New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bantam 1998 July-Sept

File Updated: 01/04/00

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bantam JULY-SEPT 1998

Tony Aspler Titanic Pbk published August 1998 by Bantam at Ł6.99 ISBN: 0 7704 2372 8

Dennis Lehane Sacred Pbk published July 1998 by Bantam at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0 553 50585 8 Artwork by: Cover image: Tony Stone
See Review by Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
Grief-stricken over the accidental death of her mother and the impending death of her father, Desiree Stone has been missing for three weeks - and so has the first investigator her father hired to look for her. And when the dying billionaire hires Boston detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro to continue the search for his missing daughter, they find that nothing is remotely what it seems.
Travelling from the windblown streets of Boston to the rum-punch sunsets of Florida's Gulf Coast and back again, they search for a woman and a man who could be saints or sinners, victims or victimizers, alive or dead. And the more Patrick and Angle discover, as they are led down a trail of half-truths and corruption into a dark and terrifying world, the more they realize that on this case, any wrong step will certainly be their last.

'A dark maelstrom, swirling with incestuous undercurrents...crackles with enough suspense to make for many a midsummer night's scream's' People

Gemma O'Connor Farewell to the Flesh Pbk published September 1998 by Bantam at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0553505866 Artwork by: Cover photograph: Simon Marsden
See Review by Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
Stebton Place in Oxfordshire and the convent of Holy Retreat overlooking Dublin Bay: two great houses whose histories are curiously entwined by shameful, forgotten secrets. Forgotten that is, until Jeddie Stebton-Hillyard knocks on the convent door...
>Anxious to salvage what remains of their decaying convent, the nuns of Holy Retreat seek the help of Terence Murphy Dunne, a suave, manipulative Dublin solicitor who persuades them to move their graveyard and sell off the site to raise funds. But just as the last coffin is exhumed, an extra, unmarked lead casket is unearthed. It is a discovery that raises many questions: who is in it, how long has it been there, and what has the eccentric Jeddie Hillyard to do with it! Come to that how has she insinuated herself so successfully into Mother Guardian's confidence?
When lawyer Teas Callaway is drafted in, she too begins to raise awkward questions - questions which set in motion a disturbing chain of events. And all too soon Tess finds herself caught in a spiral of intrigue that places herself and her baby daughter in mortal danger.

Farewell to the Flesh is the stunningly powerful new murder mystery from one of today's most accomplished writers.

Emma O'Connor, a real writer in the great tradition of Irish storytellers BBC Kaleidoscope

Christopher Reich Numbered Account Published July 1998 by Bantam at Ł9.99 ISBN: 059304296 4 Artwork by: Jacket photograph: Will Ryan

'A brilliant thriller that holds you in a vice grip from its first page to its last the strongest and most original suspense debut I've read in a while. " James Patterson

Seventeen years ago someone murdered Nicholas Neumann's father. As new evidence emerges implicating his father's employer, Zurich's venerable United Swiss Bank, he is willing to do whatever it takes to get to the truth.
To infiltrate his father's employer, Zurich's venerable United Swiss Bank, Nick must leave behind a star-making career on Wall Street and a beautiful fiancée. He is quickly plunged into a world where everything - gold, loyalty, power, even life and death - can be bought and sold for the right price. As he sinks deeper and deeper into this clandestine world where civility and discretion mask unbridled greed and treachery, and where the ultimate crime is the disloyalty to the bank, Nick learns that to catch a criminal who murdered his father he must become a criminal himself. As the bank comes under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration Nick finds himself' protecting the one man who may hold the key to his father's murder.
As his search intensifies, as the danger increases, as Nick gets closer to the answers, he realises his own life could be the final sacrifice he has to make.

Taut, intricate, full of suspense, Numbered Account marks the debut of an extraordinary new talent. Christopher Reich convincingly captures the burning issues and dilemmas of our time - money laundering, the connection between drug barons and arms dealers, the morality behind mergers and take-overs of big financial institutions and the lack of accountability of large institutions that shape our lives.

Christopher Reich was born in Tokyo and grew up in Los Angeles. He worked in the private banking department of the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva before joining the department of acquisitions and mergers in Zurich. He has now left banking to pursue writing full-time. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife

Gillian White Unhallowed Ground Published September 1998 by Bantam at Ł12.99 ISBN: 0593041747 Artwork by: Jacket photograph: Oliver Hunter
See Review by John Boyles
Georgina Jefferson has inherited a cottage from a dead brother she never met. Picturesque if dilapidated, nestling in a peaceful Dartmoor valley, Furze Pen sounds like the perfect place to escape from the nightmare that haunts her in London - the death of a child whose case she was assigned to in her job as a social worker.
So what if the cottage was cold and isolated, the neighbours weird and strangely threatening? Georgina needed to work out her life and Furze Pen seemed as good a place as any. Then she discovers an unexplained fire with a child's doll smouldering in the ashes, and small; unnerving occurrences begin to happen. Was Georgina going mad? Who was the strange figure watching her from the hill? Can Georgina escape when a blizzard severs the valley from the outside world?

Praise for Gillian White's The Sleeper:
'Bitingly brilliant - complex, witty and sinister' Daily Mirror
"What joy to discover an exciting new writer This dark, spooky, psychological thriller grabs you by the collar and won't let you go' Val Hennessy Woman's Journal

Gillian White adopted by a wealthy industrialist and his wife, Gillian White was brought up in a middle class home in Liverpool and sent to a private school. But by the age of fifteen she had been expelled from three schools and sent to a home office approved school in need of care and protection. Searching for life's thrills and spills she found them, and more, on the streets of sixties London. After a spell of homelessness, Gillian landed herself in reform school for three years where, she says, she learned more about life than she has before or since. On release, she found herself a job at the offices of a local newspaper in Essex and eventually trained to be a journalist. During this time she married the paper's chief reporter and started her family of four.
Gillian exchanged an inherited jade collection for a herd of Friesian cows after her father died and bought a small farm in wildest Cornwall. This enterprise soon folded so Gillian and her family moved to Devon to a farm near Dartington Hall School which her four children attended.
The school closed down after a notorious national scandal and Gillian invited the remaining pupils and teachers to start a new school in her farmhouse. The school survives today and is thriving but Gillian found the noise and over-population of her home hellish and was driven to her bedroom. This is why and when she stared to write. In the ten years since then three of her novels, Rich Deceiver, The Beggar Bride and Mothertime have been adapted for BBC Television.
Gillian says that the most pleasing part of being a novelist is that she is allowed to be eccentric! She lives in Totnes with her husband. Her children and grandchildren live nearby.