Martha C. Lawrence --- Murder in Scorpio Hodder & Stoughton (0 340 66570 X) £16.99 --- Out on 21st March. See Review
A brilliant new novelist makes a scintillating debut with this original and suspenseful novel about crime, detection - and parapsychology.
California private investigator Elizabeth Chase is used to sceptical glares and sarcastic comments when she works on a case. Her unorthodox methods tend to surprise people: Doctor Chase is also a double-PhD parapsychologist. And she brings all her understanding of the paranormal to her investigations.
Sergeant Tom McGowan of the Escondido Police Department knows there is something sinister about the supposed accident which killed his old flame Janice Freeman. He reluctantly hires Elizabeth to help him dig around, and in the process a down-to-earth police detective gains more than just respect for Elizabeth and her uncanny intuition.
Piecing together entries from Janice's diaries, interviews with her abusive ex-boyfriend and facts about her former employer, Elizabeth follows Janice's last footsteps, searching for what exactly Janice knew, and why it got her killed. But when the killers hear that Elizabeth has them pegged for murder, and the violence starts to happen, even her paranormal powers may be unable to save her.
Martha C.Lawrence's psychic detective Elizabeth Chase cast a spell on me. I couldn't put the book down, didn't want it to end. Linda Barnes
One of the most engaging mysteries I've ever read. There's no tougher critic than a Virgo, and this Virgo says Murder in Scorpio is flawless. Nancy Pickard, author of Confession
Murder in Scorpio is an innovative and exciting new mystery featuring a private eye with a difference. Dr Elizabeth Chase has psychic abilities, but even this edge can't keep her out of danger as she encounters murder. Peopled with fascinating characters and a well-crafted plot, this is a terrific read. Janet Dawson, author of Don't Turn Your Back on the Ocean
Martha C. Lawrence witnessed her first 'ghost' (she prefers the term 'discarnate entity') at the age of twenty. She has worked as a book editor, a professional astrologer and a business writer. Murder In Scorpio is her first novel. She lives in California.

Sue Lees --- Carnal Knowledge - Rape on Trial --- Hamish Hamilton (0241 136296) £20.00
Non-fiction. Rape has received unprecedented attention over the past five years.
The 'date rape' trials of Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith and trials of two British students made front page news. Press coverage of the trials gave the impression that in a climate of political correctness, women were increasingly crying rape when they simply regretted what had happened the night before.
Based on first-hand monitoring of the judicial process from the time a woman reports rape to the police, to the decision of the jury, this controversial book uncovers the fraudulence of this impression. Rather than women making false allegations, Sue Lees found that serial rapists are getting away with rape and being set free to rape again. By sitting in on trials at English Crown Courts in 1993, and drawing on actual rape transcripts, she investigates why jurors acquit guilty men, sometimes repeatedly.
Drawing on unique research, citing the testimonies of women, many who have never spoken out before, not only about the trauma of rape, but also about the pattern of assailants' tactics, Carnal Knowledge explodes all kinds of myths about rape that divert jurors from believing women. Rejecting the argument that the law on rape is simply unworkable, this book proposes a package of reforms to reverse the imbalance of the judicial process and create a system that will provide justice for victims without jeopardising the rights of the defendants.
Sue Lees is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of North London. She has acted as consultant to several TV documentaries, including Male Rape (Channel 4, 1995) and Getting Away with Rape (1993).
Lia Matera --- Designer Crimes --- Virago (1 86049 100 6) £9.99 See Review
San Francisco attorney Laura Di Palma takes on two cases that have her running for her life and from the law. When Joyce Kinsley, labour lawyer is shot before Laura's eyes, the only clue to her killing are her dying words designer crimes . Meanwhile, Laura is defending a high-school friend accused of grisly murder. The cases seem inextricably linked and Laura must find the connection if she is to survive.
One of the most attractive and wittiest of women sleuths in the genre New York Times Book Review
Matera just keeps getting better Sara Paretsky
Lia Matera --- Face Value --- Virago (1 86049 113 8) £5.99
Laura Di Palma, San Francisco lawyer, and champion of not-yet-lost cases, finds herself embroiled in one of the most controversial cases of her career. Investigating Californian guru Brother Mike, whose spiritual activities verge on the criminal. Picking her way through a minefield of sleaze, murder and very dubious morality, Laura finds herself directly in the killer's line of fire.
Breathlessly quick and usually unexpected Marcel Berlins, The Times
Di Palma belongs in the same league as Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky Booklist
Why not visit Lia Matera's website which contains details of all of Lia's books, including cover art and text from the first pages. There are also sound files of readings from many of the books - great!
Lia Matera graduated from Hastings College of Law and later taught at Stanford Law School. Her novel Prior Convictions was nominated for an Edgar Allen Poe Award, The Good Fight and Where Lawyers Fear to Tread were nominated for Anthony Awards and A Radical Departure was nominated for both. She lives in California.
McClure,K. --- Trauma --- Pocket (0 671 85341 4) £4.99
Val McDermid --- Clean Break HarperCollins Paperback (0 00 649772 1) £4.99
Manchester-based private eye Kate Brannigan is not amused when thieves have the audacity to steal a Monet from a stately home where she’d arranged the security. She’s even less thrilled when the hunt for the thieves drags her on a treacherous foray across Europe as she goes head to head with organised crime. And as if that isn’t enough, a routine industrial case starts leaving a trail of bodies across the Northwest, giving Kate more problems than she can deal with.
Cleaning up the mess in Clean Break forces Kate to confront harsh truths in her own life as she battles with a testing array of villains in a case that stretches love and loyalty to the limits.
Solid pleasure.... this moves along with the speed of a Porsche, so smooth you can almost kid yourself you haven’t been sitting on the edge of your seat throughout Frances Hegarty, Mail On Sunday
Top marks for pace and plot Mike Ripley, Daily Telegraph
Zippy action, a well-crafted plot and some refreshingly gritty northern truths Marcel Berlins, The Times.
One of my favourite authors Sara Paretsky.
Val McDermid won this year's Golden Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year for The Mermaids Singing.
James Mills --- Haywire Corgi Original pbk (0 552 14389 8) £5.99 --- Out on 14th March. See Review
He's gone missing in the world airline network carrying $100 million.
He's nine years old.
To former DEA agent Doug Fleming, it is the deal of a lifetime: carry $100 million in bearer bonds from Caracas to New York as a small favour for an old contract and get the chance to rebuild your life. After all, he has the perfect cover: his nine-year-old son, Charley, whose toy lion easily conceals the bonds. But the small favour becomes a high price to pay when the boy goes missing en route...
With his son vanished into the nightmare vortex of the international airline system, Fleming is thrown into a race with federal agents and money-hungry criminals with Charley and $100,000,000 as the ultimate prize.
A slam-bang thriller... even better than John Grisham's The Client James Patterson, author of Along Came A Spider
James Mills is a bestselling author and prize-winning journalist whose career spans more than three decades. He has worked for UPI and Life and has written or consulted for all three major US TV networks. The author of the non-fiction best-seller The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace, he has testified before a panel of the House of Foreign Affairs Committee as an expert on international narcotics trafficking. His previous novels include The Panic in Needle Park, Report to the Commissioner, The Power, The Truth About Peter Harley, The Seventh Power and One Just Man.
Marc Olden --- The Exchange Students --- Coronet pbk (0340 60403 4) £5.99 --- Out on 21st March
Detective Feargal Meagher works with New York City's organsied crime bureau... He's never been busier. His world is shattered when his lover, a policewoman, is murdered. Feargal investigates the murder, uncovers a frame-up, and is soon stalked by the Exchange Students, a secret organisation of killer cops from New York and Washington.
David Ramus --- Thief of Light --- Hamish Hamilton (0241 136474) £9.99
A novel of high art, low life, and a race against time.
Adrian Sellars is a corrupt Manhattan art dealer with an eye for a masterpiece and an expensive drug habit to support. Funding his business and his addiction by selling forgeries to Ryuichi Tanaka, a distinguished yet ruthless Japanese 'businessman', he spends his days among the select of the Upper East Side and his nights in a haze of heroin and sex in Spanish Harlem.
But Adrian's notion of the good life is destroyed when he discovers his brilliant master-forger slashed beyond recognition in a Soho studio, along with an irreparably damaged canvas intended to be their greatest scam: a copy of Monet's Waterlillies commissioned by Tanaka. When Adrian tries to explain, Tanaka's demands are clear: produce a genuine Monet within two weeks, or else. To punctuate the threat, Adrian's business partner is murdered in cold blood.
Thief of Light races through its thrilling plot to one of the most heart-pounding conclusions in recent fiction.
David Ramus is a recovered heroin addict and a former art dealer, who lost $5 million when the art market crashed in the early 1990's. He now lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Tim Renton --- The Dangerous Edge Arrow Pbk (0 09 946821 2) £4.99 --- Out on 21st March. See Review
Power Corrupts like nothing else !
When two British aid workers are taken hostage in Beirut, the government devises a desperate plan to rescue them using Britsh warplanes and the SAS. Not everyone in Westminster wants this dangerous gamble to succeed. With the Foreign Secratary out of the country, Jock Meldrum-Ross, a junior minister at the Foreign Office, takes on the hostage case. As the situation escalates, the thin veneer of loyalty that holds the embattled government together begins to give way and Jock becomes caught in a political power struggle as ruthless as anything in Beirut.
Tim Renton is Conservative M.P. for Mid Sussex.
An authentic picture of the anxious and cynical calculations involved in a ministerial career Sunday Times
Tim Renton is a flirtacious story - teller who has his readers by the glands. The Guardian
Ripley & Jakubowski (ed) --- Fresh Blood: The Cream of Britain’s New Wave of Crime Writers The Do-Not Press Pbk Original (1 899344 03 9) £6.99 --- Out on 22nd March. See Review
Provocative collection of writing from the cream of the country’s new wave of crime authors.
There are no bodies in the library, few conventional policemen and no neat moral endings.
Fresh Blood reflects the work of a new generation of writers whose fiction deals with real crime committed by real criminals.
They are crimes of passion, crimes of betrayal, dark and mindless violence, robberies that go horribly wrong and some that go horribly right.
But be warned: these streets can be very mean indeed. So fasten your seatbelt and follow the signs provided by:
John Harvey, Russell James, Derek Raymond, Mark Timlin, Ian Rankin, Denise Danks, Mike Ripley, Chaz Brenchley, Joe Canzius, Stella Duffy, Nicholas Blincoe, Graeme Gordon, John B Spencer and Maxim Jakubowski.
Simon Shaw --- The Company of Knaves HarperCollins (0 00 232582 9) £14.99
The new crime novel featuring actor-murderer Philip Fletcher from one of Britain’s most talented young authors: Simon Shaw’s grasp of the psychological possibilities of bad behaviour is as impressive as that of Ruth Rendell. Harriet Waugh, Literary Review
Philip Fletcher, actor-murderer and star of Simon Shaw’s award-winning theatrical crime series, is thrown into a jealous rage when he hears that his most hated rival is up for a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List. Fletcher wants one too but can’t immediately see how to go about it.
The death of a gossipy fellow actor and the subsequent threat of scandal to his family and colleagues opens up a tantalising possibility for Fletcher: he could always blackmail his way to a knighthood. Such a course is perilous though as it requires, amongst other things, undercover penetration of an S&M night-club. Is Fletcher up to the job? To what outrageous lengths is he prepared to go to realise his burning ambition? Is murder on the agenda yet again?
An exceptionally funny, satirical, an ultimately very black novel from a highly acclaimed young author, who, as an actor himself, knows the world of the theatre intimately.
Simon Shaw studied at Cambridge University and has since been working as an actor. He has written five previous Philip Fletcher novels, two of which have won the CWA’s Last Laugh Award. He lives in London.
Sisman,R. --- Special Relationship --- Mandarin pbk (0 7493 1789 2) £5.99
Oxford set romantic mystery.
John B Spencer --- Quake City The Do Not Press Pbk Original (1 899344 02 0) £5.99 --- Out on 22nd March. See Review
Charley Chase is the hard-boiled investigator of the future. But of a future that follows the Big One of Ninety-Seven - the quake that literally rips California apart and makes LA an island. A future where cred status is everything and without it, you’re a big fat zero.
It begins when Charley is offered a simple job....
Apartment sitting.
Simple. But before he’s finished, Charley will have been embroiled in a trail of blood that leads directly to the steps of the oval office, and more sudden death than a popular abatoir sees in a wet Los Angelo fortnight.
The third Charley Case title finds Spencer in tip - top form.
Thayer,J, --- White Star --- Pan pbk (0 330 34335 1) £4.99
Barbara Vine --- The Brimstone Wedding --- Viking (0670 866105) £16.00 --- Out on 28th March. See Review
The clothes of the dead won't wear long. They fret for the person who owned them
Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is smart and elegant and in control. She keeps her secrets to herself, revealing nothing of her past. Only Jenny, her young care assistant, seems aware that her heart harbours a dark, painful mystery. And only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave.
As the women talk, Jenny slowly pieces together the answers to many questions that arise. Why does Stella seem so afraid of driving? Why has she kept possession of a house that not even her children know about? What happened there that holds the key to a distant tragedy?
As Jenny uses the house to meet her lover, she discovers untouched items - a painting, a burnt dress, a decaying car. But only when Stella leaves Jenny her tape recorder, into which she has recounted the true events of the past, can the truth be finally - and shockingly - revealed.
In this gripping mystery, in which past and present are skilfully interwoven, Barbara Vine demonstrates once again her masterly control of both character and narrative.
Barbara Vine is Ruth Rendell. Viking have published her seven previous novels: A Dark Adapted Eye, A Fatal Inversion, which won the Crime Writer's Association Gold Dagger Award, The House of Stairs, Gallowglass, King Solomon's Carpet, Asta's Book and No Night is Too Long.
Timothy Williams --- Big Italy --- Gollancz Pbk (0575 05929 X) £8.99 --- Out on 21st March. See Review
After what seems like several lifetimes as a policeman Commissario Trotti can’t wait to retire, but things keep getting in the way. Like Fabrizio Bossi, for instance, with his camel-hair coat and his doughy complexion. The last thing a cop with rearing chickens on his mind wants is to be associated with a seedy PI with a bee in his bonnet about a murdered doctor and a conspiracy theory to match. So what if someone wants Bossi dead? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they didn’t get round to it....
Big Italy is a rich, complex, ambiguous mystery of politics, corruption, love - and death. Like Italy herself, this latest Trotti novel - Timothy Williams’ fifth - is endlessly fascinating.
Stylish and excellent. Those who like Dibdin will eat it up. Lionel Davidson
Wake up and smell the grapes. Big Italy is a chilling education, a scalpel-sharp exploration of Italy’s body politic. Timothy Williams knows the ABC of corruption - Andreotti, Berlusconi, Craxi - and is a convincing and compelling voice. Ian Rankin
Commissario Trotti is an inspired creation. Sunday Times
Anne Wilson --- Truth or Dare --- The Women's Press (0 7043 4469 9) £5.99
A Sara Kingsley Mystery
Introducing an entertaining new voice in women's crime fiction:
My kids don't go to fancy schools. Hannah goes to the local primary which has the advantage of being within spitting distance of Sainsbury's. Jacob is at a state nursery. So when Caroline Blythe phoned up one sweltering summer afternoon to ask for advice on where to send her darling Harriet, I assumed she had something else on her mind
Caroline Blythe has always seemed the epitome of success. A journalist, wife and mother, she is confident, assured, sophisticated and self-contained. So why should she suddenly turn to Sara Kingsley - an overworked, underpaid community counsellor - for help? And what's behind her concern for a friend who's involved with a dangerous, married man?
Unconvinced by Caroline's story, Sara insists there is nothing she can do then Caroline is found dead of a drug overdose - and questions start to surface. Who was the friend Caroline was so anxious to protect? Why are the police so quick to pronounce a verdict of suicide? And is Sara herself partly to blame? Despite the pressures of work and single motherhood, Sara feels impelled to undertake a perilous investigation that, if she dares, may bring her closer to the truth.
Anne Wilson lives in London. Truth or Dare is her first Sara Kingsley mystery and she is currently working on her second.