Gwen Hunter --- False Truths --- New English Library (pbk) (0 340 61731 4) £5.99 --- Out on January 16th
See Review
Latest from the author of the best-selling Stolen Children . When I was fifteen, I learned that I was two people. And one of me was dead.
Bonnie Sarvaunt always knows she is different, and when she's fifteen she receives a box containing a jumble of clues to her identity. When she's twenty-one, her independence comes in the form of a cheque for fifty thousand dollars. The clues she has take Bonnie out of the bayou straight to New Orleans, intent on finding out who she really is.
Maxim Jakubowski (Ed) --- Gollancz New Crimes --- Gollancz pbk. (0 575 05850 1) £5.99
Here, from the doyen of crime anthologists, is a collection of sixteen of the best, including Robert Richardson, Mark Timlin, Ed Gorman, Lesley Grant-Adamson and Janwillem van de Wetering.
Some pithy gems....and a splendid country-house shocker Marcel Berlins, The Times
Sharp, bright new criminal cocktail.... A few famous names, but some new ones who also show promise Yorkshire Post
Chris Kelly --- Taking Leave --- Hodder & Stoughton (0 340 61743 8) £5.99 --- Out on January 18th
Tom is daydreaming about joining his wife at their cottage in France when he gets the alarming phone call. He knows Helen wouldn't just disappear without telling anyone. And when he hears that an American heiress has been kidnapped from a nearby village, Tom is deeply concerned.
It seems obvious that the kidnappers have taken Helen as well.....
Suspense from Television presenter and mystery author Chris Kelly.
Laurie R. King --- To Play the Fool --- HarperCollins (0 00 232544 6) £14.99
Edgar-winner Laurie King’s stunning and complex second novel featuring Kate Martinelli and Al Hawkin.
Homicide detectives Kate Martinelli and Al Hawkin first appeared in the internationally praised, award-winning A Grave Talent. Now they are back to investigate the death of an apparently homeless man whose cremated remains are found in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Implicated in the death is an elderly wandering soul who calls himself Erasmus and exemplifies the persona of a Shakespearean fool - he speaks in quotations from the Bible and Shakespeare, although he’s not above an occasional line from Gilbert and Sullivan.
Kate is at first reluctant to take on a high-profile case - the unwelcome media attention after her last homicide investigation left her badly burned - but this looks too intriguing to step away from. As she untangles the complicated web of secrecy Erasmus has woven around his former life, she begins to doubt that he could be responsible for the killing. Brother Erasmus, however, will say nothing and do nothing to point the investigation away from himself, and Kate must not only prove one man’s innocence, she must also find the real killer.
Roy Lewis --- Angel of Death HarperCollins (0 00 232577 2) £14.99
Marvellously imagined, with high romance throbbing behind the measured prose. Literary Review (of The Cross Bearer)
At the request of his friend Dr Rena Williams, Arnold Landon is delegated to help out at a Romano-Celtic burial dig. He soon realises that present-day sexual tensions are seething beneath the surface at this ancient site. However, he is not prepared for the shocking turn that events are to take: a member of the team is found brutally murdered. Suspicion falls on Professor Geoffrey Westwood who had been involved in a feud with the dead woman. Then it emerges that local landowner Stephen Alston had also fallen out with the victim and that she was being harassed by an old boyfriend. When a man is arrested and charged with the killing, it looks as thought the mystery has been solved, but it is soon to get even murkier as Landon himself is attacked by an unknown assailant.
M.R.D. Meek --- Postscript to Murder HarperCollins (0 00 232579 9) £14.99
The author twists the strands deftly together and ends with a cunning knot. Times Literary Supplement (of A Loose Connection)
Lawyer Lennox Kemp’s newly-wed bliss is slowly being eroded by a series of anonymous threats. When a colleague of Kemp’s is murdered, Lennox is convinced he was the intended victim and, weighed down by guilt, refuses to investigate. It is left to his feisty wife Mary to follow the confusing clues. Is the murder connected to the anonymous threats or does it relate to the victim’s own affairs? An arrogant property dealer and an unbalanced young woman are only some of the mysterious elements that Mary must disentangle. But is she on the right path? And will Lennox regain his interest in the affair before another murder is committed?
M.R.D. Meek is Scottish-born, English-educated and was a solicitor for many years. She now lives in London.
Jay Russell --- Celestial Dogs Robinson - Raven paperback original --- (1 85487 429 2) £5.99 --- Out on January 15th
Chosen as Tangled Web's Book of the Month
From a new name in the fantasy genre comes this fast-paced thriller set in LA with a private eye embroiled in a cocktail of mystery, conspiracy, ancient Japanese cults and demons.
Marty Burns was famous once. Now he's just another fallen star earning his keep as a low-rent private eye, chasing one day to the next. But when hired to find a missing Hollywood hooker, he stumbles into a mystery and conspiracy that shatters everything he has ever believed in.
In darkness it sleeps. An evil as pure and ancient as the first sin. Waiting for its moment to rise again. Now darkness has come to sunny Los Angeles. Missing girls, a dead client and a string of savage murders.
Ensnared in an epic confrontation between ancient cults whose eternal battle has brought them from the mystic mountains of Japan to the seedy streets of Los Angeles, Marty must confront vicious pimps, suspicious cops, Hollywood mega-moguls and all-powerful demons out of the pages of mythology. His beliefs, his life and his very soul are at stake as the world he'd known is turned inside out. He is forced to confront that most difficult, but fundamental of existential questions: what do you believe in?
Once again two supernatural forces will battle for the soul of humanity. Only this time there's Marty Burns, who is about to become famous ..... again.
This is the ultimate Raymond Chandler with-attitude-read. Sharp, dark and savagely readable. A treat. Jay Russell is a fresh talent to watch Peter James, novelist
part supernatural thriller, part hard-boiled detective yarn, part comic Hollywood novel, and all page-turner - Celestial Dogs hits a bullseye on every target at which it takes aim Peter Atkins, novelist and screenwriter of Hellraiser II - IV.
An acerbically funny collision between Hollywood lowlife and the gods and demons of Japanese mythology that's as stylishly gritty as Dashiell Hammett. Jay Russell is a major new talent Paul J. McAuley, novelist
Jay Russell was born and raised in New York City. He has contributed to Science Fiction Review, Splatterpunks and Midnight Graffiti, and toughed out three years as an LA private eye. He now lives in London. Why not visit his webpage? There's lots more about Celestial Dogs including excerpts from the novel.
Douglas Skeggs---The Phoenix of Prague --- Little & Brown (0 316 87713 1) £15.99 See Review
Jan Capek is assigned to track down the source of a major art collection being sold in the auction houses of London and New York. It is feared that the money being raised is funding a die-hard communist plot to overthrow Czechoslovakia's new democracy and Capek's task is to destroy the paintings once he's located them, an act which many consider unpalatable. An intriguing switchback of a mystery, richly adorned by the artistic background of Prague.
Gordon Thomas --- Poisoned Sky Little & Brown --- (0 316 87625 9 ) £16.99
Fifth David Morton thriller all of which have been optioned for a series of motion pictures. Poisoned Sky is a high-tech eco-thriller involving multi-nationals, a discontented Russian scientist and an ozone layer bomb.
Robert Wilson --- The Big Killing HarperCollins (0 00 232522 5) £14.99 See Review
An evocative and compelling thriller set along that part of the African coast they used to call the White Man’s Grave
Bruce Medway, go-between and fixer for traders in steamy West Africa, smells trouble when he is approached by a porn merchant to deliver a video at a secret rendezvous. On top of which, he has been asked to travel to the Ivory Coast to sack the manager of a sheanut factory on behalf of BB, Medway’s rich Syrian patron, and act as minder to Ron Collins, a spoilt playboy in Africa to buy diamonds.
All this might be the answer to his cashflow crisis, but when the video delivery leads to a shoot-out and the discovery of a mutilated body, Medway is more inclined to retreat to his bolthole in Benin, especially as the manner of the victim’s death calls to mind a notorious political murder currently causing waves throughout the region.
His obligations, however, keep him fixed in the Ivory Coast and he is soon caught up in a terrifying cycle of violence. Does it stem from the political upheavals of neighbouring Liberia or is it rooted in the more mundane, but highly lucrative, business of diamonds? Unless Medway can get to the bottom of the mystery, he knows that for the savage killer out there in the African night he is the next target.
Robert Wilson has spent several years in West Africa and now lives in Portugal with his wife. The Big Killing is his second crime novel.
Daniel Woodrell --- Under The Bright Lights --- No Exit Press (1 874061 31 9) £4.99 --- Out on January 26th See Review
Jewell Cobb had come to St.Bruno to climb on the big city gravy train. His cousin Duncan set little Jewel up to do the killing. The boy was hillbilly raw but country tough, and pleasingly expendable.
It seemed a simple enough case for the authorities. Too bad the dead man was a prominent black city council man. But for police detective Rene Shade it all looked too neat. Shade takes on the city hall as he follows a twisting trail through the sleazy streets of the Cajun quarter into the murky swamps and bayous that ring the city. It is a trail that leads to corruption, betrayal and yet more murder.
Daniel Woodrell is stone brilliant, a bayou Dutch Leonard. James Ellroy
Faulknerian relationships, ripe dialogue and a dark, dim view of human nature.... as mean and dirty as they come. Kirkus Reviews