File Updated: 01/04/00

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Gollancz JULY-SEPT 1998
Simon Brett Crime Writers and Other Animals Published July 1998 by Gollancz at £16.99 ISBN: 0 575 06489 7
Here are ten evilly plotted masterpieces from one of Britain's favourite mystery writers.
In 'Happy Christmas Darling - and Goodbye!' the eternal triangle is fractured by the unlikeliest of murder weapons: a tumble-dryer hose. In 'The Man Who Got the Dirt' two Angry Young Men have become Angry Old Men - and one of them is angry enough to kill. In 'A Little Learning' we discover the surprising literary antecedents of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, including Beowulf, Sir Philip Sidney, and Alexander Pope's essay on detection. In 'Political Corrections' a recently discovered and very valuable, unpublished manuscript by a classic English crime writer of the thirties falls foul of the political correctness of the nineties. But is it genuine!
In these tales, each with its surprising twist, Simon Brett covers all seven of the deadly sins, with supremely entertaining results.

'One of the wittiest crime writers around' Antonia Fraser

Simon Brett is the author of seventeen Charles Paris novels. He also works as a television producer, He lives in Arundel, Sussex, with his wife and children.

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Colin Bruce The Strange Case of Mrs Hudson's Cat And Other Science Mysteries Published July 1998 by Gollancz at £16.99 ISBN: O57506
The World's Greatest Detective is called upon to solve baffling cases of science gone mad and nature gone murderous.
Learning the basic laws of physics mechanics, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics - can be quite a struggle. But when that master of deduction, Sherlock Holmes, leads the way, those difficult concepts become crystal clear. Colin Bruce brings Holmes, Dr Watson, and other beloved Conan Doyle characters to life to solve a dozen baffling science mysteries: murder on a royal train; divers dead of heat-stroke at the bottom of an icy sea; a mysterious lady whose brilliance is matched only by her evil; and epidemic insanity among the world's top scientists.
The Strange Case of Mrs Hudson's Cat is an extremely lucid and very entertaining book for the armchair scientist in all of us.

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Christopher Lee The Killing of Cinderella Published September 1998 by Gollancz at £16.99 ISBN: 0575063475

A Bath Detective Mystery
Christopher Lee Pantomine becomes drama in this thrilling sequel to The Bath Detective.
Backstage, all are suspects, and when the Detective Inspector and his sergeant, Madelaine Jack step in, they soon discover the illusions of spiteful theatrical companions: greed, malice, undisguised lust, and terrible sadness and loneliness. The Bath Detective, who thought he had seen it all, finds himself in a world of sinister slapstick where no puncher are pulled and where there's not a little rejoicing at the killing of Cinderella
Christopher Lee was BBC correspondent in Moscow before taking up research in contemporary history at Cambridge. He is the author of ten books including The Bath Detective. He also writes for Radio 4.

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Julian Rathbone Trajectories Published September 1998 by Gollancz at £16.99 ISBN: 057506501X
Julian Rathbone's gripping new novel takes on civilization - from its seemingly idyllic origins to its terrifying future...
2035 - Richard Somers, ex-rock star; tucked away safely in an enclave for the very rich and very powerful, is bored. Every luxury wealth can buy and an affair with the wife of a senior civil servant are not enough. But back into his life comes his sister Hannah-Rosa and her troupe of travelling dancers - and with her a disk containing their father's unpublished scenario describing man's, or rather woman's, beginnings in a Garden of Eden on the shores of an African lake.
Trajectories contrasts the idyll that was the origin of our species with its final decades in a polluted, doomed environment, the pampered, secure life of the haves with the squalor and civil strife of the majority, and adds up to an apocalyptic vision which is both prophecy and warning - a user's guide to the twenty-first century.
Neither science fiction nor fantasy, but a novel whose every horror is already present or foreshadowed in the world we live in, Trajectories will confirm Rathbone's reputation as a major writer for our times.

Julian Rathbone is the author of twenty-nine novels, two of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in Hampshire.

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