A terrifyingly plausible, unstoppable chase thriller from an acclaimed new talent

Why did they sack me? For Harry Lamb, that is his sole concern after suddenly losing his job at a City stockbroking firm. When he starts to investigate the circumstances surrounding his dismissal, he finds a link to the critical research he has been preparing on the giant media and broadcasting company, Cable Media.

Why did they choose me? For Julia Porter, that becomes her main question when she is plucked from her job at a management consultancy to work for a year at the Serious Fraud Office. Her mission is to investigate the largest insider dealing ring the City of London has ever seen. She soon discovers she is fighting more than a group of financial fraudsters. Instead she is up against an organisation that appears to have access to information about everything, including her own movements.

Samuel Haverstone, the chairman of Cable Media, is a man obsessed with controlling the greatest source of power and wealth in the modern world: information. Nothing will be allowed to stand in his way. When Harry and Julia discover too much about him, they find themselves alone and on the run, hunted by the most sophisticated surveillance and tracking systems ever assembled in private hands. To survive, they must outwit the satellites.

Praise for Matthew Lynn's first novel, Insecurity:

'Insecurity does to high finance what Jurassic Park did to extinct species...a near-perfect executive-class airport thriller' Sunday Express

'A rattling yarn in the best traditions of the classic thriller' The Times

Matthew Lynn is an experienced business journalist. Brought up in London, he was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and works at the Sunday Times.

A stunningly atmospheric novel which confirms Alison Taylor as an outstanding talent in the field of psychological crime.

When Ned Jones is found dead in his room, the police visit is merely routine. Detective Inspector McKenna, his day already soured by the loss of a promotion, is more interested in the extraordinary house of women Ned inhabited: Edith, hooked on tranquillisers, floating through life; Phoebe, her overweight, acutely intelligent teenage daughter; Mina, Phoebe's beautiful, blank faced older sister.

But when the post-mortem comes in, it's clear that it's not a natural death. Ned has died from a very rare allergy, an allergy he was aware of.

As McKenna struggles with the politics of the police force, the long awaited repainting of the offices, and the attempts of his officers to get to grips with the high incidence of local car theft, he finds himself increasingly drawn to the circumstances surrounding Ned's death. The investigation leads him back into the past, into the family's history, weaving scholarship and promises of genius with themes of isolation and retribution.

Alison Taylor has a son and a daughter, and has lived in north Wales for many years. Her interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, literature of the Enlightenment, art and the history of architecture, and riding. She has written two previous novels, Simeon's Bride and In Guilty Night.

In this, the fourth of Leslie Thomas's novels about Dangerous Davies, the last detective, Davies is retired (although no one has told him) from the Metropolitan Police and has set up as a private eye in an office above the Welsh Curry House, Willesden, Northwest London.

Cases are hard to come by until he is abruptly thrown into two mysteries - the murder of women answering lonely hearts advertisements, and the disappearance of a young girl student and a psychologist with a secret worth millions.

There is a parade of eccentric and amazing characters which are the trademark of any book by Leslie Thomas: Mod, the philosopher and Davies' sidekick; Dora his estranged wife; and Mrs Tulljames, their landlady at 'Ball Hill', the Willesden boarding house. Kitty, Davies' yak-like dog, is also on the case. Others include Sestrina, a beauty who likes her sex with a dagger in her hand, and Oily who has his expensive Harley Davidson motorcycle stolen while he is collecting his dole.

Mysteries and escapades are all interwoven into a highly original detective story that is as ingenious as it is touching and funny.

Leslie Thomas is one of Britain's most popular authors. His boyhood in a Barnado's orphanage is described in his hugely successful autobiography This Time Next Week. He is the author of numerous other bestsellers, including Stand Up Virgin Soldiers, Tropic of Ruislip, The Magic Army, Arrivals and Departures, three Dangerous Davies titles, Running Away and, most recently, Chloe's Song. He lives in Salisbury with his wife, Diana.