Ruth Dudley Edwards --- Ten Lords A-Leaping --- HarperCollins pbk (0 00 649805 1) £4.99
Shortlisted for the CWA’s Last Laugh award Splendid fun and a complete delight to read... She is unique Irish Independent Ida ‘Jack’ Troutbeck, outrageous Mistress of St Martha’s College, has been elevated to the peerage, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the House of Lords will never be the same again. Disinclined to watch her language or moderate her manners, she appalls conventional peers, but plats vigorously with others to scupper an anti-hunting bill of which she violently disapproves.
Assisted by her old friend Robert Amiss, the baroness feels confident of winning the battle. But she hadn’t reckoned with the campaign of intimidation mounted by the animal activists and the attempt on the life of one of her allies, shortly followed by scenes of horrifying carnage amongst the peers ...
Sharply entertaining ... Highly enjoyable satire Scotsman
Edwards puts the knife into the House of Lords with majestic aplomb Mike Ripley, Daily Telegraph
Charles Higson --- Getting Rid of Mr Kitchen --- Little, Brown (0 316 88106 6) £15.99
Some days you just can't get rid of a body .........This guy comes round to buy your car and you get into an argument with him and wind up killing him. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn't, but you've got to dump the body and get on with your life. But the whole of London seems to be conspiring against you and you soon realise that this is going to be the worst day of your life as you drive around town with the body in your boot, a vicious cocktail of drink and drugs in your system and a rapidly dwindling set of options.
Action, consequence, retribution: Getting Rid of Mister Kitchen is a brutal - and brutally funny - modern morality tale where motive is meaningless and justice is just another victim.
Higson writes with sympathy for and understanding of his desperate, pathetic characters.....a horribly compelling storyteller. Daily Mail
Charles Higson --- Full Whack --- Abacus Pbk (0 349 10811 0) £6.99
Dennis The Menace pike is going grey and going straight. Then two old faces turn up from the past - the Bishop brothers, Chas and Noel. Famously inept, they were bad news then, and they haven't aged well. He refuses to get involved in a new scheme they've dreamed up, but when he finds his bank accounts been tampered with, Pike is drawn back to a world he spent ten years escaping from. A novel of searing wit, scurrilous characters and horrifically haphazard violence.
Higson has the kind of ear for middle-England angst that more established writers should be jealous of Nick Lezard, GQ
Reginald Hill --- Asking for the Moon --- HarperCollins (0 00 2325128) £14.99
Featuring Dalziel and Pascoe
This collection of short stories is sure to win new readers and at the same time delight old ones, with Reginald Hill divulging how Fat Andy and Peter Pascoe met, and thus made crime-writing history, in the novella, The Last National Service Man.
Pascoe’s Ghost finds the inspector in Poe country, as he investigates the fate of a woman who seems to have slipped from the world, and hasn’t been seen by a soul for a year - unless you count her brother, who claims her ghost is haunting him. But Pascoe isn’t the only one who has a brush with the supernatural, and Dalziel’s Ghost sees the man who normally wouldn’t be seen dead in a graveyard expressing a surprising interest in the ‘other side’.
The last story in this collection, One Small Step, looks to the future where murder on the moon requires the personal intervention of Commissioner Peter Pascoe of the Eurofed Justice Department, who turns to his old mentor, Andy Dalziel for assistance …
Russell James --- Count Me Out --- Serpent's Tail Pbk (1 85242 530 X) £8.99 Out 24th September See Review
£2,000,000 in used notes is an attractive proposition. Too attractive. And when Gottfleisch makes one mistake in his attempt to steal it, the cash disappears, and he knows exactly who's taken it . So do the police. And so does everyone else. What no one knows is where Scot Heywood has gone, and what he's done with the money. But they're all determined to find out.
Which makes it all rather unpleasant for Heywood's abandoned wife and son, his brother, Jet, the fairground boxer, and most of all for Jet's eight-year-old daughter, who becomes the prime target of Heywood's pursuers.
One of fiction's most rococo tough guys. The Guardian
Few contemporary writers have so powerfully evoked the sheer bloody menace of our capital city. GQ
J.Robert Janes --- Sandman --- Constable (0 09 476240) £14.99
France in the grip of winter, is on her knees and bleeding. It is January 1943.
In the Bois de Boulonge two figures crouch over the body of a young girl; beside her a scrap of white paper on which is written Je t'aime, Nénette .
The men are Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo and Louis St-Cyr from the Surété, two detectives of long standing but from opposite sides of the war, thrown together by thrown together by circumstances and fate to become partners first then friends. Four other girls had been sexually violated and murdered in the past five weeks. the city was up in arms and demanding a stop to the killer, this sadique, dubbed by the press the Sandman .
Sharyn McCrumb--- The Rosewood Casket --- NEL Pbk (0 340 64690 X) £5.99 See Review
Dying cost nothing and could be done alone; otherwise, Randall Stargill might have lived forever. Randall Stargill's four sons have gathered at their mountain farm to build a coffin for their dying father , to come to terms with their unhappy family's past, and to decide whether to keep or sell the farm the Stargills have owned since the 1790s.
But for Nora Bonesteel, Randall's sweetheart of long ago, his imminent death poses another problem: the small box that must be buried with Randall. A box that contains the bones of a small child.
Sharyn McCrumb's dark clear mysteries so far transcend the genre that a different word should be coined for them.... Such a Joy! Anne Rivers Siddons
Jessica Mann --- A Private Inquiry --- Constable (0 09 476250 3) £14.99
Barbara Pomeroy led a busy life as a Planning Inspector. When an anonymous telephone caller threatened the life of her son, her courage and professional integrity were on trial.
With his mother often away from their St Ives home, Toby was cared for by his retired father who had recently made a friend of Clarissa Trelawney, an attractive newcomer to the town. Clarissa soon became Toby's surrogate mum.
Walter Moseley --- A Little Yellow Dog --- Serpent's Tail (1 85242 370 6) Pbk £8.99 Out September 26th See Review
It's 1963 and Easy Rawlings has given up the street life that brought him so much trouble and grief. He works at Sojourner Truth Junior High School in Watts. For two years he's been getting up early and going in. He wears nice clothes and puts all his energy - and love - into his job and his adopted children. Easy likes his new life, although he feels empty and a little bored sometimes. But all that's about to change.
Easy arrives early one morning to find one of the teachers already in her classroom. She has a dog with her and a story about a husband gone mad. Before Easy knows what's happpening, the teacher is in his arms. Before the day is over, she's gone, leaving Easy with her dog and the handsomest corpse Easy has ever seen in the school garden. That night a second corpse turns up. Easy wants to keep his new life, but it's just not possible. A murderer is on the loose. And there's a little yellow dog plotting revenge.
Praise for the Easy Rawlings series....
Noir fiction of the highest order GQ
The more Moseley writes, the more he deserves to be hailed as a contemporary, black Raymond Chandler. F.E. Pardoe - Birmingham Post
Marcia Muller --- Broken Promise Land --- The Women's Press (1 85799 476 0) £5.99 (0 7043 4504 8)
Featuring Sharon McCone, Private Investigator.
When country music star, Ricky Savage, receives an anonymous threat, he knows instantly where to turn. His sister-in-law is Sharon McCone.
But Ricky's past isn't as pretty as his press notes suggest. As threats lead to gossip and radio stations turn reluctant to play his new album, both Ricky's precarious marriage and his glittering career are soon in jeopardy. Then the trauma takes on more treacherous tones. And McCone discovers that Ricky has deadly enemies, in an industry known for breaking promises - and lives.
McCone is one of the most freshly conceived and complexly characterised of the female private eyes. Publishers Weekly
Excitement amplified Literary Review
Jerry Raine --- Smalltime --- Do - Not Press Pbk (1 899344 13 6) £5.99 Out September 27th See Review
Chris is an ordinary guy working in an off-licence in suburban England and living in the local YMCA. Both are just stop-gap measures......at least that's what he tells himself.
Then one day Chris is mugged taking the shop's money to the bank, and his life is turned upside down.
As he sets out to unravel the identity of his attacker, he is drawn into the dangerous and seedy underworld of suburban London, whilst at the same time trying to make up his mind about the attentions of three women.
In this remarkable debut, Jerry Raine shows just how easily curiosity can turn into fear amid the horrors, despair and despondency of a life lived a little too close to the edge.

Ruth Rendell --- The Keys To The Street --- Hutchinson (0 09 179190 1) £15.99 Out on 4th September
Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered.
But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
Located in the area around Regent’s Park, Ruth Rendell creates an atmospherically charged universe, where a young woman’s life is in danger both from the middle class world she knows and another world of the dispossessed and deranged.
Mysterious, complex, dangerously inventive, Ruth Rendell’s new novel may well be her finest achievement.
Ruth Rendell also writes as Barbara Vine
A masterpiece A.N.Wilson
Ruth Rendell is, unequivocally, the most brilliant mystery novelist of our time. Her stories are a lesson in a human nature as capable of the most exotic love as it is of the cruelest murder. She does not avert her gaze. Once again, she magnificently triumphs in a style that is uniquely hers and mesmerising Patricia Cornwell
Aline Templeton --- Past Praying for --- Constable (0 09 476060 8) £14.99
When the Rev. Margaret Moon, plump, short-sighted and down-to-earth, is sent to her first charge as vicar of a parish, she is disgusted by the by the comfortable complacency of the well-heeled parishioners.
It is only when her brother Robert, a forensic psychologist, comes to visit that she is made aware of the uneasy undercurrents and tensions which pervade village society.
Someone is concealing a childhood trauma so severe that it has fractured her personality. But who is it? When the poison pen letters start and arson leads to death, Margaret Moon finds herself drawn closer and closer to the heart of the problem. But will even her brother Robert's professional skill be enough to discover the answer before more lives are lost?