Val McDermid --- Booked for Murder --- Women's Press £15.99 Out November 21st See Review 
Why would anyone want to kill Penny Vernavides, bestselling author of the teen dream series? It can't have been the freak acccident it first appeared - Penny's death was an exact replica of the murder method in her forthcoming book. Apart from Penny, only three people knew the plot: her agent, her editor and her ex-girlfriend Meredith.
In memory of her old friendship with Penny, Lindsay Gordon agrees to investigate. Reluctantly she leaves her California haven for the fraught world of London book publishing. And as her investigation reveals an incendiary mixture of soured relationships and seething rivalries, Lindsay must face the frightening truth. Someone in Penny's literary or love life must have been driven to murder...........
Gladys Mitchell ---The Rising of The Moon -- Virago Crime Classics Pbk (1 86049 074 3) £5.99
Described by Philip Larkin as her tour de force , The Rising of the Moon shows Gladys Mitchell at her mordant and morbid best. Every full moon a ripper runs amok on the streets of Brentford. Masters Simon and Keith Innes set out to catch the killer under the disturb ing guidance of Mrs Bradley.
A delightfully subversive read - sharp and shy - Ioved it. Liza Cody.
Reggie Nadelson --- Hot Poppies -- Faber ( 0 571 17435 3) £14.99
A murder in New York's diamond district. A dead Chinese girl with a diamond in her gut. A fire in a sweat-shop in the city's swarming Chinatown. These are the events that bring ex-cop Artie  Cohen out of retirement and back into the world of murder and politics that nearly killed him in Red Mercury Blues.
Artie yearns only to hole up with Lily Haines, the red-headed reporter who shares his passion for food and jazz. But Lily is obsessed with adopting a baby, and in spite of himself Artie is back in the game - this one even deadlier than the last, because this is a trade in human beings.
The terrifying plot uncoils as Artie follows its threads from New York to London's Chinatown and finally to Hong Kong, where everything, and everyone, is for sale, even the children.
Reggie Nadelson --- Red Murcury Blues -- Faber Pbk ( 0 571 17485 3) £4.99
A stunning debut by an exciting new thriller writer.
A Gorky Park for the 1990's as Dashiell Hammett might have done it. Red Mercury Blues is a mine of taut, snappy writing, set in a New World Order peopled with Russian mobsters.....the times they are a changin', and Nadelson has her finger on the pulse. The Times
An excellent first novel ......it has everything going for it. The slickness and the quality of the writing, and her capacity to create atmosphere.... Her next novel is already something to look forward to. Daily Telegraph.
Frank Palmer --- Red Gutter -- Constable (0 09 476650 9) £14.99
Rising police star Phil Sweeney Todd hurries back from holiday after the mystery death of his chief to take over an investigation into a bombing campaign by animal-lib militants. A good result could mean promotion and power.
He finds that many operational secrets have died with his boss and begins to suspect that one bombing in the series may have more to do with fraud in the family and freemasonry than terrorism.
Now he must make a snap decision that will either save himself and a crew transporting livestock or expose his own panic-stricken incompetence. Has he overreached himself with ambition?
Mike Philips --- An Image to Die For -- HarperCollins Pbk (0 00 649671 7)) Out 18th November
Black journalist Sam Dean has had a bad feeling about the job TV producer Wyndham Davis is offering: tracking down a man mixed up in two brutal murders on a tough London housing estate. But when a figure from Sam's past re-emerges and puts emotional pressure on him Sam finds he can't say no.
As he embarks on his search for the missing man, Sam realizes there's more than one agenda here. There are secrets from Wyndham's life influencing events and Sam is getting sucked into the dirty heart of the mystery. Tough, vivid and shocking, An Image to Die For is a disturbing and compelling read from ome of Britain's foremost crime writers.
A tightly plotted and brutal tale of the inner city.....Genuinely moving, this is the novel Philips has been promising. Time Out.
Thom Racina--- Snow Angel -- Hodder (0 340 67422 9) £16.99
When Julia Larsen returns to her snowy home town for Christmas, she discovers that her parents have been brutally murdered. To her aid comes childhood friend Matt Hinson, but he is soon arrested for the killings.
James Sallis ---Moth-- No Exit Press Pbk (1 874061 52 1) £4.99 Out November 7th
One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin's dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, La Verne Adams is dead - and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers......leaving behind a crack-addicted infant and a mystery.
Abandoning his former career for the safe respectability of teaching, Lew Griffin now spends his time in an old house in the garden district - determined to keep his distance from the lowlife temptations of the New Orleans night. But an inescapable obligation to an old friend is drawing the tormented black ex P.I. to danger like a moth to a flame. And there will be no turning back when his history comes calling and the dying begins again.
Andrew Taylor --- The Lover of the Grave -- Hodder (0 340 6172 8) £16.99 See Review 
The latest in the acclaimed Lydmouth series. A farmer is found hanging fro,a tree at a crossroads. The implication is suicide, but Jill Francis and DI Thornhilleach come to think differently.
Scott Turow --- The Laws of Our Fathers -- Viking (0670 872318) £16.00 See Review
In Scott Turow's most powerful novel, an explosive murder trial brings together a cast of unforgettable characters whose long-held secrets erupt devastatingly into the present.
In September 1995, June Eddgar is gunned down in a drive-by-style shooting at a gang-plauged Kindle County housing project. Within days her son, Nile, a probation officer, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
The judge assigned to the case is Sonia Sonny Klonsky, who knew the Eddgars in the late Sixties, when June's husband, Lovell, was a leading campus radical. A group of remarkable personalities from their shared pasts gathers in Sonny's courtroom for Nile's trial. All have been permanently marked by the iconoclasm of their youth and some carry terible secrets that come to bear on the case in unexpected and fateful ways.
Mary Wills Walker --- Under the Beetle's Cellar -- HarperCollins (0 00 225433 6) £15.99 Out November 21st
For forty-six days, bus driver Walter Demming and eleven schoolchildren have been buried underground, held captive in the fortified compound of a fundamemtalist cult. Deprived of daylight, fresh air and contact with the outside world, they endure the terrifying rants of the cult's leader, the charismatic Samuel Mordecai. He joyfully predicts the arrival of Armageddon - in exactly five days' time.
All attempts at negotiations have failed. Enter tenacious crime reporter Molly Cates, the only journalist ever to have interviewed Mordecai. It was the worst assignement of her life - until this one. She has gained his trust before, and she must try again. But this time the stakes are immpossibly high. And she has just five days.
Stan Washburn --- Into Thin Air -- Hodder (0 340 68028 8) £16.99
The new thriller from the author of Intent to Harm sees the return of sympathetic California policeman Toby Parkman, investigating a child kidnapping case which, unknown to him, is alarmingly close to home.
Charles Willeford ---New Hope for the Dead -- No Exit Press Pbk (1 874061 57 2) £4.99 Out November 7th. See Review
Hoke Moseley's boss has dumped fifty cold cases , old unsolved homicides, on his desk. His ex-wife has dumped his two teenage daughters on his doorstep. His voluptuous partner, Cuban Ellita Sanchez has been kicked out of her house for immoral goings-on. The Miami police chief is kicking Hoke out of his house for illegal goings-on. Happily, however, the wanton stepmother of the OD'd teenage junkie wants Hoke in her bed. But that could just turn out to be the biggest shocker of all.
No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford. Elmore Leonard
Herbert O. Yardley ---The Education of a Poker Player -- Oldcastle Press (0 948353 76 7) £5.95 Out November 7th See Review
This classic book is out on its own, not only as a poker playing manual but also as an exposure of the cynical reality behind the American dream. A marvellous autobiography about countless poker games and countless characters, about the railroad men, travelling salesmen, speculators, drunks, no-hopers - even secret agents - whom Yardley saw through a tobacco haze across the green baize tables of the world.
I sent to America for the book, was delighted with it and gave some copies away for Christmas. I said the book contained a hatful of some of the finest gambling stories I had ever read. The book would certainly become a classic.  It was sharply, tautly written.... Ian Fleming.