closer to home: the kind of explosive trouble that MI5 could do without …

Stella Rimington, former Director General of MI5, returns with a tense and heart-stopping spy thriller where the stakes are high and the enemy is always just out of sight.

I Am God

The latest blockbuster novel from the bestselling author of I Kill

A serial killer holds New York in his grip. He does not choose his victims. Nor does he watch them die. But then there are too many of them for that. The explosion of a twenty-two storey building, followed by the casual discovery of a letter, lead the police to face up to a dreadful reality: some of New York’s buildings were mined at the time of their construction. But which ones? And how many? A young female detective who hides her personal demons behind a tough facade, and a former press photographer with a past he’d rather forget are the only hope of stopping this psychopath. A man who does not claim responsibility for his actions. A man who believes himself to be God.

Blood Line

Under the watchful eye of Detective Chief Superintendent James Langton, Anna is given her first case. But is it a full-blown murder investigation or purely a missing person's case? An ominous pool of blood and no victim lead Anna on a desperate hunt for a man who has disappeared without trace. As Anna becomes obsessed with seemingly irrelevant details, Langton fears that she is losing control of the case. They still have no body and Anna is under increasing pressure to make an arrest.

Outrage

Indridason returns triumphantly to his worldwide bestselling Reykjavik Murder Mystery series.

"An international literary phenomenon--and it's easy to see why. His novels are gripping, authentic, haunting and lyrical." -- Harlan Coben

In a flat near Reykjavik city centre, a young man lies dead in a pool of blood although there are no signs of a break-in or any struggle. A woman's purple shawl, found under the bed, gives off a strong and unusual aroma. A vial of narcotics found in the victim's pocket among other clues soon lead Erlendur's colleagues down a trail of hidden violence and psychological brutality, and of wrongs that will never be fully righted.

66 North

In January 2009 there are demonstrations in the centre of Reykjavík. A small group of protesters meet up and complain about how the demonstrations are too peaceful, not violent enough. They get drunk together, and then go out on to the streets where they attack and accidentally kill a banker, the former boyfriend of one of them. The death is dressed up as suicide.

Eight months later a senior Icelandic banker is murdered in London. Magnus works with the British police on the case. As Magnus begins to discover links between the deaths of the two bankers, it becomes clear that there is a conspiracy to kill the people whom Icelanders blame most for the economic crisis in their country. Magnus must nail the conspirators before they kill again.

Meanwhile Magnus makes uncomfortable discoveries about his Icelandic family going back several generations. Are these related to the death of his own father in Massachusetts when Magnus was a student?

The Devotion Of Suspect X

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her apartment floor. Overhearing the commotion, Yasuko's next door neighbor, middle-aged high school mathematics teacher Ishigami, offers his help, disposing not only of the body but plotting the cover-up step-by-step.

When the body turns up and is identified, Detective Kusanagi draws the case and Yasuko comes under suspicion. Kusanagi is unable to find any obvious holes in Yasuko's manufactured alibi and yet is still sure that there's something wrong. Kusanagi brings in Dr. Manabu Yukawa, a physicist and college friend who frequently consults with the police. Yukawa, known to the police by the nickname Professor Galileo, went to college with Ishigami. After meeting up with him again, Yukawa is convinced that Ishigami had something to do with the murder. What ensues is a high level battle of wits, as Ishigami tries to protect Yasuko by outmaneuvering and outthinking Yukawa, who faces his most clever and determined opponent yet.

Afterwards

There is a fire and they are in There. They are in there ...Black smoke stains a summer blue sky. A school is on fire. And one mother, Grace, sees the smoke and runs. She knows her teenage daughter Jenny is inside. She runs into the burning building to rescue her. Afterwards, Grace must find the identity of the arsonist and protect her family from the person who's still intent on destroying them. Afterwards, she must fight the limits of her physical strength and discover the limitlessness of love.

White Death

Castagnetti, a bee-keeping private detective, is hired by a businessman to find out who set fire to his car and why. It seems like a dead-end case, nothing more than an instance of mindless vandalism. But before long the businessman is receiving threatening phonecalls, his factory is burnt to the ground and an employee loses his life. Castagnetti traces similar cases of arson across the city and realises that this sort of systematic intimidation happens when the owner's land is about to be redesignated as residential. The last person to stand in the developers' way was whacked in Milan a year ago. Castagnetti needs to solve the case before his client, and his city, are both buried in cement.

Smokin' Seventeen

Break out a cold drink and slap on some sunscreen, because everyone's favourite bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is going to warm up your winter in her next adventure SMOKIN' SEVENTEEN!

Where there's smoke there's fire, and no one knows this better than New Jersey bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum. The bail bonds office has burned to the ground, and bodies are turning up in the empty construction lot. To make matters worse, Stephanie is working out of a motor home she shares with a dancing bear, and Joe Morelli's old world grandmother has declared a vendetta against her. And just when Stephanie decides it might be time to choose between the two men in her life, Morelli and Ranger, a third man from Stephanie's past moves back to Trenton...

Janet Evanovich is the recipient of the Crime Writers' Association's John Creasey Memorial, Last Laugh and Silver Dagger awards, as well as the Left Coast Crime's Lefty award, and is the two-time recipient of the Independent Mystery Booksellers' Association's Dilys award. Her website address is http://www.evanovich.com.

Miracle Cure

Another classic Coben release for his huge army of fans.

They were looking for a miracle cure... Sara Lowell and Michael Silverman are the ideal celebrity couple, darlings of the media. She's TV's most popular journalist. He's New York's hottest basketball star. Their lives would soon be shattered by the most deadly illness of modern times.

Dr. Harvey Riker's clinic has found the miracle cure that millions seek. One-by-one his patients are getting well. One-by-one they are targeted by a serial killer more fatal than their disease.

Rev. Earnest Sanders' ultra-conservative Holy Crusade Church saw the disease as God's vengeance on a lustful, sin-ridden generation of the damned. And God's will could not be denied.

Lieutenant Bernstein's true desires make him a perfect choice to track the killer...or a perfect victim.

Harlan Coben was the first ever author to win all three major crime awards in the US. He is now global bestseller with his mix of powerful stand-alone thrillers and Myron Bolitar crime novels. He has appeared in the bestseller lists of The Times, the New York Times, Le Monde, Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and four children.

An Uncertain Place

Adamsberg travels to London, where a routine conference draws him into a disturbing investigation

Commissaire Adamsberg leaves Paris for a three-day conference in London. With him are a young sergeant, Estalère, and Commandant Danglard, who is terrified at the idea of travelling beneath the Channel. It is the break they all need, until a macabre and brutal case comes to the attention of their colleague Radstock from New Scotland Yard.

Just outside the baroque and romantic old Highgate cemetery a pile of shoes is found. Not so strange in itself, but the shoes contain severed feet. As Scotland Yard's investigation begins, Adamsberg and his colleagues return home and are confronted with a massacre in a suburban home. Adamsberg and Danglard are drawn in to a trail of vampires and vampire-hunters that leads them all the way to Serbia, a place where the old certainties no longer apply.

FRED VARGAS was born in Paris in 1957. A historian and archaeologist by profession, she is now a bestselling novelist. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.

Where The Bodies Are Buried

The brililant new novel from the bestselling author Chris Brookmyre - and a change of direction.

Detective Catherine McLeod was always taught that in Glasgow, they don't do whodunit. They do score-settling. They do vendettas. They do petty revenge. They do can't-miss-whodunit. It's a lesson that has served her well, but Glasgow is also a dangerous place to make assumptions. Either way she looks at it, she recognises that the discovery of a dead drug-dealer in a back alley is merely a portent of further deaths to come. Elsewhere in the city, aspiring actress Jasmine Sharp is reluctantly - and incompetently - earning a crust working for her uncle Jim's private investigation business. When Jim goes missing, Jasmine has to take on the investigator mantle for real, and her only lead points to Glen Fallan, a gangland enforcer and professional assassin whose reputation is rendered only slightly less terrifying by having been dead for twenty years. Cautiously tracing an accomplished killer's footsteps, Jasmine stumbles into a web of corruption and decades-hidden secrets that could tear apart an entire police force - if she can stay alive long enough to tell the tale.

Since his award-winning debut novel Quite Ugly One Morning, Christopher Brookmyre has established himself as one of Britain's leading crime novelists.

Theodore Boone And The Abduction

Theodore Boone is back in a new adventure, and the stakes are higher than ever.

When his best friend, April, disappears from her bedroom in the middle of the night, no one, not even Theo Boone-who knows April better than anyone-has answers.

As fear ripples through his small hometown and the police hit dead ends, it's up to Theo to use his legal knowledge and investigative skills to chase down the truth and save April.

Filled with the page-turning suspense that made John Grisham a #1 international bestseller and the undisputed master of the legal thriller, Theodore Boone's trials and triumphs will keep readers guessing until the very end.

John Grisham is the author of twenty-one novels, one work of non-fiction, and one collection of short stories. His works are translated into thirty-eight languages. He lives in Virginia and Mississippi.

Fallen

The gripping new thriller from the double #1 bestseller.

In the blazing heat of an Atlanta summer, Special Agent Faith Mitchell of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation returns home to a nightmare. Expecting to find her mother minding her new baby daughter Emma, she is horrified to discover Emma locked in the shed, her mother’s safe open and her gun missing and a bloody handprint on the front door frame.

Without waiting for back-up, she enters the house to a scene of carnage. It has been turned over and a man lies dead in a pool of blood. She discovers two others upstairs. Within minutes they have been shot dead. And when the Atlanta police force turns up, Faith has some difficult questions to answer. Why didn’t she wait for back-up? Did she really kill them in self-defence? And what did the men want with her mother? Ex-Atlanta police chief, Evelyn Mitchell was once under investigation by Faith’s partner Will Trent. Is she directly involved this time, and where is she? There is evidence she might have been tied up but what was she doing with a renowned drug baron – whose body has been found in the trunk of her car?

Suddenly things have become a whole lot more complicated for Will. He must go back to his previous, deeply unpopular case and unpick all the threads, risking the police force closing ranks on him to protect one of their own. And all the while he is conscious that his partner is right at the centre of it all, and he must tread very carefully indeed…

Carte Blanche

James Bond returns in a contemporary new thriller by Number One bestselling author Jeffery Deaver

'The face of war is changing. The other side doesn't play by the rules much any more. There's thinking, in some circles, that we need to play by a different set of rules too . . .'

Fresh from Afghanistan, James Bond has been recruited to a new agency. Conceived in the post-9/11 world, it operates independent of Five, Six and the MoD, its very existence deniable. Its aim: to protect the Realm, by any means necessary.

The Night Action alert calls Bond from dinner with a beautiful woman. GCHQ has decrypted an electronic whisper about an attack scheduled for later in the week: casualties estimated in the thousands, British interests adversely affected.

And 007 has been given carte blanche to do whatever it takes to fulfil his mission.

The Wonder Of Seldom Seen

Miles Jordon is a wanted man. But not in a good way. The police are after him. So too is the erratic, renegade ASIO agent Robert Wilson, and Greg Sweeney, a violent man whose wife Miles can’t resist. Only a few weeks earlier he had driven up the Gippsland Highway with his dog in search of a new life. Briefly Miles thought he may have found a way to start over, then he is forced to move on and ends up in Seldom Seen. This may appear to be a quiet hamlet in Victoria’s High Country but it harbours secrets that are deeper than could ever be imagined.

Death On A Galician Shore

A cleverly plotted, page-turning murder mystery set on the beautiful, rugged coast of Galicia in northwest Spain.

One misty autumn dawn in a quiet fishing port in northwest Spain, the body of a sailor washes up in the harbour. Detective Inspector Leo Caldas is called in from police headquarters in the nearby city of Vigo to sign off on what appears to be a suicide. But details soon come to light that turn this routine matter into a complex murder investigation. Finding out the truth is not easy when the villagers are so suspicious of outsiders. As Caldas delves into the maritime life of the village, he uncovers a disturbing decade-old case of a shipwreck and two mysterious disappearances. Death on a Galician Shore is a chilling story of violence, blackmail and revenge that has enthralled readers across Europe...

Domingo Villar grew up in Vigo, Galicia and now lives in Madrid. He is a screenwriter and novelist whose two novels have been bestsellers and shortlisted for several awards in Spain. His first novel, Water-blue Eyes, also featuring Inspector Leo Caldas, was published in the UK by Arcadia. Death on a Galician Shore is his second novel.

The Boundary

An award-winning crime novel that breaks new ground in Australian fiction

Winner of the 2009 David Unaipon Award

Long ago, Meston Park in Brisbane's West End marked the city's boundary. A curfew kept its Aboriginal population outside the city limits after dark.

When the park becomes the site of a multi-million dollar development, the Corrowa People vow to fight and file a native title claim. Hours after rejecting the claim, Justice Bruce Brosnan is brutally murdered.

Some believe it is the work of an ancient assassin, returned to destroy the boundary.

While the investigation forces Detective Jason Matthews to confront his buried heritage, lawyer Miranda Eversely battles a sense of personal failure at the Corrowa's defeat

How far will it take her to the edge of self-destruction?

The Silent Girl

It's gory. It's gripping. It's Gerritsen. The new heart-stopping Rizzoli & Isles bestseller.

Description of book

When a severed hand, clutching a gun, is found in a Chinatown alley in downtown Boston, detective Jane Rizzoli climbs to the adjacent roof-top and finds the hand's owner: a red-haired woman whose throat has been slashed so deeply the head is nearly severed. She is dressed all in black, and the only clues to her identity are a throwaway cell phone and a scrawled address of a long-shuttered restaurant.

With its wary immigrant population, Chinatown is a closed neighbourhood of long-held secrets - and nowhere is this more obvious than when Jane meets Iris Fang. Strikingly beautiful, her long black hair streaked with grey, she is a renowned martial arts master. Yet, despite being skilled in swordplay, neither she nor her strangely aloof daughter, Willow, will admit any knowledge of the rooftop murder. And pathologist Dr Maura Isles has determined that the murder weapon was a sword crafted of ancient metal from China.

It soon becomes clear that an ancient evil is stirring in Chinatown - an evil that has killed before, and will kill again - unless Jane and Iris can join forces, and defeat it ...

Black Flowers

This is not a story about a girl who disappears. This is the story of a little girl who comes back. As if from nowhere, she appears one day on a seaside promenade, with a black flower and a horrifying story about where she's been. But telling that story will start a chain reaction of dangerous lies and deadly illusions that will claim many more victims in the years to come. Neil Dawson has grown up wanting to be like his father - a writer. When his father commits suicide, he is devastated. But through his grief, Neil knows something isn't right. Looking through his father's papers, he finds a copy of an old novel, The Black Flower. Opening it will take Neil into an investigation full of danger, pain and subterfuge. Hannah Price is also mourning her father. She followed his footsteps into the police force, and knows she has a big reputation to live up to. When she gets assigned to Neil's father's case, it will lead her on a journey into her own past and to the heart of a shattering secret.

Inspector Singh Investigates A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree

Inspector Singh is in Cambodia - wishing he wasn't. He's been sent as an observer to the international war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, the latest effort by his superiors to ensure that he is anywhere except in Singapore. But for the first time the fat Sikh inspector is on the verge of losing his appetite when a key member of the tribunal is murdered in cold blood. The authorities are determined to write off the incident as a random act of violence, but Singh thinks otherwise. It isn't long before he finds himself caught up in one of the most terrible murder investigations he's witnessed - the roots of which lie in the dark depths of the Cambodian killing fields. . .

Love, Honour And O'Brien

Holly Love's in big trouble - she's got to find the cheating swine who ripped her life apart, which turns out to be a huge mystery involving a gloomy old house, a hearse-driving Elvis impersonator and a gang of vengeful thugs - not to mention a possessed parrot and a very cute guy who might just take her mind off all her woes! A funny and hugely entertaining mystery from a brilliant storyteller.

'Ingenious, funny, with a cast of charming and eccentric characters.' Kerry Greenwood

She stared into the speckled mirror, wondering how she had come to this. How could she, Holly Love, apple of her parents' eye, competent manipulator of invoices in Gorgon Office Supplies, have ended up alone and starving in a dead man's flat?

How indeed? Most reluctant heroines would throw in the towel at this point. But Holly Love is made of sterner stuff. She's sworn to track down the cheating swine who ripped her life apart, and make him pay. But as she tries to keep her head in the face of a bizarre mystery, a gloomy old house, a hearse-driving Elvis impersonator and a gang of vengeful thugs - not to mention a garrulous and possibly possessed parrot - Holly is forced to come to terms with a great truth. However bad things seem, they can always get worse.

Jennifer Rowe is a devotee of the murder mystery genre; she enjoys reading these 'extended brainteasers' as much as writing them. A multi-award winning writer, Jennifer is the author of the Verity Birdwood and Tessa Vance mysteries, and creator of the television series Murder Call. Now she brings us the adventures of a new and reluctant/accidental P.I., Holly Love.

The Hypnotist

When a whole family is murdered in Stockholm, Detective Inspector Joona Linna knows there is only one person who can help find the perpetrator. Erik Maria Bark, retired hypnotist, is called in to work with Josef Ek, a fifteen-year-old boy who witnessed the brutal murder of his family.

Following a series of accusations by his patients, Erik is reluctant to return to his craft but makes an exception for Joseph Ek. As he delves deep into the boy′s mind, he discovers that Josef murdered his own family on the orders of his sister Evelyn. When Joona and Erik journey deep into the woods to find Evelyn, she admits that she was abused by her brother for many years. When she refused to submit to him, he took revenge on the entire family. When Josef escapes from custody and Erik′s only son Benjamin disappears from the family home, Erik is thrust into a world of violence and gang warfare, forcing him to revisit his past to discover the truth.

Plugged

Headline are delighted to announce a brilliant darkly comic adult crime debut from the bestselling author of the Artemis Fowl children's titles.

Dan, an Irishman who's ended up in New Jersey, works as a bouncer in a seedy club, half in love with hostess Connie. When Connie is murdered on the premises, a vengeful Dan finds himself embroiled in an increasingly deadly sequence of events in which his doctor friend Zeb goes mysteriously missing, a cop-killing female cop becomes his only ally, and he makes an enemy of ruthless drug-dealer Mike Madden. Written with the warmth and wit that make the Artemis Fowl novels so irresistible, though with additional torture and violence, PLUGGED is a brilliant crime debut from a naturally gifted writer with a huge fanbase.

Eoin Colfer's first Artemis Fowl book was published in 2001 and he has now published seven books in that series as well as many others. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.

Previous Books:
Artemis Fowl Novels: Artemis Fowl (2001), The Arctic Incident (2002), The Eternity Code (2003), The Opal Deception (2005), The Lost Colony (2006), The Time Paradox (2008), Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex (2010)

Other titles: And Another Thing... (The sixth book in the Douglas Adams's Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy series)

...and many more.

Mercy

Sometimes you get a second chance . . .

Carl Mørck used to be a good homicide detective. One of Copenhagen's best, in fact. Then a bullet almost took his life. Two of his colleagues weren't so lucky, and Carl, because he didn't draw his gun, blames himself. Now his erratic behaviour is going to cost him his job. It's just a matter of time.

So promotion is the last thing he expects. Newly created Department Q deals with 'cases of special focus'. His former colleagues think it's a joke – a home for hopeless cases. Carl, leading it, will fit right in. Except that his first case is that of missing politician Merete Lynggaard. She vanished five years ago. Everyone assumes she's dead. Everyone assumes it's a waste of time.

Everyone, that is, except Carl. Because Merete isn't dead – at least not yet.

About The Author

Jussi Adler-Olsen was born in Copenhagen and studied medicine, sociology, politics and film. He worked as a magazine editor and publisher before starting to write fiction. So far he has written three Department Q thrillers, which all hit the Danish bestseller lists on publication and stayed there ever since.

The Wreckage

Set in the turbulent aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, The Wreckage pits Vincent Ruiz against powerful agents who will stop at nothing to bury secrets...

In London, ex-cop Vincent Ruiz rescues a young woman from a violent boyfriend but wakes next morning to find that he's been set up and robbed. As he tracks down the thieves, he discovers the boyfriend's tortured body and learns that powerful men are looking for the girl. What did Holly Knight steal that is so important to them

Meanwhile in Baghdad, the bank robbery capital of the world, billions of dollars in reconstruction funds has gone missing and Pulitzer prize-winning Journalist Luca Terracini is trying to 'follow the money'. The dangerous trail will lead him to London where he teams up with Vincent Ruiz and together they investigate the disappearance of an international banker and a mysterious 'black hole' in the bank's accounts.

Before writing full-time Michael Robotham was an investigative journalist in Britain, Australia and the US. He is the pseudonymous author of 10 best-selling non-fiction titles, involving prominent figures in the military, the arts, sport and science. He lives in Sydney with his wife and 3 daughters.

The Sixth Man

After alleged serial killer Edgar Roy is arrested, his lawyer is found dead. For former FBI investigators Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, this throws doubt on whether Edgar is really guilty. Edgar's lawyer, Ted Bergin, was Sean's old friend and mentor. So this case is extremely personal. Is Edgar a killer or not? The evidence seems clear, but Sean and Michelle are beginning to have their doubts. But the more they dig into Edgar's past, the more they are bombarded with obstacles, half-truths and dead ends. Could this deadly case be the one that leaves the duo permanently parted?

David Baldacci is the New York Times bestselling author of The Camel Club, Absolute Power and Hell's Corner.

I'll Walk Alone

In this exciting Mary Higgins Clark thriller, a woman has her life turned upside down after her son is kidnapped and she is a victim of identity theft.

I’ll Walk Alone introduces us to Alexandra Moreland, a Manhattan-based woman who is a rising star in the architectural world. But behind Alexandra’s success is sorrow – she is haunted by the disappearance of her young son, Matthew, who was kidnapped in broad daylight two years ago. On Matthew’s fifth birthday, photos surface that show Alexandra kidnapping her own child, followed by a chain of events that suggest somebody has stolen her identity. Who is targeting her?

I’ll Walk Alone is Higgins Clark’s 30th novel. It's a flawless suspense.

The Crossing

Redemption is born of guilt, and weighs heavy on even the strongest man.

Traumatised by the disappearance of his daughter Claire, Taylor Bridges' marriage breaks down, and he exiles himself to Glorys Crossing in Tasmania. Taylor is the only ranger in this isolated town adjoining a national park... a town dying a slow death as the rising waters of the new dam project slowly flood it.

Struggling with the guilt of Claire's disappearance, Taylor is a chronic sleepwalker. When another young girl the same age goes missing, Taylor begins to question himself... uncertain of what happens when he sleepwalks.

It's a race against time not just to find the missing girl, but in Taylor's search for redemption and a past better left lying at the bottom of the new lake.

Bone And Cane

Nottingham, 1997. Sarah Bone is a Labour politician with a hidden radical past, about to face the election battle of her life. She also has a radical ex-boyfriend Nick Cane, just released from prison for growing and selling cannabis. They're brought together again when Sarah campaigns successfully for the release of Ed Clarke, a wrongfully imprisoned 'murderer', only to be sexually assaulted on the night she celebrates his release with him. Is she responsible for a terrible injustice? Nick's life is strangely bound up with Ed Clarke's: inmates in the same prison and now working illegally for the same mini-cab firm. Will the old chemistry spark as Nick and Sarah work together to expose Ed Clarke's guilt? As the election of a generation heats up, Bone and Cane's convictions are tested to the limit.

A Conspiracy Of Friends: A Corduroy Mansions Novel

Following on from the huge success of the 44 Scotland Street series, Alexander McCall Smith has 'moved house' to a crumbling four-storey mansion in Pimlico - Corduroy Mansions. It is inhabited by a glorious assortment of characters: among them, Oedipus Snark, the first ever nasty Lib Dem MP, who is so detestable his own mother, Berthea, is writing an unauthorised biography about him; and one small vegetarian dog, Freddie de la Hay, who has the ability to fasten his own seatbelt. (Although Corduroy Mansions is a fictional name, the address is now registered by the Post Office.)

A Dark Anatomy

This title introduces a major new historical mystery series. The year is 1740. George II is on the throne but England's remoter provinces remain largely a law unto themselves. In Lancashire a grim discovery has been made: a Squire's wife, Dolores Brockletower, lies in the woods above her home, Garlick Hall, her throat brutally slashed. Called to the scene, Coroner Titus Cragg finds the Brockletower household awash with rumour and suspicion. He enlists the help of his astute young friend, doctor Luke Fidelis, to throw light on the case. But this is a world in which forensic science is in its infancy, and policing hardly exists. Embarking on their first gripping investigation, Cragg and Fidelis are faced with the superstition of witnesses, obstruction by local officials, and denunciations from the Squire himself.

The Bayou Trilogy

Includes three novels from the author of Winter's Bone - Under The Bright Lights, Muscle For The Wing and The Ones You Do.**

A hard-hitting, critically acclaimed trilogy of crime novels from an author about whom New York magazine has written, What people say about Cormac McCarthy ... goes double for [Woodrell]. Possibly more.

In the parish of St. Bruno, sex is easy, corruption festers, and double-dealing is a way of life. Rene Shade is an uncompromising detective swimming in a sea of filth. As Shade takes on hit men, porn kings, a gang of ex-cons, and the ghosts of his own checkered past, Woodrell's three seminal novels pit long-entrenched criminals against the hard line of the law, brother against brother, and two vastly different sons against a long-absent father.

THE BAYOU TRILOGY highlights the origins of a one-of-a-kind author, a writer who for over two decades has created an indelible representation of the shadows of the rural American experience and has steadily built a devoted following among crime fiction aficionados and esteemed literary critics alike.

The Strange Fate Of Kitty Easton

When former infantry officer Laurence Bartram is called to the small village of Easton Deadall, he is struck by the beauty of the place: a crumbling stately home; a centuries-old church; and a recently planted maze, a memorial to the men of the village, almost all of whom died in one heroic battle in 1916. But it soon becomes clear to Laurence that while rest of the country is alight with hope for the first time since the end of the War, as the first Labour government takes power, the Wiltshire village is haunted by its tragic past. In 1911, five-year-old Kitty Easton disappeared from her bed and has not been seen since: only her fragile mother believes still she is alive. When a family trip to the Empire Exhibition in London ends in disaster and things take an increasingly sinister turn, Laurence struggles to find out what has happened as it seems that the fate of the house, the men and of Kitty herself may be part of a much longer, darker story of love, betrayal - and violence.

Spiral

The first bio-tech thriller from acclaimed Cornell professor, Paul McEuen. Pacific Ocean 1946: Liam Connor of the British Army, a global expert on germ warfare, is sent to help the US Navy foil an attempt by a Japanese submarine to unleash the world's first biological super-weapon. Code-name: Uzumaki. Translation: Spiral. The devastating decision is made to annihilate Spiral by releasing the world's fourth atomic bomb, obliterating the weapon before it can release its catastrophic payload. New York, present day: Connor, now a world-renowned Nobel prize-winner working on the cutting edge of nano-science technology, prayed that the spectre of Spiral would never return. But now it is back and the stakes are exponentially higher. Spiral would be virtually unstoppable with current technological advances and only Connor holds the key to its cure. Those who seek Spiral will stop at nothing to obtain Connor's knowledge, even if it means his death and that of everyone he holds dear. As the race begins for Spiral, will the world survive the Doomsday scenario about to unfold?

The Death Instinct

The eagerly awaited follow up to the million-copy selling THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER.

Ten years on from THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER, Stratham Younger and James Littlemore embark on a thrilling new adventure in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in New York; it is a story that will lead Stratham to the heart of war-ravaged Europe, where he will once again encounter Sigmund Freud.12.01pm, September 16, 1920. A quarter ton of explosives is detonated on New York’s Wall Street, the deadliest attack in the United States’ 150 year history. Stratham Younger, recently returned from the battlefields of Europe, witnesses the explosion alongside Captain James Littlemore of the NYPD and Colette Rousseaux, a brilliant and beautiful young disciple of Marie Curie. Littlemore’s investigation will lead him into conflict with the FBI, and to the centre of a dangerous web of corruption that links Wall Street and Washington. Meanwhile Stratham and Colette embark on a perilous journey that will take them to Vienna, where Freud will shed light on his theory of the human desire for destruction, even self-destruction, which he terms ‘the death instinct’.

Mortal Remains

The 13th Temperance Brennan thriller from international bestselling author, and world-class forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs.

When Tempe is called to the scene of an autoerotic death, she has little idea of the tangled chain of events that will follow. Because the man whose body she is examining apparently died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam 40 years before. So who is buried in the soldier's grave?

Tempe's investigations take her to Honolulu where she is caught up not only in the mystery of the unidentified body in the soldier's grave, but also dragged into investigating who, or what, killed the young men whose body parts have floated up onto a popular Hawaiian beach. And as Tempe gradually unravels the tangled threads of the mystery, it becomes clear that there are some who would rather the past stays dead and buried. And when Tempe proves difficult to frighten, they turn their attention to the person who means more to her than anyone else in the world.

The Informationist

A high-octane thriller with a heroine who’d give Lisbeth Salander a run for her money!

‘One of the best thrillers of the year!’ Tess Gerritsen

Vanessa Munroe deals in information - covert information. With an extraordinary intellect, a physique that allows her to pass as either male or female, and ruthless martial arts skills, she offers a unique service to anyone - government or individual - who’ll pay her.

Now Texas oil billionaire Richard Burbank has hired her to find his daughter Emily, who vanished in Africa four years earlier. Where international investigators - and local mercenaries - have tried and failed, Munroe dredges a cold trail across three continents, deep into the lawless lands of Central Africa. And there things spin out of control.

Pulled deep into the mystery of the missing girl, she finds herself cut off from civilization and left for dead. Her only hope of discovering what happened to Emily - and of getting out of Africa alive - is to face up to the violent past that she’s tried for so long to forget ...

Toploader

Spying inside the Iraqi Embargoed Zone is risky business. Agent Cobra has been doing just this, and is now due his payment. But there's a snag: his spymaster, Captain Smith, is broke. All Smith can offer Cobra is the mysterious Toploader. Discontent with this arrangement, Cobra quickly offloads the device, and returns to haranguing Smith for cash. Yet senior military personnel soon learn that Toploader is no longer in their possession. Panic ensues, and a frantic operation is launched to retrieve it. Caught in the ensuing crossfire are Flora; a plucky teenage orphan; Cooper, a reporter with a penchant for the wrong end of the stick; and Moon, a hapless drone pilot. The Toploader is about to make all of their lives a lot more dangerous, and a hell of a lot more bizarre. Toploader is a wonderfully original novel that serves as a razor-sharp satire on the absurdity of war, and how the depersonalization of death and injury is meant to make it acceptable.

Ed O'Loughlin was born in Toronto and raised in Ireland. He reported from Africa for the Irish Times, and was Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age of Melbourne. His first novel, Not Untrue & Not Unkind was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009.

Falling Glass

An old associate of regular McKinty hero Michael Forsythe, Killian makes a living enforcing other people's laws, collecting debts, dealing out threats. Now Forsythe sets Killian up with the best paid job of his life. A prominent, politically connected, Irish businessman, Richard Coulter, needs someone to find his ex-wife and children - for half a million.

Reluctant to take it, but persuaded by the money, Killian travels across the world for his briefing from Coulter himself. Once on the trail, Killian discovers the real reason Coulter's ex is running, and helps her take refuge amongst his people - a community of Irish Travellers, who close ranks to look after them. McKinty is at his continent-hopping, pacy, evocative best in this new thriller, moving between his native Ireland and distant cities within a skin-of-his-teeth timeframe.

The Fifth Witness

n tough times, crime is one of the few things that still pays, but if defense attorney Mickey Haller was expecting an uptick in business during the economic downturn, the reality is a different story. Even people needing legal representation to keep them out of jail are having to make cut-backs, it seems. In fact, the most significant part of Mickey's business right now is not about keeping clients out of jail but about keeping a roof over their heads, as the foreclosure boom hits thousands of people who were granted unrealistic mortgages in the good times and now face being kicked to the curb by ruthless corporations. Lisa Trammel had been a client of Mickey's for eight months - his very first foreclosure case, in fact - and although so far he'd managed to stop the bank from taking her house, the strain and sense of injustice are beginning to take their toll, and the bank had recently got a restraining order to prevent her protesting against their fraudulent practices. But now the bank's CEO, Mitchell Bondurant, has been found in the bank's car park with a bullet in his brain, and Lisa is about to be indicted for murder. For Mickey, it's back to what he does best on the biggest stage of all, but if he thought defending Lisa Trammel was going to be a walk in the park, he'd be wrong. Not only is he about to learn some startling truths about his client, but also about himself, and by the time the verdict is in, Mickey's whole world will have been turned upside down.

Drawing Conclusions

When Anna Maria Giusti returns from holiday to find her elderly neighbour Constanza Altavilla dead, with blood on the floor near her head, she immediately alerts the police. Commissario Brunetti is called to the scene and it seems the woman has suffered a fatal heart attack. Patta, the Vice-Questore, is eager to dismiss the case as a death from natural causes, but Brunetti believes that there is more to it. It soon transpires that there are some faint bruises around her neck and shoulders, indicating she may have been shaken. Could this have caused a heart attack? Was someone threatening her?

Meanwhile, Brunetti meets Signora Altavilla’s son, Niccolini, who tells him that since her retirement she had been helping out at a nearby nursing home. Brunetti visits the home with Ispettore Vianello to try and find any information that might be connected to the case. While they speak to those she spent the most time with, it appears that there is some hostility between the residents which raises Brunetti’s suspicions. Once again, he enlists the help of Signorina Elettra, who discovers that Signora Altavilla was involved with an organisation that helped women at risk, providing them with a safe house. Could this have something to do with her death?

As the investigation takes an unexpected twist in events, Brunetti needs to find out the truth before it gets buried within a community that seems to be slipping deeper and deeper into deception and lies.

The Gallows Bird

The new psychological thriller from No 1 bestselling Swedish crime sensation Camilla Lackberg. A woman is found dead, apparently the victim of a tragic car crash. It's the first in a spate of seemingly inexplicable accidents in Tanumshede and marks the end of a quiet winter for detective Patrik Hedstrom and his colleagues. At the same time a reality TV show is being shot in the town. As cameras shadow the stars' every move, relations with the locals are strained to breaking point. When a drunken party ends with a particularly unpopular contestant's murder, the cast and crew are obvious suspects. Could there be a killer in their midst? As the country tunes in, the bodies mount up. Under the intense glare of the media spotlight, Patrik faces his toughest investigation yet!

Next Of Kin

Why do we fear strangers when often it's those closest to us who pose the greatest threat? Fear and anxiety have spread to Denmark in the aftermath of the London bombings. Late one evening, journalist Dicte Svendsen receives an anonymous package containing footage of a brutal murder a beheading carried out by a sabre-wielding figure dressed in black. Dicte and her old friend Inspector John Wagner form an uneasy alliance with the Danish secret intelligence service to identify the killer. As media reports unleash a wave of anti-Muslim hysteria across the country, panic escalates, and when Dicte's teenage daughter is attacked, the investigation gets personal. Dicte has fought long and hard to put her dark past behind her so how does the killer seem to know her deepest secrets? Next of Kin is the best-selling European thriller from crime writer Elsebeth Egholm, and the first of her popular Dicte Svendsen' series available in English.

The Blackhouse

The Isle of Lewis is the most remote, harshly beautiful place in Scotland, where the difficulty of existence seems outweighed only by people's fear of God. But older, pagan values lurk beneath the veneer of faith, the primal yearning for blood and revenge. When a brutal murder on the island bears the hallmarks of a similar slaying in Edinburgh, police detective Fin Macleod is dispatched north to investigate. But since he himself was raised on Lewis, the investigation also represents a journey home and into his past. Each year the island's men perform the hunting of the gugas, a savage custom no longer necessary for survival, but which they cling to even more fiercely in the face of the demands of modern morality. For Fin the hunt recalls a horrific tragedy, which after all this time may have begun to demand another sacrifice. The Blackhouse is a crime novel of rare power and vision. Peter May has crafted a page-turning murder mystery that explores the darkness in our souls, and just how difficult it is to escape the past. Author Information

An award-winning journalist at twenty-one in his native Scotland, Peter May left newspapers for television and screenwriting, creating three prime-time British drama series, and accruing more than 1000 television credits before moving to France to concentrate on writing novels. He is the author of fifteen novels including two series: The Enzo Files and The China Thillers. May won the French Prix Intramuros in 2007 for Cadavres Chinois a Houston (Snakehead) and is the only Westerner to become an honorary member of the Chinese Crime Writers Association. The Blackhouse was published in French as L'Ile des Chasseurs D'Oiseaux before publication in English.

A Red Herring Without Mustard

'You frighten me,' the Gypsy said. 'Never have I seen my crystal ball so filled with darkness.' So begins eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce's third adventure through the charming but deceptively dark byways of the village of Bishop's Lacey. What the fortune teller in fact claimed to see was a vision of Flavia's dead mother, Harriet. 'She's trying to come home,' the old woman intones. 'And she needs your help.'

For Flavia, the old gypsy's words open up old wounds and new possibilities - not all of them nice ones. Is she a faker, motivated by the fact that the Roma used to camp in the grounds of Buckshaw until Flavia's father turned them off, with tragic results? Or is there some truth to her powers and the message she brings back from the other side?

And when the village is rocked by another ghastly murder, how will a growing fascination with gypsy lore help Flavia to solve it?

Live Wire

Over the years, Myron Bolitar has walked a tight rope between sports agent, friend, problem solver and private eye, his big heart quick to defend his clients' interests so fiercely that he can't help but jump in to save them, no matter the cost to his own happiness. So when former tennis star Suzze T and her rock star husband, Lex, encounter an anonymous Facebook post questioning the paternity of their unborn child, Lex runs off, and Suzze - at eight months pregnant - asks Myron to save her marriage, and perhaps her husband's life. But when he finds Lex, he also finds two people he wasn't looking for: his sister-in-law, Kitty, wife of Myron's estranged brother, and her teenage son, Mickey, who is achingly familiar. But this boy that he has never met blames Myron for everything that has happened to his parents...As Myron races to locate his missing brother while their father clings to life after a savage heart-attack, he must face the lies that led to the estrangement long ago - including the ones told by Myron himself. He must also answer the questions that Mickey's arrival has thrown up. Who is Myron Bolitar really? And can he heal the damage of the past? We thought we knew Myron, but Harlan Coben now shows us we never did. An electric, stay-up-all night thriller that unfolds at a breakneck pace, Live Wire proves that Coben still has the ability to shock us anew.

Blood Count

In New York's Harlem, every street is steeped in history, and the music of jazz legends plays in the memories of its residents. Artie Cohen could feel at home here - if he wasn't on the trail of a killer intent on erasing the past - An elderly Russian woman is found dead in her apartment, and Cohen finds himself in the centre of a violent debate between city developers and an older generation of Harlem tenants. Not to mention the tensions between himself, his old girlfriend, and her new, younger lover. Meanwhile someone in these once-violent streets is intent on hauling Harlem into the twenty-first century, no matter what it takes -

The Aurora Teagarden: Omnibus 2 (Books 5-8)

A mystery series from the No. 1 bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels.

Lawrenceton, Georgia, was once a small town; now many people see it only as a growing suburb of Atlanta - but it's still a small town at heart, where people wander in and out of each other's homes, and everybody knows everybody's business. Librarian Aurora Teagarden - Roe to her friends - grew up there, and she should know. She's always been interested in the darker side of human nature, ever since her True Crime book club led to a real murder...

This omnibus edition contains the last four novels: Dead Over Heals (book 5); A Fool and his Honey (book 6); Last Scene Alive (book 7 ); Poppy Done to Death (book 8).

Sanctus

The certainties of the modern world are about to be blown apart by a three thousand year-old conspiracy nurtured by blood and lies ...

A monk throws himself to his death from the oldest inhabited place on the face of the earth, a mountainous citadel in the historic Turkish city of Ruin. This is no ordinary suicide but a symbolic act. And thanks to the media, it is witnessed by the entire world.

But few understand it. For charity worker Kathryn Mann and a handful of others in the know, it is what they have been waiting for. The cowled and secretive fanatics that live in the Citadel suspect it could mean the end of everything they have built -- and they will kill, torture and break every law to stop that. For Liv Adamsen, New York crime reporter, it begins the next stage of a journey into the heart of her own identity.

And at that journey′s end lies a discovery that will change EVERYTHING ...

SANCTUS is an apocalyptic conspiracy thriller like no other -- it re-sets the bar for excitement and fascination, and marks the debut of a major talent in Simon Toyne.

The Serpent's Daughter

Leaving British East Africa for a holiday in Morocco, Jade del Cameron expects this trip will be far less dangerous. Instead, she finds herself traversing deadly territory in a desperate bid to save her mother's life ? and her own. Soon after joining her mother in the ancient port city of Tangier, Dona del Cameron goes missing ? victim of an apparent kidnapping ? and, shockingly, the French authorities seek to arrest her for murder. To find her mother and expose the true villains, Jade must call upon her resourcefulness and courage as never before. For even as she learns of her connection to a legendary line of powerful women she begins to understand the plot initiated by an ancient foe known as the serpent's daughter ? a plot that is intended to bring about Jade's destruction ...

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Book Twelve

As the countdown to Mma Makutsi's wedding begins, all is not as it should be at the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency. While investigating unpleasant occurrences on a southern cattle- post, Mma Ramotswe, always on the side of the weak against the strong, has reason to reflect on Rule No.3 of The Principles of Private Detection: never lie to the client. Apprentice mechanic Charlie seems to be avoiding certain important responsibilities. And as Mma Makutsi's big day approaches, her nemesis Violet Sephotho is casting her net wider: by standing for election which could spell trouble for the entire nation. But as friends and family gather under starry African night skies, it turns out that even the most perplexing of apparitions - and the most shocking of crimes - may yield to rational explanation. And, of course, to Mma Ramotswe's inimitable way with love, intuition and redbush tea.

The Leopard

A heart-stopping thriller from the international star the Independent has called 'The next Stieg Larsson'.

In the depths of winter, a killer stalks the city streets. His victims are two young women, both found with twenty-four inexplicable puncture wounds, both drowned in their own blood. The crime scenes offer no clues, the media is reaching fever pitch, and the police are running out of options. There is only one man who can help them, and he doesn’t want to be found.

Deeply traumatised by an investigation that threatened the lives of those he holds most dear, Inspector Harry Hole has lost himself in the squalor of Hong Kong’s opium dens. But with his father seriously ill in hospital, Harry reluctantly agrees to return to Oslo. He has no intention of working on the case, but his instinct takes over when an MP is found brutally murdered in a city park.

The victims appear completely unconnected to one another, but it’s not long before Harry makes a discovery: the women all spent the night in an isolated mountain hostel. And someone is picking off the guests one by one.

A heart-stopping thriller from the critically-acclaimed Jo Nesbø, The Leopard is an international bestseller that will grip you until the final page.

Hanging Hill

How far would you go to protect the one you love? The new standalone bestseller by the most terrifying thriller writer.

What if you found yourself divorced and penniless? With no skills and a teenage daughter to support? What if the only way to survive was to do things you never thought possible, to go places you never knew existed …

These are questions Cal has never really thought about before. Married to a successful business man, she’s always been a bit of a dreamer. Until now.

Her sister Zoe is her polar opposite. A detective inspector working out of Bath Central, she loves her job, and oozes self-confidence. No one would guess that she hides a crippling secret that dates back twenty years, and which – if exposed – may destroy her.

Then Cal’s daughter gets into difficulties, and Cal finds she needs cash – lots of it – fast. With no one to help her, she is forced into a criminal world of extreme pornography and illegal drugs; a world in which teenage girls can go missing.

Two sisters intent on survival. Until one does something so terrifying that there’s no way back …

The Troubled Man

The final Kurt Wallander Mystery - and the first new Wallander novel for a decade.

Every morning Håkan von Enke takes a walk in the forest near his home in Stockholm. However, one winter’s day he fails to come home. It seems that the retired naval officer has vanished without trace.

Detective Kurt Wallander is not officially involved in the investigation but he has personal reasons for involving himself in the case as Håkan’s son is engaged to his daughter Linda. A few months earlier, at Håkan’s 75th birthday party, Kurt noticed that the old man appeared uneasy and seemed eager to talk about a controversial incident from his past career that remained shrouded in mystery. Could this be connected to his disappearance? When Håkan’s wife Louise also goes missing, Wallander is determined to uncover the truth.

His search leads him down dark and unexpected avenues involving espionage, betrayal and new information about events during the Cold War that threatens to cause a political scandal on a scale unprecedented in Swedish history. The investigation also forces Kurt to look back over his own past and consider his hopes and regrets, as he comes to the unsettling realisation that even those we love the most can remain strangers to us.

And then an even darker cloud appears on the horizon...

The return of Kurt Wallander, for his final case, has already caused a sensation around the globe. The Troubled Man confirms Henning Mankell’s position as the king of crime writing.

To Fetch A Thief

When a valuable circus elephant and his trainer go missing, Chet and Bernie are hired to find out whats going on. Have Peanuts and his trainer, Uri, been lured away by animal rights activists? Or have they been kidnapped by someone with a grudge? It's not long before Chet and Bernie discover that their disappearance is much more sinister than an animal rights stunt, and may in fact involve vicious smugglers and the huge illegal international trade in exotic animals. To Fetch a Thief shows why readers have fallen head-over-paws in love with the Dog On It series. Top-notch suspense, humour, and insight into the ways our canine companions think and behave make this the most entertaining book in the series yet.

Aegean Prophecy

The third book in a new commercial crime series staring the sexy homicide detective Andreas Kaldis, with each book set in a different Greek city.

St John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation over 1900 years ago in a cave on Greece s eastern Aegean island of Patmos. When a revered monk from that holy island s thousand-year-old monastery is murdered in Patmos s town square during Easter Week, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis is called upon to find the killer.

Andreas' impolitie search for answers brings him face-to-face with a scandal haunting the world s oldest surviving monastic community. On the pristine Aegean peninsula of Mount Athos, isolated from the rest of humanity, twenty monasteries sit protecting the secrets of Byzantium amid a way of life virtually unchanged for more than 1500 years. But today this sacred refuge harbours modern international intrigues that threaten to destroy the very heart of the Church...in a matter of days.

Fatal Error

After a cyber-philandering sociopath is murdered, Ali Reynolds risks her life to find the true killer when her good friend becomes the prime suspect. By the best-selling author of Trial by Fire. 150,000 first printing.

Satori

A gripping thriller that follows assassin Nicholai Hel across Asia as he fights to regain his freedom. Sugamo Prison, Japan, October 1951. Nicholai Hel has spent the last three years in solitary confinement for the murder of his mentor. A formidable assassin as well as a master of hoda korosu or 'naked kill', he has developed a supreme awareness of the presence of danger. Suddenly offered the chance of freedom, he feels it now as never before...Overseen by Haverford, his American spymaster he must go to Beijing and kill the Soviet Union's commissioner to China. In a landscape primed for war this is a suicide mission he has no choice but to accept. Can Hel succeed in winning his freedom and if so, at what cost? And can he ever achieve his ultimate goal of satori -- the possibility of true understanding and harmony with the world?

Ghost Of Waterloo

It's 1828. The Running Patterer (colonial Sydney's best known itinerant newshawker) has just solved a series of gruesome murders when a group of unknowns pulls off a daring bank heist. Reluctantly, The Patterer is dragged into crime detection once more ndash; and soon there are more murders to add to his list. Populated with a cast of intriguing real and imagined characters, Robin Adair's Sydney of 1828 comes to life. Could Napoleon Bonaparte, The devil himself, really be in Sydney town? Where do a castrato and a performing dog come into it? and were the robbers really after the money? Only the Patterer has the wherewithal to find out ndash; with a little help from a motley collection of characters and at considerable risk to his own heart. Following on from the award-winning Death And The Running Patterer, this mystery with a killer punch will have you both laughing out loud and racking your brains.

Silent Mercy

Sex crimes, torture, hate – this case has Assistant DA Alex Cooper written all over it!

When the burnt headless body of a young woman is found on the steps of a Baptist Church in Harlem, Alex is one of the first on the scene. She has seen some gruesome crimes committed in New York, but the barbarity of this one leaves her nauseous. Working with NYPD cop Mike Chapman, she begins to investigate, and it becomes clear that there is a zealous religious fanatic serial killer on a rampage.

A former Manhattan Assistant DA, Linda Fairstein is now an award-winning author with numerous international bestsellers. Author Nelson DeMille said she is "one of the best crime fiction writers in America today.”

Pericles Commission

Athens, 461BC. A dead man falls from the sky, landing at the feet of a surprised Nicolaos. It doesn't normally rain corpses. This one is the politician Ephialtes, who only days before had turned Athens into a democracy. Rising young statesman Pericles commissions Nicolaos to find the assassin. Nico walks the mean streets of Classical Athens in search of a killer, but what's really on his mind is how to get closer - much closer - to Diotima, an intelligent and annoyingly virgin priestess, and how to shake off his irritating twelve year old brother, Socrates . .

Noble Killing

The brilliant new Istanbul crime novel from Barbara Nadel delves into the shocking world of honour killing Turkey: the police are called to the scene of what seems to be the honour killing of a young girl. Burnt alive, she is not the first girl to suffer such an horrific death in Istanbul. Further investigations by Inspectors Cetin Ikmen and Mehmet Suleyman reveal that the girl had a secret boyfriend who has now disappeared. He and the girl's family are prime suspects, even though forensic evidence is scant. Why does the family, in common with other families of girls immolated in the city, now appear to be broke? There are also links to an infamous local gangster. Religion, organised crime and the lengths some people will go to in order to conform, come together in a tragic story of violence in a divided and changing society. And Mehmet Suleyman is on the verge of making a mistake that could ruin his career...

Stonecutter - Special Price Edition

The remote resort of Fj llbacka has seen its share of tragedy, though perhaps none worse than that of the little girl found in a fisherman's net. But the post-mortem reveals that this is no case of accidental drowning ... Local detective Patrik Hedstr m has just become a father. It is his grim task to discover who could be behind the methodical murder of a child both he and his partner, Erica, knew well. He knows the real question - and answer - lies with why. What he does not know is how this case will reach into the dark heart of Fj llbacka and the town's past, and tear aside its idyllic fa ade, perhaps forever.

Toys

This sci-fi thriller by internationally megaselling author James Patterson will appeal to fans of movies like Terminator and I, Robot. Humans no longer rule the world. Elites have taken control of civilised society. Elites are technologically enhanced versions of humankind. Originally created by man, they were intended to save humanity. Instead, they have slowly usurped humans from leadership. Animosity between Elites and humans is fierce, and many rebels fight back against Elite rule. Hays Baker is an agent in the Elite forces and at the forefront of keeping the humans under control. However, Hays is unknowingly hiding a secret that will make him the greatest threat to the Elite regime ...

James Patterson is one of the best-known and biggest-selling writers of all time. He is the author of many bestselling novels – including the Maximum Ride, Alex Cross and Women's Murder Club series.

The Terror Of Living

Hunt, an ex-convict, has spent the past twenty years on a small ranch with his wife, supplementing his income with the odd drug smuggling job. Drake, a deputy sheriff, is newly married and has almost escaped the shadow of his father, who was also a sheriff -- and no stranger to the drug trade himself...Drake is on Hunt's trail when a big drug deal in the mountains goes awry and so begins a terrifying race against time. Although Hunt evades Drake's attempts at capture the traffickers soon unleash a merciless hired killer to reclaim what's theirs. As the chase closes in and loyalties are tested, Drake's quest for justice contends with a hitman's quest for blood, and Hunt must face a terrible choice...

The Simple Death

A man falls off a ferry and dies and an elderly lady dies after a long painful illness - could the two deaths be linked? Are they mercy killings or is Detective Nicholas Troy on the trail of a serial killer? A smart, sophisticated, hugely entertaining mystery, with a plot ripped straight out of tomorrow's headlines.

'Duffy is indisputably a writer to watch. He will soon be ranked alongside the likes of international behemoths Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos and Don Winslow. There is no higher praise.' Winsor Dobbin, Sun-Herald

A man has come off the Manly Ferry and Detective Nicholas Troy investigates but he is distracted. His mentor Father Luke Corelli has been accused of abusing a young boy years before. To Troy's dismay he's not denying the charge and nor is the Catholic Church trying to defend his name. Troy's ambitious and attractive colleague Susan Conti is newly single and his eccentric boss, Jon McIver, would rather be singing the blues than following leads.

In another part of Sydney, successful bureaucrat Leila Scott's mother has bone cancer. She asks for help to die and Leila seeks the advice of a voluntary euthanasia group. She finds herself caught up in a police investigation when Troy comes across members of the group and begins to suspect voluntary euthanasia is being used as an excuse for something much darker. As Troy digs deeper into both cases, feeling instinctively that they are somehow connected, he realises that morality and the law might not always follow the same path. And that there is no such thing as a simple death.

Michael Duffy writes about true crime for the Sun Herald and the Sydney Morning Herald. He co-presents 'Counterpoint' on ABC Radio National. The first novel in his series about Nicholas Troy, Jon McIver and Susan Conti was The Tower.

Praise for The Tower:

'A gripping, fast-paced debut that introduces Michael Duffy's simple, true and confident voice to an army of crime lovers. Sure to be a hit with fans of Underbelly and Michael Connelly, The Tower unites classic noir suspense with seat of the pants action set against the glimmer and grime of the harbour city, where the sharks are beginning to circle.' Sydney Unleashed.com 'This is crime reporter Michael Duffy's first novel but it's well-informed by his real-life experiences of a more sinister underworld beneath Sydney's bright surface.' M2

Guardians

When Trevor's childhood friend Ben commits suicide, he and the remainder of their tight-knit friendship group must return to Grimshaw - the provincial Canadian town of their youth from which they have all been running for the last twenty years.

As the men slip uneasily back into the oppressive atmosphere of their childhood haunt, they realise that they cannot escape the reason that sent them away in the first place: the memory of a brutal murder that - until now - has remained in Grimshaw with Ben. It seems like the running is over and the past is going to catch up with them, just as it did their friend.

As old memories demand to be faced, the four remaining friends must confront the site of their worst fears - an eerie and derelict house that sits directly across from Ben's parental home. There's something, or someone, unknown inside and they mustn't let it out...

The Penguin Book Of Victorian Women In Crime

A wonderfully wicked new anthology from the editor of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime

It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder.

In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has brought together all of the era's great crime-fighting females- plus a few choice crooks, including Four Square Jane and the Sorceress of the Strand.

Assassins Of Athens

The second book in a new commercial crime series staring the sexy homicide detective Andreas Kaldis, with each book set in a different Greek city.

When the body of a boy from one of Greece s most prominent families turns up in a dumpster in one of Athens worst neighbourhoods, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis - now head of the Special Crimes Division - is certain there s a message in the murders. But who sent it - and why?

Andreas search for answers takes him deep into the sordid, criminal side of Athens nightlife and on to the glittering society world, where age-old frictions between old and new money breed jealousy, murder, revenge, revolutionaries and dangerous, if not deadly, truths...

Shatter The Bones

'You will raise money for the safe return of Alison and Jenny McGregor. If you raise enough money within fourteen days they will be released. If not, Jenny will be killed.'

Alison and Jenny McGregor, Aberdeen's own mother-daughter singing sensation, are through to the semi-finals of TV smash-hit Britain's Next Big Star. They're in all the gossip magazines, they've got millions of YouTube hits, everyone loves them. But their reality-TV dream has turned into a real-life nightmare. The ransom demand appears in all the papers, on the TV, and the internet, telling the nation to dig deep if they want to keep Alison and Jenny alive.

The media want action; the public displays of grief and anger are reaching fever-pitch. Time is running out, but DS Logan McRae and his colleagues have nothing to go on: the kidnappers haven't left a single piece of forensic evidence. The investigation is going nowhere.

It looks as if the price of fame just got a lot higher...

The Cypress House

With a hurricane bearing down, a journey to Florida becomes an inescapable nightmare. But the storm isn't the only danger. Three strangers stranded at the Cypress House - an isolated Gulf Coast boarding house - must also face an unseen and even deadlier force that means certain death for all of them ...

Arlen Wagner has seen it in men before - a trace of smoke in their eyes that promises imminent death. He is never wrong. When Arlen awakens on a train one hot Florida night and sees death's telltale sign in the eyes of his fellow passengers, he tries to warn them. Only 19-year-old Paul Brickhill believes him, and the two abandon the train, hoping to escape certain death. They continue south, but are soon stranded at the Cypress House - an isolated Gulf Coast boarding house run by the beautiful Rebecca Cady - directly in the path of an approaching hurricane.

The storm isn't the only approaching danger, though. A much deadlier force controls the county and everyone living in it, and Arlen wants out - fast. But Paul refuses to abandon Rebecca to face the threats alone, even though Arlen's eerie gift warns that if they stay too long they may never leave. From its chilling beginning to terrifying end, The Cypress House is a story of relentless suspense from 'one of the best of the best'.

Envy the Night was selected as a Reader's Digest condensed book in 2009 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller. Koryta has also won the Great Lakes Book Award for Best Mystery and has received nominations for the Edgar, Shamus, and Quill Awards.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Amos, Mississippi, is a quiet town. Silas Jones is its sole law enforcement officer. The last excitement here was nearly twenty years ago, when a teenage girl disappeared on a date with Larry Ott, Silas's one-time boyhood friend. The law couldn't prove Larry guilty, but the whole town has shunned him ever since. Then the town's peace is shattered when someone tries to kill the reclusive Ott, another young woman goes missing, and the town's drug dealer is murdered. Woven through the tautly written murder story is the unspoken secret that hangs over the lives of two men - one black, one white.

All He Saw Was The Girl

The latest brilliantly plotted novel from Peter Leonard full of Mafia revenge, double-crosses, car chases and shoot outs, with an evocative Roman setting.

Rome: Mcabe and Chip, two American exchange students, are about to become embroiled with a violent street gang, a beautiful Italian girl and a flawed kidnapping plan. Detroit: Sharon Vanelli's affair with Joey Palermo, a Mafia enforcer, is about to be discovered by her husband Ray, a secret service agent.

Brilliantly plotted and shot with wry humour, All He Saw Was The Girl takes place as these two narratives converge in the backstreets of Italy's oldest city. A thrilling ride, it once again displays Peter Leonard's genius for exploring the wrong turns that life can take.

Peter Leonard's growing fan base includes greats such as Carl Hiaasen ('great storytelling') and Michael Connelly ('clever plotting and blood and guts characters'), and publications as diverse as Uncut ('sensational'), the Daily Mirror ('stunning') and the Big Issue ('brilliantly snappy').

The Sentry

Dru Rayne and her uncle are Louisiana refugees who relocated to Los Angeles after Hurricane Katrina. Now, five years after the storm, their struggling restaurant faces a different danger. When Joe Pike witnesses Dru's uncle beaten by a neighborhood gang intent on extorting protection money, he offers his own brand of protection. But neither Dru nor her uncle want his help - and neither do the federal agents mysteriously watching their store - agents who seem more than willing to let the gang have their way.

But Pike is falling for Dru and won't back away whether she wants his help or not. As the violence escalates, the gang targets Pike, who, with Elvis Cole's help, learns that Dru and her uncle are not who they seem. It soon emerges that everything Pike thought he knew about them, their relationship to the gang and the reasons they fled New Orleans have been lies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Crais is the author of the bestselling Cole and Pike novels. Crais began a successful career in television in the 1970s, writing scripts for such major series as Cagney and Lacey, Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues. In addition to the Cole and Pike novels, he has also written several bestselling stand-alone thrillers. Crais lives in Los Angeles with his wife and family.

Kill Me Once

A thoroughly shocking, riveting, and startlingly inventive thriller from a chilling new voice.

At a tender and vulnerable young age, FBI Special Agent Dana Whitestone witnessed the brutal murders of her beautiful and loving parents. Her idyllic childhood instantly shattered, the loss was crushing and drove her towards a determined and deeply personal mission to fight the most evil and twisted of criminals – an obsession that has taken over her life. Tough and driven, she lives for her work, but now this expert investigator is stumped by her latest case – a sadistic serial killer who mocks her every step, and with immaculate precision, compulsively covers his own.

This butcher makes no mistakes. His calling cards reveal nothing about who he is – rather, they recall the actions of others. What at first appears to be the work of a copy-cat soon evolves into an explosive game of cat and mouse, a shockingly personal battle between an agent with an agenda and a brilliantly demented killer with an axe to grind and a mess to clean up. Dana must force the hand of the crazed perfectionist she trails, whose capture rests solely on a chance mistake.

Savvy, terrifying, and unputdownable, this is a smart and profoundly haunting thriller that will resonate, chill, and leave readers checking their doors and windows.

Prime Cut

The world is in economic meltdown but a mining town of Hopetoun, Western Australia, is booming.

With the town's population exploding, it's easy enough to hide a crime - and a dirty past.

Disgraced police-service golden boy DSC Cato Kwong is doing time investigating roadkill with the Stock Squad. But when the ocean throws up a human torso onto the shores of Hopetoun, Cato is called in from the cold.

Cato faces powerful opposition in the town when his investigation lifts the lid on the exploitation of migrant workers. The stakes are raised higher when the Chinese whispers started by Cato disturb an even darker criminal mind.

'A gripping read. So real I had to wipe the blood off my fingertips.' - Dave Warner

'A deadly debut, ambitious and multi-layered. A very promising start to a new career.' - Allan Guthrie

Shortlisted, 2010 UK Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger Award

Moonlight Mile

Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston suburb in 1997. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led savvy, tough-nosed investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home. Now Amanda is 16 and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Yet Amanda's aunt is once more knocking at Patrick Kenzie's door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, bright young woman who hasn't been seen in two weeks.

Haunted by the past, Kenzie and Gennaro revisit the case that troubled them the most, following a 12-year trail of secrets and lies down the darkest alleys of Boston's gritty, blue-collar streets. Assuring themselves that this time will be different, they vow to make good on their promise to find Amanda and see that she is safe. But their determination to do the right thing holds dark implications Kenzie and Gennaro aren't prepared for consequences that could cost them not only Amanda s life, but their own.

Secrets To The Grave

A mother is brutally murdered. A child's heart is broken. Only one woman can unravel the secret of a killing whose secrets are as silent as the grave.

The police find Marissa Fordham on her kitchen floor, her body slashed and mutilated. Lying with her head on her mother's bloody breast is Fordham's four-year-old daughter, Haley, barely clinging to life herself.

To protect their fragile witness, the police call in Anne Leone, child advocate. Anne not only works in the justice system, she's about to become star witness in the trial of the man who tried to make her his fourth victim in the See-No-Evil murders. As soon as Anne sees little Haley, alone and terrified, her heart is hers.

But it will be no easy task to unravel the secrets of Haley's young life or those of her mother. Haley hasn't spoken a word since being rescued. Meanwhile, the cops begin to peel back the layers of Marissa Fordham's life only to discover that she seems never to have officially existed.

Hollywood Hills

Welcome to Hollyweird: imagine Catch-22, but set in a Los Angeles police station. Your guide is the legendary ex-LA detective sergeant and world-champion crime writer Joseph Wambaugh.

For the streetwise cops of Hollywood Station, dealing with the panhandlers, prostitutes and costumed crackheads of the boulevard is all in a day's work. If they're lucky, surf-mad partners Flotsam and Jetsam can spend the morning calming the crazies and the afternoon policing the babes on the beach. But beyond the lights and the crowds on the Walk of Fame, the real Los Angeles simmers dangerously. And when things heat up, even veterans like Viv Daley will see things that they'll wish they could forget.

In the hills above town, it's a different world, where sports-car-studded driveways lead to sprawling villas stuffed with clothes and jewels. Up here, pickings are easy for the Bling Ring, a group of photogenic young addicts who knock off celebrity cribs to fund their next fix. Even experienced cop and wannabe filmstar Nate 'Hollywood' Weiss has struck gold in the hills. Leona Bruger, wife of an Industry Mover and Shaker, has taken a fancy to him. Although he knows the Hollywood maxim - you don't pet the cougars, especially if they belong to the boss - Nate reckons that a leg-over might be just the leg-up he needs. What Weiss doesn't realise is that his new flame's crooked art-dealer is about to pull a forgery scam right under his nose. And when a pair of desperate junkies hit on a foolproof plan to pay their drug debts with a stolen painting, things get very complicated indeed ...

Joseph Wambaugh served with the LAPD for fourteen years. He is internationally recognised as one of crime fiction's Olympians. He lives in Rancho Mirage, California, with his wife Dee.

The Identity Man

A fugitive framed for murder gets a new face and a new life from a mysterious foreigner. So why are the cops still after him?

A nationwide manhunt is underway for John Shannon, a petty criminal framed for murder. But he's convinced he won't get caught. He's hiding in the ruins of a city destroyed by a terrible flood, and, thanks to a mysterious foreigner calling himself the Identity Man, he has a new face, new papers and a new life.

But the city is crawling with corruption. Crooked politicians, gangsters and dirty cops are everywhere, and for some reason Shannon doesn't understand, all of them want him dead. John Shannon has run out of second chances, and now he's running out of time. Moving through the darkness in the burnt out shambles of a dirty town, he must ferret out the secret of his new life, before he is left with no life at all.

Andrew Klavan, a two-time Edgar Award winner, is the author of bestselling crime novels Don't Say a Word, The Animal Hour, True Crime and Damnation Street among others. He studied at Berkeley in California, where he also worked as a reporter. He has written twenty-four novels and four films. He lives in southern California.

Follow The Money

'When beautiful young women kiss you on the cheek you know you're over the hill, but I didn't really feel like that. As Wesley said, I still had the moves.' Cliff Hardy may still have the moves but he's in trouble. The economy's tanking and he's been conned by an unscrupulous financial advisor and lost everything he's got. Cliff only knows one way, and that's forward, so he's following the money trail. It's a twisted road that leads him down deep into Sydney's underbelly, into the territory of big money, bent deals, big yachts and bad people. Cliff's in greater danger than ever before, but he's as tenacious as a dog with a bone.

Sharp Turn

Tara Sharp is back in a new high octane mystery... This time she's helping out motor racing mogul Bolo Ignatius whose team is being sabotaged and she's also coaching the girls the local high class bordello on the finer points of body language reading.

Tara Sharp is at it again! Things are finally looking up on the work front, which may just mean she'll be able to escape living in her parent's garage.

Not only has the owner of a motorcycle racing team put her on retainer to find out who's sabotaging his bikes, but a wealthy 'madam' (of the bordello variety) wants her 'girls' coached on how to read their clients more astutely. But dark clouds are gathering. The word is that local gang lord, Johnny Viaspa, has engaged a hitman known as 'the Finisher' to clean up some 'unfinished business'. And given her previous history with Viaspa, Tara has reason to be concerned... As if that weren't bad enough, Wal, her narcoleptic security chief is suddenly homeless and is eyeing off the couch in Tara's digs while talking about 'keeping an eye on her'.

Marianne Delacourt is the pseudonym of a successful Australian fantasy writer who is sold throughout the world. Marianne grew up in Perth and now lives in Brisbane with her husband and three sons.

Red Wolf

The launch of the new bestseller by the Thriller Queen who gets all other crime writers excited

AN ACCIDENTAL DEATH?
Reporter Annika Bengtzon is working on the story of a devastating crime when she hears that a journalist investigating the same incident has been killed. It appears to be a hit-and-run accident.

A SERIES OF MURDERS
Several brutal killings follow – all linked by handwritten letters sent to the victims’ relatives. When Annika unravels a connection with the story she’s writing, she is thrown on to the trail of a deadly psychopath.

THE HUNT IS ON
Caught in a frenzied spiral of secrets and violence, Annika finds herself and her marriage at breaking point. Will her refusal to stop pursuing the truth eventually destroy her?

Treachery In Death

Detective Eve Dallas and her partner, Peabody, are following up on a senseless crime - an elderly grocery owner killed by three stoned punks for nothing more than kicks and snacks. This is Peabody's first case as primary detective - good thing she learned from the master. But Peabody soon stumbles upon a trickier situation. After a hard workout, she's all alone in the locker room when the gym door clatters open - and while hiding inside a shower stall trying not to make a sound, she overhears two fellow officers, Garnet and Oberman, arguing. It doesn't take long to realize they're both crooked - guilty not just of corruption but murder. Now Peabody, Eve, and her husband Roarke are trying to get the hard evidence they need to bring the dirty cops down - knowing all the while that the two are willing to kill to keep their secret.

Field Grey

It's 1954 and Bernie has tired of his increasingly dangerous work spying on Meyer Lansky for Cuban Intelligence. He secretly buys a boat and sails to Florida, where he's arrested, sent back to Cuba and imprisoned in the Isle of Pines. There he meets Castro, and a French intelligence officer, Thibaud, who liaises between the CIA and French intelligence. Exhaustively questioned by Thibaud, Bernie finds himself flown back to Berlin and another prison cell with a proposition: work for the French or hang for murder. Bernie's job is simple: to meet and greet POWs returning from Germany. One of these is Edgard de Boudel, a French war criminal and member of the French SS, who has been posing as a German Wehrmacht officer. The French are anxious to catch up with this man and deal with him in their own ruthless way. But Bernie's past as a German POW in Russia is about to catch up with him - in a way he could never have foreseen.

The Gordian Knot

A prize-winning Cold War spy novel from the author of international megaseller THE READER.

Young lawyer Georg Polger gives up a comfortable existence in Germany to work as a freelance translator in the South of France. But business in the picturesque village is far from booming and Georg struggles to make ends meet. One day he is approached by a Mr Bulnakov, who wants Georg to take over a local translation agency whose previous owner has just died in mysterious circumstances.

Everything seems to be going perfectly: Georg falls in love with Bulnakov's attractive secretary, Francoise and takes on a lucrative project left unfinished by his predecessor, translating plans for military helicopters. But everything changes when Georg notices Francoise copying his plans. She tells Georg that Bulnakov has threatened to harm her brother, who lives in Poland, if she refuses to do his bidding. Georg quickly realises that he is stuck between the CIA and the KGB and further out of his depth than he can begin to comprehend. But which side was he working for?

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany is 1944. A professor of law at Humboldt University, Berlin and Cardozo Law School, New York, he is the author of the major international bestselling novel and movie THE READER, short story collection FLIGHTS OF LOVE and several prize-winning crime novels. He lives in Berlin and New York.

Bury Your Dead

International phenomenon Louise Penny makes her Sphere debut with an ingenious mystery sure to delight readers of P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, and Donna Leon.

As Quebec City shivers in the grip of winter, its ancient stone walls cracking in the cold, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache plunges into the most unusual case of his celebrated career. A man has been brutally murdered in one of the city s oldest buildings - a library where the English citizens of Quebec safeguard their history. And the death opens a door into the past, exposing a mystery that has lain dormant for centuries... a mystery Gamache must solve if he s to apprehend a present-day killer.

About The Author

Blood Count

The breathtaking new race-against-the-clock thriller from the master of the triple cross

There’s no such thing as easy money. As surgeon Edward Hammond is about to find out. Thirteen years ago he performed a life saving operation on a Serbian gangster, Dragan Gazi. Gazi is now standing trial for war crimes in the international court in The Hague. After his life was saved, his men went on to slaughter thousands in the Balkan civil wars.

Now Gazi’s family want more from him: in exchange for keeping Hammond’s dirty little secret, they want him to find for them the man who holds the key to all the money Gazi squirreled away before he was locked up. But Italian financier, Marco Piravani, doesn’t want to be found, not by Hammond, not by anyone. No sooner has Hammond tracked him down, than Piravani has disappeared again.

His pursuit will take him first to the Hague, and then to Milan to find the Italian, and then finally back to the scene of his crime, Belgrade, where he must confront the decisions he once so easily took. Only then will he be able to lay the past to rest...

Three Weeks To Say Goodbye

Jack and Melissa McGuane have spent years trying to have a baby. Finally their dream has come true with the adoption of their daughter, Angelina. But nine months after bringing her home, they receive a devastating phone call ...

After years of trying for a child, Jack and Melissa McGuane's dream came true with the adoption of their daughter Angelina. But just nine months after bringing her home, they're plunged into a nightmare when a call from the adoption agency reveals that their child's biological father - an 18-year-old boy - never signed away his parental rights. Now he wants Angelina back and the law's on his side. Worse, the boy's father is a well-connected federal judge prepared to use the full weight of his influence to make it happen: Jack and Melissa's attorney won't even touch their case; Jack's job is suddenly and inexplicably under threat. On the other side of the law, the boy runs with Sureno13, a dangerous street gang. Together, father and son wage a harrowing campaign of intimidation and harassment. Jack and Melissa know that the boy and his father have no love for Angelina, what they don't know is why they want her so badly. With 21 days until they are legally compelled to hand over their daughter, just how far outside the law are they prepared to go to find out?

C. J. Box is the winner of the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, the Barry Award and the Edgar Award and an L.A. Times Book Prize finalist. His novels are US bestsellers and have been translated into 21 languages. Box lives with his family outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Lennox

Sensational writing, deft use of humour and page-turning action combine to make this a must-read novel. In a world full of books with bland narrative voices and lazy plotting Lennox fairly sizzles. An unforgettable read.

Four weeks and a day ago, I didn't know Frankie McGahern. I also didn't know that this was a state of affairs much to be desired. My life was, admittedly, not without its ups and, more often, downs, and I knew a lot of people that others would cross the street to avoid, but Frankie McGahern was a bright star that was yet to cross my sky. Shady investigator Lennox stands somewhere between legal and illegal, honour and greed, crims and cops. The one clear thing about Lennox is his certainty that only the toughest and most ruthless survive in his home town of Glasgow.

The McGahern twins are on the way up in Glasgow's grimy underworld. Then Tam, the brains of the two, is killed in a vicious contract killing. Frankie, Tam's identical twin, wants Lennox to find out who killed Tam. Lennox refuses.

Later that night, Frankie turns up dead, and Lennox finds himself in the frame for the murder. The only way for him to prove his innocence is to solve the crime - but he'll have to evade dodgy cops and men more deadly than Glasgow's notorious crime bosses before he gets any answers.

Redback

A force to be reckoned with

Tribal warlords or international warmongers; insurgents or terrorists; rebels or elected politicians; the only real differences are scale, ideology, and how close they get to the action.

While world leaders and faceless power brokers remote-control wars on a global scale, their political big-pictures translate to personal tragedy for those on the other end of the shock and awe of surgical strikes, rolling tanks and interminable detention.

And as western governments manipulate their War on Terror to stay in power, individuals the world over respond in different ways to the fear being generated; depending on whether they’re fearful of the message, or the messenger.

Being alert rather than alarmed is good advice, until people begin to wonder who they should be watching and whether they’ve been had.

Redback begins with the personal – a Pacific island hostage situation, small-scale terrorist attacks in Australia, France, Pakistan and the US, and a series of murders in London, Tokyo and Sydney.

After rescuing hostages from Pacific Island rebels and then tracking down comrades missing on the lawless Afghan-Pakistani frontier the Redbacks, a team of Australian retrieval agents led by Commander Bryn Gideon, stumble across the explosive plans of new terrorist group, Atarsa Kára.

At the same time American journalist Scott Dreher’s research into video-game training for actual warfare, reveals predictable connections to arms dealing, both legit and illegal; but disturbing links between agencies of his government and known terrorists.

Meanwhile, trade negotiator Jana Rossi’s new job with the Helix Foundation lands her in trouble in Thailand; Ashraf Majid prepares his first mission for Atarsa Kára; the home-grown terrorists of militias in Europe and America prepare to assault their own governments; and an assassin stalks and dispatches the victims on his hit list.

Independently, Bryn Gideon and Scott Dreher narrow the degrees of separation between these seemingly unrelated international incidents. When Gideon and Dreher finally join forces they discover that while the members of the mysterious group behind the attacks have no common political or religious affiliations, their ultimate goal is the oldest known to greedy men - wealth and power, power and wealth. And to achieve this end, they have no problem playing both sides of the terror divide against each other.

It then, of course, becomes a race against time for Gideon’s Redbacks to unravel a Gordian knot conspiracy involving assassination and terror.

Snouts In The Trough

Every decade or so a book is published that is of such importance that it changes the way we do things forever. Snouts in the Trough is just such a book for its chilling chronicle of the crimes and betrayals of some of Australia's own police, notorious rogue cops who stand charged with the ultimate form of police corruption - shielding their crimes behind their badges. Andrew Fraser, author of bestsellers, Court in the Middle and Lunatic Soup is outspoken when it comes to corruption in Australia's justice system. This new book from Andrew Fraser will blow the lid open on the hidden world behind certain sections of Australian policing. These are true stories that you won't read in the papers or see on the news. Like the revelations that prompted the Fitzgerald Inquiry and the Wood Royal Commission, for the unsuspecting public these stories will shock and appall. The book describes how millions of dollars in drugs escaped onto the streets; how police corruption contributed to the gangland killings; how pockets were lined with the proceeds of crime; how the "brotherhood" operates in this country and the benefits they reap. This gripping real-life tale of corruption reveals a brotherhood, with hierarchies, rituals and codes of conduct; how favours paid are returned in kind; how money spreads out among the few; how protecting your mates comes in above protecting others - a force riddled with rorts that leads down a path to murder and extortion.

Eye Of The Red Tsar

First in a gripping new series of detective novels set at the birth of Stalin's Russia.

It is the time of the Great Terror. Inspector Pekkala - known as the Emerald Eye - was the most famous detective in all Russia. He was the favourite of the Tsar. Now he is the prisoner of the men he once hunted.

Like millions of others, he has been sent to the gulags in Siberia and, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he is as good as dead. But a reprieve comes when he is summoned by Stalin himself to investigate a crime. His mission - to uncover the men who really killed the Tsar and his family, and to locate the Tsar's treasure. The reward for success will be his freedom and the chance to re-unite with a woman he would have married if the Revolution had not torn them apart. The price of failure - death.

Set against the backdrop of the paranoid and brutal country that Russia became under the rule of Stalin, Eye of the Red Tsar introduces a compelling new figure to readers of crime fiction.

Sam Eastland is the pseudonym of a British writer who lives in the United States. Eye of the Red Tsar is the first novel featuring Inspector Pekkala.

Murder In Mykonos

Mykonos has always had a romantic reputation, until the body of a blonde female tourist is discovered on a pile of bones under the floor of a remote mountain church. When the island s new police chief - the young, politically incorrect, former Athens homicide detective Andreas Kaldis - starts finding bodies, bones and suspects almost everywhere he looks, he s forced to admit that the island paradise is harbouring a ritualistic serial killer.Mykonos s character is at stake, but political niceties no longer matter when another blonde vanishes. Andreas must delve into ancient myths and forgotten island hideaways as he races against a killer intent on claiming a new blonde victim - who is herself determined to out step him..

Snow Angels

Kaamos: Just before Christmas, the bleakest time of the year in Lapland. The unrelenting darkness and extreme cold above the Arctic Circle drive everyone just a little insane . . . perhaps enough to kill.

A beautiful Somali immigrant is found dead in a snowfield, her body gruesomely mutilated, a racial slur carved into her chest. Heading the murder investigation is Inspector Kari Vaara, the lead detective of the small-town police force. The vicious killing may have been a hate crime, a sex crime-or one and the same. Vaara knows he must keep this potentially explosive case out of the national headlines or else it will send shock waves across Finland, an insular nation afraid to face its own xenophobia.

The demands of the investigation begin to take their toll on Vaara and his marriage. His young American wife, Kate, newly pregnant with their first child, is struggling to adapt to both the unforgiving Arctic climate and the Finnish culture of silence and isolation. Meanwhile Vaara himself, haunted by his rough childhood and failed first marriage, discovers that the past keeps biting at his heels: He suspects that the rich man for whom his ex-wife left him years ago may be the killer.

Endless night can drive anyone to murder.

The Best American Noir Of The Century

In his introduction to the The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, noir is the most scrutinised offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad.o Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction.

James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing 1910u2010 to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's Pastorale,o and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, Patricia Highsmith and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade.