File Updated: 01/04/00

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Gollancz JAN-MARCH 1998
Francis Bennett Making Enemies Published March 1998 by Gollancz at £16.99 ISBN: 0 575 06552 4 Artwork by: Gary Day-Ellison
February 1947. There is a massacre, deep in a frozen Russian forest, 'You could say.' the officer in char-ge of the execution squad remarks drily, 'that they have died for their country.' But why was it expedient to execute dozens of old people and blow up their apartment block!
The answer lies in events nearly fifteen years before, when Ruth, a Soviet delegate from the Institute of Physics, attended a conference in Leiden and became involved with Geoffrey Stevens, a Cambridge physicist whose work on atomic energy ran on similar lines to her own. It was a passionate if politically unwise affair; without apparent consequence until, in the aftermath of WW2, a chance interrogation makes them pawns in the deadliest of global games: the race for the hydrogen bomb …
Intelligent, beautifully written and wholly absorbing, this book puts Francis Bennett straight into the Le Carre league.
Francis Bennett is the son of the military historian Ralph Bennett and the biographer Daphne Bennett. He was educated at Magdalene College. Cambridge.

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Jeff Gulvin Storm Crow Published March 1998 by Gollancz at £15.99 ISBN: 0 575 06529 X
In Storm Crow Jeff Gulvin has written an authentic thriller in the style of Tom Clancy.
Never before has anyone written in such detail about the Anti-terrorist Branch, S013, and its response to its worst nightmare - a chemical weapons threat in London perpetrated by a terrorist who knows what he is doing - somebody worse than Patrick Hayes or Jan Taylor, two ex Royal Green Jacket soldiers who joined the Provisional IRA and were responsible for the second Harrods bomb in 1993.
In researching Storm Crow Jeff has had access to various Specialist Operations Units within the Metropolitan Police Service as well as FBI counter-terrorist departments, and the United States Diplomatic Security Service. He volunteered to be an unknown suspect to assist armed response officers with training exercises, and still bears the plastic handcuff marks after a 'mock arrest' on a stationary tube train. He has shot Berettas and M16s with the Nevada Highway Patrol, as well as taking part in simulated armed training exercises. Whilst living and writing in Idaho, he met various members of the US 'patriot movement' and was mistaken for an undercover FBI agent, by a Freeman from the eighty-one-day stand-off in Montana. Three times in ten minutes his life was threatened: by being shot, having his throat cut and finally being chopped into pieces for dog food.
The result of all this research is a gripping international thriller with an outstanding new villain. The terrorism in Storm Crow has nothing to do with religion or territory…
Jeff Gulvin has written three previous novels, Sleep No More, Sorted and Close Quarters. He has two daughters and lives in Norfolk.

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Mark Timlin Dead Flowers Published March 1998 by Gollancz at £16.99 ISBN: 0 575 06508 7 Artwork by: Cover: Splash
Nick Sharman's gone to ground since his daughter returned to Scotland. Nothing will tempt him back into the business again; unless it's money. That, and a story to touch his heart. And Ray Miller's got plenty of both. Miller a lottery rollover double-jackpot winner, wants to find the wife who left him and his three-year-old son. This should be a simple task for Sharman, giving him an easy five grand and evidence for Judith, his daughter; that he’s trying to get his life together. But when Miller’s wife Sharon turns out to be a heroin-addicted whore, and the news of Ray Miller's new-found wealth brings out south London's worst villains, eager to relieve him of his readies, the most unpleasant of these Adult Baby Albert and Mr Freeze decide the best way to get what they want is to use Sharon to prise it from Miller. And Sharman, the patsy, is primed to take the fall.
Mark Timlin's Nick Sharman thrillers have established him as Britain's leading writer of hardboiled detective fiction. Born in south London, where he still lives, he worked for many years in the rock'n'roll business but is now a full-time writer:

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