Catherine Arnold --- Imperfect Justice --- Hodder & Stoughton (0 340 66015 5) £16.99
A compelling legal thriller featuring defence attorney Karen Perry-Mondori on her second case. A tale of long-concealed secrets, political ambitions and an imperfect justice.

Brian Battison --- Poetic Justice --- Constable (0 09 476780 7) £15.99
Chief Inspector Jim Ashworth and Detective Sergeant Holly Bedford are confronted with a race against time when a ruthless extortionist starts targeting the Save U Supermarket in Bridgetown. The evidence all seems to point towards one person, but arresting her is going to be extremely difficult.
Then the extortionists widen their threat, and the beautiful Holly Bedford finds herself in terrible danger........

John Burdett--- The Last Six Million Seconds --- Hodder & Stoughton (0 340 67241 2) £16.99
Spring 1997. Less than three months until Hong Kong is handed back to the Chinese.
After a tip-off, Detective Chief Inspector Chan dredges up a plastic bag in the sea near the Chinese mainland. Inside: three unidentifiable, decapitated heads. One female, caucasian; two male, oriental.
In his quest to solve the mystery, Chan takes us on an intense, frightening journey through the spectrum of contemporary Hong Kong society. And all the time, the clock is ticking, for he has only six million seconds to complete his investigation.
Fom th author of the highly acclaimed A Personal History of Thirst

Emma Cave --- The Lair--- Hodder & Stoughton (340 63251 8) £16.99 Out January 2cnd
Two, the number of ill omen; Rupert Deyntree remarks to Disa Trapani at their first strange encounter. And when he accompanies Disa to her Private Greek island, a threatening bond will be forged between them.
Back in England, Rupert's fiancee Lucy Riven has now borne his child. Despite his long, inexplicable disappearance, she still loves and believes in him... unlike his three ex-wives.
Meanwhile Lucy's best friend and her lover hold the secret means to control Rupert. But is any possession wholly safe when powerful forces of evil unite to obtain it?
Like Emma Cave's previous novel, Bluebeard's Room, The Lair is a compulsive brew which will have readers on the edge of their seats.

J.D. Christilian -- Scarlet Women --- Coronet Pbk (0 340 68188 8) £5.99 Out 16th January
Set in the 1870s in a magnificently evoked New York City - a brawling, dangerous melting-pot of wealth and destitution - Scarlet Women introduces a pioneering private investigator as fascinating and ruthless as the city he knows so well.
Alice Curry was a fallen woman who died sordidly in a dockside warehouse. Mrs Vance Barclay Walburton is the wife of one of New York's richest men, leading a life of privilege and pampered luxury. Yet Alice Curry was wearing Mrs Walburton's clothing on the day she died. And Mrs Walburton, supposedly on an extended tour of Europe, has disappeared.
Hired to trace the connection between the two women - and to surpress any hint of scandal that might taint the Walburton family - New York enquiy agent Harp begins to uncover disturbing links between the harlot and the runaway wife. His search for the truth about Olivia Walburton and Alice Curry takes him from the upper echelons of Manhattan to its most sordid depths. Harp's discoveries will expose political and financial corruption - and lead to violence and death.

Michael  Connelley --- Trunk Music --- Orion (0 75280 700 5) £16.99 Out January 13th
Back on the job after an involuntary leave of absence, Harry Bosch lands his first case: a Hollywood producer found in the trunk of a Rolls Royce, shot twice in the head - what looks like "Trunk Music", a Mafia hit. The LAPD's organised crime unit is curiously uninterested, so Harry follows the money trail to Las Vegas where he rekindles an old romance - and begins to uncover a web of corruption. And then, suddenly, he gets yanked off the case - and things begin to spin out of control. But only a bullet can stop Harry when he's searching for the truth.

Thomas H Cook --- The Chatham School Affair --- Corgi Pbk Original (0 552 14518 1) £5.99 Out January 9th
On a summer morning in 1926, a young woman alights from a bus in a Cape Cod village and embarks on an odyssey she cannot foretell. The new art teacher at Chatham School has come from an exotic and liberated world, a world barely imaginable to the inhabitants of this small town. She moves into a cottage beside Black Pond. From that moment, the ripples she creates there move outwards with an increasing ferocity until they create a terrifying storm of lust, anger and, ultimately, death.............
Seven decades later, the bodies are buried, the notorious headlines are dust, proud Chatham School little but a memory. Only one living soul knows the answer to the questions that tore the soul from the town. Only now can he summon the courage to piece together the jagged fragments of a once tranquil world..........

Jeffrey Deaver --- The Bone Collector --- Hodder & Stoughton (0 340 65374 4) £16.99
The new bestseller by the author of A Maiden's Grave. Lincoln Rhyme is one of the world's foremost forensic criminalists. He is also a quadriplegic, on the verge of loosing the will to live.
Then a hand is discovered, belonging to a man who got into a cab at the airport and never got out. And the driver was the Bone Collector.
As the minutes count down to each succesive death, Rhyme finds his taste for life reawakening...........

Michael Dobbs--- Goodfellowe MP -- HarperCollins (0 00 2324280 X) Out January 23rd
In a world of cynicism and sleaze comes a new political hero the country has been crying out for - Thomas Goodfellowe MP, a backbench politician who is far from humble or ordinary. A parliamentary detective. A man who has discovered the extraordinary powers of a backbencher to ask questions of anyone about anything - and the freedom to make an almighty public fuss.
It is a dangerous game for a man with his own share of problems: chaotic finances; a troublesome teenage daughter; and the oppostion of some of the most powerful people in the Establishment - particularly the country's most prominent press baron, who has sworn to destroy Goodfellowe before the parliamentarian's investigations destroy him.
Goodfellowe has the inquiring mind of a parliamentary Morse coupled with the ruthlessness in the pursuit of justice of a backbench Urquhart - a truly unique character developed in the hands of the country's leading political thriller writer.

John Gilstrap --- Nathan's Run -- Warner Pbk (0 7515 1803 4) £5.99 Out January 16th See Review. Chosen as "Best Thriller of 1996" by Val McDermid
A high security Virginia juvenile detention centre is the scene of a savage killing. Twelve-year-old Nathan Bailey is accused of murder and branded a cop-killer; orphaned, alone and with nowhere to turn for help, he becomes a target of a nationwide manhunt.
"A first novel of the same relentless pace as John Grisham's early work" Scotland on Sunday
"Exemplary...Compelling...A taut piece of storytelling" Mail on Sunday

Lisa Howell --- A Job to Die For --- Hodder & Stoughton (0 340 61700 4) £16.99
Kate Wilkinson is back in a story of ruthlessness, greed, and sudden death, set against the background of a new television channel - a world that her creator, the Director of Programmes for the cable channel UK Living, knows extremely well.

Richard Hunt --- The Man Trap --- Constable (0 09 476840 4) £15.99
Detective Chief Inspector Sidney Walsh and his Cambridgeshire Constabulary CID team are summoned to the scene when a man's body is found in a bunker on the Hasling Abbey golf course. Nothing, however, proves straightforward. What on earth had Hitler, a long dead hermit Catholic priest and two National Front thugs got to do with the killing? What was the murdered man's beautiful modeel wife up to on the night he died? Was the story of a haunting ghost and an ancient family feud relevant? Sidney Walsh and his team have to go through a traumatic baptism of fire, violence and fear before the case can be finally resolved.

James Morton --- A Calender of Killing -- Little Brown £16.99 Out January 16
A True life killing for everyday of the year. A unique record of crime in the twentieth century: a killing for every day of the year. The earliest is the shooting of a Yorkshire policman in 1900, the most recent the suffocation of a middle-aged accountant in early 1996; the 336 entries in James Morton's diary of death remorslessly charts the modern history of one of man's most primitive and powerful instincts.

Michael Pearce --- The Fig Tree Murder -- HarperCollins (0 00 232619 1) £14.99 Out January 23rd
Why was the body put on the line? Chance? Or did someone want to halt the progress of the new electric railway out fom Cairo to the City of Pleasure being built in the suburbs?
Was it another of Egypt's traditional revenge killings? Or had the murdered man somehow got caught up in the manoeuvrings of the sinister power groups jostling for position around the new railway?
In this, the tenth novel in Michael Pearce's award-winning series, Old Egypt is pitted against New and in the middle is the Mamur Zapt. To answer these questions he has to look both in the luxurious quarters of the dazzling New Heliopolis and in the more humble houses of the dead man's village, and in neither place are things as straightforward as they seem......

Richard Stark --- The Parker Omnibus Volume 1 -- Allison & Busby Pbk (0 74900 239 5) Out January 27th
Including; The Man with the Getaway Face, The Outfit, Deadly Edge.
The first installment in a full re-print of Stark's Parker Novels. Not to be missed.
"Nobody tops Stark in his objective portrayal of a world of total amorality" New York Times.
"The Writing is as stripped down as a drag racer and the action as brutal and as powerful" Scotsman.

Andrew Taylor --- The Four Last Things -- HarperCollins (0 00 232557 8) £15.99 Out January 23rd
First novel in the Roth Trilogy, a gothic psychodrama set against the changing face of the Church of England.
Little Lucy Appleyard is snatched from her child minder's on a cold winter afternoon, and the nightmare begins. When Eddie takes her home to beautiful, child-loving Angel, he knows he's done the right thing. But Lucy,s not like their other visitors...........
To the outside world Lucy has disappeared into a black hole with no clues to her whereabouts...until the first grisly discovery in a London graveyard. More such finds are to follow, all at religious sites, and, in a city haunted by religion what do these offerings signify?
All that stands now between Lucy and the final sacrifice are a CID sereant on the verge of disgrace and a woman cleric but how can they hope to halt the evil forces that are gathering around their innocent daughter?

Andrew Taylor --- The Barred Window -- HarperCollins Pbk (0 00 647213 3) £5.99 Out January 20th
Thomas Penmarsh has always lived at Finisterre, the house by the sea,. He sleeps in the room with the barred window and looks down on the cats in the garden. He is forty-eight, but he has been an old man since one evening in 1967 when he lost everything he valued.
Then Cousin Esmond cane back and rescued him from despair and the cats. Esmond always looked after Thomas.
But now Alice wants to come home too.
Alice will spoil it all if she returns, because she brings her past with her. From the moment of her conception, she has been a child of enchantment, madness and death.
"Like Hitchcock, Taylor pitches extreme and gothic events within a hair's breadth of normality." Times Literary Supplement.
"A psychological tingler with more than a touch of the Daphne Du Mauriers....this author knows precisely how to wield suspense." Independant on Sunday.

Robert Wilson--- The Big Killing -- HarperCollins Pbk (0 00 647986 3) £5.99 Out January 20th See Review
Bruce Medway, go-between and fixer for traders in steamy West Africa, smells trouble when a porn merchant asks him to deliver a video at a secret location. Things look up, though, when he's hired to act as a minder to Ron Collins - a spoilt playboy looking for diamonds - in the Ivory Coast. Medway thinks this could be the answer to his cashflow crisis, but when the video delivery leads to a shootout and the discovery of a mutilated body, the prospect of retreating to his bolthole in Benin becomes increasingly attractive - especially as the manner of the victim's death is too similar to a current notorious political murder for comfort.