File Updated: 01/04/00

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Vista JULY-SEPT 1998
Simon Brett Dead Room Farce Pbk published September 1998 by Vista at £5.99 ISBN: 0 575 60261 3

In Charles Paris, the ever-popular Simon Brett has created the most enduring actor-sleuth in crime fiction. Dead Room Farce will delight all his fans
It's not Beckett exactly, but a three-month run of Not on Your Wife! - a new farce by the prolific British farceur Bill Blunden - is not to be sniffed at by a jobbing actor. Especially when the presence in the cast of the much- loved comedy actor Bernard Walton makes a West End run a distinct possibility.
  Which is why Charles Paris is standing on stage with his trousers round his ankles. Rehearsals have gone well, the laughs are coming, and if his marriage is on the skids there's always the consolation of Bell's - and the uncertain attractions of ageing ingénue Cookie Stone.
  But by the time the troupe has reached Bath a darker mood has set in. Cookie Stone seems to think she and Charles are practically married (if only he could remember what happened!), and Charles' old friend Mark, who runs a recording studio where Charles is making a talking book, has a drink problem that amounts to a death wish.
But it's not the drink that eventually kills Mark . . .

Praise for Simon Brett
`One of the wittiest crime writers around' - Antonia Fraser
`Simon Brett writes stunning detective stories . . . I would recommend them to anyone' - Jilly Cooper
'Three cheers for Simon Brett . . . Sicken and! So Die is a complete delight' - A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard

Simon Brett is the author of numerous Charles Paris novels. A noted humorist, diarist and  broadcaster. he lives in Sussex with his family. 

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Christopher Lee The Killing Of Sally Keemer Pbk published July 1998 by Vista at £5.99 ISBN: 0 575 60205 8
See Review by Bob Cornwell
Chief Superintendent Leonard's self-indulgent Sunday, reading books in bed, has left him unprepared for Monday's new murder inquiry: a woman found dead in a toilet on the Paddington to Bristol train. He recognises her as the rather attractive woman - long in the leg, short in the skirt and well suited to both - who briefly distracted him from his book on the Saturday evening Paddington to Bath express. Sally Keemer was a partner in a small Bath-based PR agency. All nice and respectable. But she may have known more than was good for her about some of the darker dealings of the firms her company represented, and about the private lives of some of her clients. There's a whiff of blackmail, and rumours that she was supplying her clients with extra services not listed on her company's books.

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Robert Richardson Victims Pbk published August 1998 by Vista at £5.99 ISBN: 0575 60134 5
In the summer of 1990 police discovered the bodies of three adults and two children at Tannerslade Farm, near the isolated Suffolk village of Finch. The killers were never caught. Why should anyone suspect Giles Lambert and Randall Jowett, Cambridge undergraduates from good families, with no connection with Tannerslade or the people who lived there? Six years later, tortured by guilt, Randall Jowett returns to Finch, desperately seeking some kind of redemption. The people in the village accept him as a summer holiday visitor with nice manners. Neglected wife Joyce Hetherington finds him an attractive younger man, without realising how dangerous getting involved with him might be. Victims is another tense and dramatic novel of psychological suspense by the author of The Hand Of Strange Children, which was shortlisted for the Crime Writer's Association Gold Dagger Award.

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Paul Thomas Inside Dope Pbk published July 1998 by Vista at £5.99 ISBN: 0 575 60394 1
Meet the down – under Carl Hiaasen!
Duane Ricketis had planned to steer clear of drugs once he got out of the Thai jail, but it's tough turning down a dying man's last request - even if he's a hardened criminal with a fatal weakness for transvestites. So now Ricketts is looking for the lost treasure of the notorious Mr Asia syndicate: ten kilos of high-grade cocaine. When he finds a body simmering gently in the spa pool, he's also got Auckland's finest, that odd couple Tito Ihaka and Finbar McGrail, on his case.
Ingenious, hilarious, and featuring a rogue's gallery of weird and wild characters, Inside Dope marks the emergence or a highly original crime writer.

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