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

File Updated: 01/04/00

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

Philip Boast Deus Pbk published August 1998 by Headline at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0 7472 5380 3 Artwork by: Cover illustration: Lee Gibbons
An uplifting historical epic and a fascinating novel of cabbalistic intrigue, Deus is a triumph of story-telling in the grand manner.
A hideous murder from the 12th century goes unpunished, the murderer's cursed guilt afflicts generations to come. Buried amidst the stones of London Bridge lay a key that could release the inheritors of London's ancient evil

Philip Boast is also the author of Resurrection, a dramatic, sweeping epic of St Paul's Cathedral. He has also written the Ben London trilogy, London's Child, London's Millionaire, London's Daughter.
Philip Boast lives in Devon with his wife Rosalind and three children.

Lilian Jackson Braun The Cat Who Sang For the Birds Pbk published July 1998 by Headline at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0 7472 5392 7
Spring has come early to Moose County. The flowers are blooming and the birds are singing, but all is not well four hundred miles north of everywhere. On the surface, things appear tranquil - Jim Qwilleran, newspaper columnist and the county's richest resident, has moved back into the remodelled apple barn with his two remarkable felines, Koko and Yum Yum. And the newly built gazebo is providing an idyllic opportunity for all three to commune with nature.
But then an elderly woman dies in a suspicious fire, and the newly opened art centre falls victim to a mysterious break-in. Throw in a scandal involving an unscrupulous local politician and an anticomputer uprising at the town library and suddenly life in Pickax is anything but peaceful. In addition, a young artist disappears and Qwill, Koko, and Yum Yum have some serious sleuthing to do.
Lillian Jackson Braun began writing her Cat Who...detective series when one of her own Siamese cats mysteriously fell to its death from her apartment block. Since then twenty Cat Who...novels have been published , all featuring the very talented Koko and Yum, Yum, Siamese cats with a bent for detection. She lives with her husband and two cats in the mountains of North Carolina.

Mary Clayton Word is Death Pbk published July 1998 by Headline at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0 7472 5691 8

P.C. Doherty The Devil's Domain Published July 1998 by Headline at Ł16.99 ISBN: 0 7472 2080 8 Artwork by: Jacket illustration: Alison Jay
See Review by Michael Jecks - author of the highly acclaimed Furnshill & Puttock series

The Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan
'A time of bloody tribulation! Of horrid sights! The season of murder and subtle trickery! Thus proclaims the chronicler of Westminster in the summer of 1380, as the British and the French wage war on the Narrow Seas.
In Hawkmere Manor, a lonely, gloomy dwelling place, otherwise known as the 'Devil's Domain', a Frenchman lies dying, poisoned by an unknown hand. He is one of five prisoners, held to ransom by the Regent John of Gaunt. Sir John Cranston and his secretarius, Brother Athelstan, are summoned to investigate the mysterious death in the hope of averting French retaliation, but their path is riddled with obstacles. How could the murderer have entered the Frenchman's chamber when the room was locked from within and the window nothing but a narrow aperture? Their aid, Sir Maurice Maltravers, is more of a hindrance than a help, as he faces the misery of heartbreak. Lady Angelica, the woman he intended to marry, has been whisked away to a convent by her tyrannical and disapproving father. It soon becomes apparent that only when the lovers have been reunited will any progress be made in the investigation ...

'Anchoring his feet in the all the muck of mean streets, Doherty rifles epochs with rebut with and zest for breaking open hidden secrets. The Sunday Times
'Doherty writes well and his fascination for history comes off the page' The Express
Paul Doherty is a one man writing phenomenon. He was born in Middlesborough and studied History at Liverpool and Oxford Universities and obtained a doctorate at Oxford for his thesis on Edward II and Queen Isabella. He writes prodigiously both under his own name (several different series including the much loved Hugh Corbett mysteries) and as Paul Harding and Michael Clynes as well as under three other pseudonyms for American publishers. As well as his very successful writing career, he is the headmaster of Trinity school in Essex, which is one of the largest comprehensive schools in England. He lives with his wife and seven children near Epping Forest.

Ron Ellis Ears Of The City Pbk published September 1998 by Headline at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0747259429 Artwork by: Cover photo: Photonica/Tony Stone Images
Also look forward to the 2nd book in the Johnny Ace series called "Ferry to the bottom of the Mersey".
THE JOHNNY ACE SERIES
Johnny Ace has a show on a Liverpool radio station. He also owns several flats in the City. Whilst reading the Daily Post one day, he learns of the death of a youth called Matt Scrufford. It isn't a common name and Johnny remembers he played in a group in the sixties with a MaIly Scrufford. He finds out that Matt is Molly's son and sets about solving the mystery in a journey which takes him back to the days of Merseybeat, when The Beatles were local heroes, whilst giving a fascinating glimpse of the city as it is today. At the same time, his erratic personal life veers from the faithful Hilary to the blue-stocking Maria.
Ears Of The City is the first book in a planned series featuring Johnny Ace.
Johnny Ace has a daily record show on local radio in Liverpool. He also owns property in the city but he has time on his hands. When he reads in the paper about the murder of the 19 year old son of an old colleague, he decides to turn detective and find the killer. Perhaps, he thinks, he's been watching too much "Taggart" on TV. His quest leads him back to his youth in the 60's to the days of The Beatles and The Cavern and Merseybeat when he played drums in The Cruzads. As he moves around the twilight world of the city's nightclubs, he soon finds out that certain people are looking for him and his own life is in danger. Furthermore, his love life is causing problems. The faithful, sexy Hilary is getting tired of his new 'companion', Maria, who looks like a 'blue-stocking version of Cher'. The city of Liverpool comes to life in this gripping story, told with sardonic Scouse humour, as D.J. Johnny Ace makes the headlines for his own show.
Read an excerpt from Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE - Ears Of The City
Matt Scrufford's ears were posted to his father in a Jiffy bag. Not something that you'd want to open first thing in the morning over your Shredded Wheat. The rest of him turned up a few days later at the bottom of the Huskisson Dock.
I first read about it in the Daily Post whilst I was having breakfast at the ground floor cafe in the Royal Liver Building. They call it The Diner. It's a handy place for me, just down the road from my flat in Waterloo Dock. I can be there quicker than burning my own toast.
Not many people know about the cafe but they do an excellent bacon sandwich and when you look through the tinted vaulted ceiling at the glass-sided offices shimmering into the sky, you'd swear you were in New York not Liverpool.
The ears were the front page headlines in the Post. I was curious. Scrufford wasn't a common name but I'd known a Mally Scrufford back in the Sixties when we'd played together in a group called The Cruzads, hoping to be the next Beatles. He was the lead singer and the one all the girls fancied. Could he be any relation?
I read the article. The ears had arrived at the father's house last Saturday morning although the paper didn't say whether they had been accompanied by a ransom note which I would have thought was the likeliest scenario.
But how would that explain the body turning up five days later? Had they called the police who had botched the job? Had they refused to pay the ransom? Worse, had they paid it and the kidnappers reneged on the deal? I walked across to the counter and took a second pot of tea back to my table near the fountain. A couple of office girls next to me were discussing their night out at the Multiplex. One of them had found "Striptease” a very boring film. "Although there were fellas in the audience giving it plenty of mouth," she said. "Mind you, I don't know why, cause that Demi Moore's nothing special to look at." I'd seen it myself and I tended to agree with her as I'd fallen asleep midway through. I often do that with slow films but I hadn't had a wet dream so it can't have been that sexy.

Ann Granger Call the Dead Again Pbk published August 1998 by Headline at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0 7472 5646 X Artwork by: Cover photograph: Adam Randolph
Mitchell and Markby Cotswold Mystery
When Meredith Mitchell gives a lone hitchhiker a lift into Bamford one evening, she is left feeling uneasy, for the girl is highly secretive. What business can she have at Tudor Lodge, home of Brussels-based lawyer Andrew Penhallow, where she asks to be dropped? Unusually, Penhallow is at home that night...and the next morning he is found murdered in the garden.
His death results in some spectacular revelations about a double life involving his mysterious visitor, Kate Drago, but she is not the only suspect unearthed by Meredith's boyfriend, Superintendent Alan Markby, as he investigates the ghosts of Penhallow's past as well as the secrets of the present; aided and abetted by Meredith but rather hindered by colleague Sergeant Prescott, who has inconveniently fallen in love with the chief suspect…
Praise for Ann Granger:
'A Pair of delightful sleuths...more please!' Margaret Yorke
'Classic tale...a good feel for understated humour, a nice ear for dialogue' The Times
'A good old-fashioned whodunnit with an up-to-date flavour that will leave you satisfied but hoping for more' Prima
Like her heroine, Ann Granger has worked in British embassies all over the world. She is now based in Bicester, near Oxford. Ann is currently working on her next Mitchell and Markby novel, and on a new series featuring Fran Varady.

Richard Greensted Raw Nerve Published July 1998 by Headline at Ł17.99 ISBN: 0 7472 1811 0

Jeff Gulvin Close Quarter Pbk published July 1998 by Headline at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0 7472 5386 2

Keith Heller Man's Loving Family Published September 1998 by Headline at Ł16.99 ISBN: 0747219613 Artwork by: Jacket illustration: Paul Bawden/The Inkshed
See Review by Angela Morgan
October 1727. While the citizens of London reel through the streets in celebration of the coronation of King George II, George Man, late of London's Parish Watch, is out of work and growing desperate. Thrown off the Watch after an altercation with a corrupt but powerful man, and with his wife Sarah away tending her dying father, Man's sparse rooms above the bakery in Ironmonger Row hold no comfort for his restless spirit.
He is glad therefore to be offered a job bodyguarding tobacco merchant Abraham Sinclair's son, whose murder in the forthcoming November has been mysteriously prophesied in an almanac. He is less glad when the prophecy is fulfilled before his very eyes in a tavern brawl. Worse still, the man charged with the murder and who indeed held the fatal sword is his good friend, the volatile poet Richard Savage.
Man is sure that there is another hand behind the killing, so, to clear his friend, he embarks on his most ambitious investigation yet; a search which takes him into the bosom of the troubled Sinclair family - where a whole nest of vipers is nursed...

This fictionalised re-creation of an actual murder and the notorious trial of one whom Dr Johnson later vindicated in his Lives of the Poets is the finest yet of Keith Heller's brilliantly realised stories of eighteenth-century crime in London.

Born in the mid-West in 1949, Keith Heller for many years taught English Literature, most recently at a Californian university. Together with his wife and daughter he lived abroad for seven years, three of which were spent in Madrid. He also lived in Japan and Argentina. A published poet, he is the author of the highly acclaimed Snow on the Moon, which The Times described as 'a fable about spiritual resurrection, written with considerable subtlety'. Man's Loving Family is the third in his unusual trio of crime novels, , following the career of George Man, a parish watchman in eighteenth-century London. Now retired from university teaching, Keith Heller lives in California where he writes full time.

Keith Heller Man's Illegal Life Pbk published September 1998 by Headline at Ł5.99 ISBN: 0747256853 Artwork by: Cover illustration: Paul Bawden/The Inkshed

After nightly patrolling its seedy sad and dangerous streets for twenty-seven years, George Man has seen all the horrors eighteenth-century London has to offer. But even he is sickened when his colleague, Taylor Hoole, discovers the emaciated corpse of Geoffrey Stannard, lashed to a chair and abandoned in a boarded-up home in Drury Lane.
It isn't merely shocking manner of Stannard's starvation that apples Man, it's the ominous fact that the elderly recluse, a once-successful entrepreneur, was deliberately isolated in the very wry that plague victims were sacrificed fifty years earlier. Is this murder a desperate attempt to stifle another epidemic...or a more cold-blooded act of malice?

Praise for Keith Heller's Man trilogy
'Outstandingly original...strong as Stilton' Scotsman
'A tour de force' Time
'Clever and spell-binding' Booklist
Born in the mid-West in 1949, Keith Heller for many years taught English Literature, most recently at a Californian university. Together with his wife and daughter he lived abroad for seven years, three of which were spent in Madrid. He also lived in Japan and Argentina. A published poet, he is the author of the highly acclaimed Snow on the Moon, which The Times described as 'a fable about spiritual resurrection, written with considerable subtlety'. Man's Illegal Life is the second in his unusual crime novels, following the career of George Man, a parish watchman in eighteenth-century London. Now retired from university teaching, Keith Heller lives in California where he writes full time.

Joyce Holms Bad Vibes Published July 1998 by Headline at Ł16.99 ISBN: 0 7472 2096 4 Artwork by: Jacket photograph: David Grogan
See Review by John Boyles
When an elderly German tourist is found dead in his bath in an Edinburgh hotel, the post mortem shows no injury incompatible with an accidental slip on a wet surface. No one suspects foul play - not even 'Fizz.' Fitzgerald, a legal student with a remarkable talent for detective work, who is moonlighting at the hotel. When the deceased's sister discovers that a painting her brother had bought on the day he died is not among his effects, she goes to the police. The senior officer who released the body for cremation is understandably reluctant to start a serious investigation. But Fizz is intrigued, and ropes in her sleuthing sparring partner, lawyer Tam Buchanan, to unearth the truth. Soon they're on a trail leading from Edinburgh to Musselburgh, the Moorfoot Hills and the island of Arran - and back fifteen years.
A rich vein of humour runs through this tense and tantalising new novel from an acclaimed author.

Acclaim for Joyce Holms' Fizz and Buchanan mysteries:
'Engaging and entertaining, it builds to a spectacular climax...Deft, daft and definitely delicious' Val McDermid
'Cleverly plotted.. the characters are well-drawn and the story moves along at an enjoyably brisk pace' Susannah Yager, Sunday Telegraph
Joyce Holms grew up in Glasgow and now lives in Edinburgh. Suffering from a chronically low boredom threshold she is now living in her thirteenth house and has earned her keep in a variety of jobs in a variety of locations, from running a hotel on the Island of Arran to working for an Edinburgh detective agency. Currently Joyce runs a B&B in the Central Highlands during the Summer months and lives in Edinburgh during the rest of the year.