NEW  BOOKS FOR SPRING 1997

John Wessel --- This Far, No Further --- pbk Viking --- March 97 --- £10.99 
Harding was once a licensed private investigator with an office, a partner and a future. But then a simple little domestic case - finding a family's missing daughter turned on him when the daughter showed him the scars her father had given her.
Now Harding’s an ex-con with another simple little domestic case, to take a few pictures of a straying husband with his girlfriend. This time the heartsick wife shows up a his door, and the girlfriend shows up dead. When the cops tell Harding he's a murder suspect, he begins to realize just how much trouble he's in.
'This far, No further goes much further. It's not only a wild, lovely mystery full of surprises and switchbacks and sharp wit. It's also got the vividness of vision. John Wessel has fixed a fiend's eye on the cruelty of our time - the tortured loneliness, the offhand sadism, the soul-bight -. and he has conjured up a nightmare - George Dawes Green. author of The Juror  

Pernille Rygg --- The Butterfly Effect --- Harvill --- April 97 ---£15.99 

Annie Ross --- Double Vision --- Headline --- March 97 --- £16 99 See Review  
A beautiful American heiress is violently murdered while on a visit to her home state of Kansas. The police charge her British husband, Malcolm Laurie, with the murder, even though he vehemently protests his innocence. Since the couple's home is in the UK, television director Bel Carson is sent out to make a documentary about the case.
All the evidence seems to point to Malcolm's guilt, but Bel is not convinced. Why are there traces of celluloid in the fireplace at the murder scene? And why is the victim's sister paying a fortune for Laurie's defence? Meanwhile, Bel has her own problems. She is furious that she's been assigned a researcher Amanda, who has no television experience - although she does know her way around Kansas City, where her estranged husband is a doctor. Bel is also aware that Joe, her cameraman, leaves on clandestine expeditions very late each night.
But before Bel can deal with these issues, there is a second murder. It, too, seems to have no solution - that is, until Bel learns of the mysterious death of a teenage girl years earlier and realises this is the key to the identity of the person who has brutally murdered three women. But as she closes in on the killer, she finds herself caught in an inferno of twisted passion and betrayed love, which threatens to destroy them all...
Annie Ross is the pseudonym of a television producer with years of experience in the making of documentaries both in the UK and abroad. A Scot born and raised in Aberdeenshire, she now lives in London.

Walter Mosley --- Gone Fishing --- Serpent's Tail --- April 97 --- £9.99  
'When I had finished reading A Little Yellow Dog, I went out and got all four of Walter Mosley's previous Easy Rawlins novels and read them straight through. To write five novels about a character as interesting and complex as Easy and never to flag, never to miss a beat. is pretty amazing: when you take in that it isn't just Easy who is brilliantly portrayed but also his friend. Mouse, and a whole host of other subsidiary characters who reappear throughout the oeuvre, Mosley's achievement becomes even more impressive.' The Guardian 
A must for all Easy lovers. Gone Fishin' - Walter Mosley's stunning first novel - is published at last.
It's Houston, 1939. Nineteen-year-old Easy Rawlins has agreed to drive his friend Mouse to Pariah, Texas, in a 'borrowed 1936 Ford. Mouse is getting married to EttaMae and wants to settle some old scores with his stepfather. Easy, terrified that Mouse will learn of his earlier liaison with EttaMae, accepts Mouse's, IOU for $15 for his services, and so begins a journey into a world of voodoo, sex, revenge and death that changes their lives and prefigures their destinies. An intense story of youthful naivety and adult passions, Gone Fishin' reveals for the first time the forces that shapes the characters in Mosley's successful mystery series.
Praise for the Easy Rawlins series 
See Reviews 1 & 2 of A Little Yellow Dog 
'His Easy Rawlins novels are a series of perfectly balanced concoctions of lust. violence, politics and race. You crack a new one open knowing exactly what sort of pleasure is in store.' The Sunday Times 
'Takes the big-city detective story on to another level.' Sunday Telegraph 
'I wish I could write as movingly as he does.' Colin Dexter in the Sunday Express 
'Noir fiction of the highest order.' GQ 
'Crime at its very best’ Literary Review  

Elizabeth Peters --- Devil-May-Care --- Severn House --- Feb 97 --- £16.99 
Mystery thriller of an ancestral curse haunting a young couple.

Margaret Yorke --- Act of Violence --- Little Brown --- April 97 --- £15.99 
The facade of the quintessential English market town of Mickleburgh has successfully hidden the secrets of its inhabitants for generations, but the casual murder of a man while he tries to prevent some vandalism shatters the peaceful veneer.
Parents are forced to consider that their children might have been involved in the killing, and the aftermath of violent death reveals unexpected reactions and emotions between partners and friends. And moving within the community is someone who has a very close acquaintance with murder, a part of their history they thought they had buried successfully, but which now threatens to resurface and damage a great many people. 

Roger Ormerod --- Seeing Red --- Constable ---April 97 --- £15.99 
On a lone road on the borders Wales, a man has cashed his car and died. It seems like a simple accident to everyone except the man's grieving daughter, Angie. She becomes obsessed by the idea that her father was killed, for, being a sufferer from red-green colour blindness, he refused to drive himself.
On suspension, DS Harry Kyle agrees, as a favour to Angie's exasperated husband, to visit her and convince her chat her suspicions axe groundless. But the more he probes into the case, the more suspicious he becomes, and the fonder he grows of Angie. Then, as he is examining the wreckage of the car, someone hits him over the head. And Harry Kyle sees red. 

J K Mayo --- The Interloper --- Macmillan --- April 97 --- £l6.99  
Tale of world sabotage.

Frank Palmer --- Hot Toddy --- Constable --- April 97 --- £15.99 
Detective Superintendent Phil `Sweeney' Todd is fielded as a last-minute substitute when a security service agent disappears hunting a renegade ex-spy handler at an international conference. A gun is missing. So is money from a slush fund. And, when the MI5 man is found dead in a train, Todd begins to suspect an inside job. 

Eric Lustbader --- Dark Homecoming --- HarperCollins --- March 97 --- £l6.99 
An ex-cop becomes involved in the illegal transplant trade.

Barbara Whitehead --- Death at the Dutch House --- Constable --- April --- £15.99 
Take a beautiful historic house, divide part of it into flats, put a group of varied people to live in them - and look out for squalls.
DCI Robert Southwell was amused by the community at the Dutch House until the storms in the tea cups turned to murder. At first he thought the murderer and the motive were from outside, but he changed his mind as he discovered that all was not as it seemed in the respectable lives of the flat dwellers.
Death at the Dutch House is the seventh of Barbara Whitehead's cycle of mysteries set in York. 

Stuart Kaminsky --- Dancing in the Dark --- Severn House --- April 97 --- £16.99 
The latest job for Toby Peters, LA's sleuth to the stars: to convince a semi-retired gangster and his girlfriend to leave Fred Astaire alone...
The ex-mobster is Arthur Forbes, who has swapped his one-time prominence in Detroit's Purple Gang for Los Angeles real estate and respectability. His woman is I.una Martin, a blonde beauty - with feet of lead and the grace of an armadillo. But Luna wants to dance, and Forbes wants the most famous feet in America to teach her. Fred Astaire wants Forbes and the rather loose Luna off his back - but they don't take this rebuff kindly. It's a case choreographed for trouble, Toby finds himself hoofing it on-stage with Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth, as he desperately tries to unmask a fast-stepping killer, and prevent Astaire from trading in his tap shoes for cement galoshes.
'Mr. Kaminsky has such a good time writing, and he so loves the period, that the reader is swept along willy-nilly'. New York Times Book Review

Lawrence Block --- The Matt Scudder Mysteries --- Orion --- March 97 --- £16.99 See Review  
The Matt Scudder mysteries collected here launched one of the greatest career PIs of the last twenty years. Matt is an alcoholic ex-cop now doing favours for friends who take him deep into the underbelly of urban New York to mix with call girl: drug dealers and bent government officials. The Sins of the Father 
A murdered prostitute's father wants the investigation into her death re-opened. And Matt Scudder is lured into a sordid world of phoney religion and murderous lust where children must die for their parents' most secret sins.
Time to Murder and Create 
NYPD cop Jerry Broadfield has turned on his own, collaborating in a Special Prosecutor's investigation into police corruption. It's a move that lands him in a jail cell on a murder rap.
In the Midst of Death 
The Spinner was a petty crook and a blackmailer, but that didn't give someone the right to bash his head in, throw him in the river and walk away. At least not according to Matt Scudder's code of honour.

Jane Jakeman --- Let There Be Blood --- Headline --- March 97 --- £16.99 
Lord Ambrose of Malfine must act to prevent further murders.

John Straley --- The Music of What Happens ---Gollancz --- 27th Feb 97 --- £16.99 See Review  
Sitka, Alaska, is a place where civilisation touches on a wildness of water and ice, where a man could lose his mind in a long winter of danger and doubt. Cecil Younger is fresh out of the psych ward, but he has it on medical authority that he's not crazy -just suffering from substance abuse and a crack on the head from his client's ex-husband. And instead of the prescribed rest and recuperation, his client has brought him into the custody case from hell - one which rapidly turns into murder...
Praise for John Straley: 
`Haunting and mesmerising... strange, poetic and funny and unlike anything else you'll read this year' Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News (of The Curious Eat Themselves) See Full review  
`An impressive novel... cults have started from less' Literary Review (of The Curious Eat Themselves) 
'darkly poetic thriller with a strong sense of place' Time Out (of The Woman Who Married A Bear) `See Tangled Web UK Review  
'... a brilliant creation' Liverpool Daily Post (of The Woman Who Married A Bear)
John Straley is the author of three crime novels. The Woman Who Married A Bear, which won The Shanrus Award and The Curious Eat Themselves. He lives in Sitka, Alaska.

W E B Griffin --- The Victim --- Severn House --- April 97 --- £17.99  
The latest in the "Badge of Honor" series.

Stephanie Barron --- Jane and the Man of the Cloth --- Headline --- April 97 --- £16.99 
Second tale featuring Jane Austin as a sleuth.
Jane Austen and her family are travelling to the seaside town of Lyme Regis for a holiday when, in a fearful storm, their carriage is overturned and Jane's sister injured. Jane sets out into the night for help and chances upon High Down Grange, a dismal manor house whose master, Geoffrey Sidmouth, is brusque to the point of rudeness and runs a household like no other Jane has encountered. He wastes no time in effecting a rescue, however, and once she and her family are settled in town, Jane determines to find out more about the secrets he surely conceals.
But common gossip is soon forgotten when a man is found hanged from a makeshift gibbet on the Cobb. Is his death connected to the trade in contraband goods from France? And what is the true identity of the Reverend, the notorious scoundrel whose smuggling activities under the noses of Crown officials continue unchecked? The evidence - and the word of new acquaintances - points to the mysterious Sidmouth himself.
When another suspicious death occurs, Jane is drawn into a perilous scheme to entrap and expose Sidmouth. But she finds herself uncertain of his guilt - and puts her own life at risk to establish the truth.
'The author has set herself a Herculean task that happily succeeds on all levels: a robust tale of manners and mayhem that faithfully reproduces the Austen style - and engrosses to the finish' Kirkus Reviews (of Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor)

Patrica Cornwell --- Hornet's Nest --- Little Brown --- March 97 --- £16.99  See Review  
Violence is swarming is Charlotte, and Deputy chief Virginia West has a mood to match. Another out- of town businessman has been found murdered in his hire car, a wise-ass detective has taken her parking slot, the new police headquarters still resembles a construction site and her boss, is telling her to go out on Patrol as escort to a reporter. To Virginia the press is the enemy and her first encounter with Andy Brazil - lounging in her office taking notes while she was on the phone - raises her blood pressure as high as the headquarters of the US Bank Corporate Centre, which houses a whole bunch of other enemies.
Andy Brazil has two driving ambitions, either to be a writer or to be a cop, and the agreement between his publisher and chief of Police Judy Hammer allowing him to ride patrol is an opportunity beyond his wildest dreams, and the way he makes a complete fool of himself on his first outing is beyond his wildest nightmares.
However after a few routine calls. one hi-jacked ambulance and a murder scene, West grudgingly begins to acknowledge that Brazil is on her side; he's turning in positive copy for the news pages and doesn't set in the way, much. She also has other reasons for increasing her nicotine intake: departmental in-fighting, Court appearances, her boss coping with an obese husband and a never-ending stream of burglaries, busts and bodies.
Then, just as he begins to feel that he is winning West’s and Hammer’s confidence. Brazil discover; someone is stealing his stories, and he is uwittingly caught up in the power game being played between the city's leading lights.
With great style and, humour and empathy Patricia Cornwell brings policing a city to three-dimensional life with verve and fast-moving tensions. It is entertainment of the highest calibre. 

Lesley Grant-Adamson --- The Girl in the Case --- Hodder --- March --- £16.99 See Review  
A chillingly realistic story of psychological suspense from the mistress of unease, who is on top form in this tale of murder and deception in a small Cotswold village.
Maddy Knewton thinks there is nowhere she'd rather be than her Cotswold village in spring. But then a woman's body is discovered and her cherished dream begins to dissolve.
The stream of gossip that flows through the village touches the lives of Maddy, her friends and feckless lover, but never tells the whole truth. Was the woman's death a domestic murder? Is someone stalking Maddy? Bu the time she faces stark reality, it is too late.
'Lesley Grant-Adamson is rapidly turning the genre into an art form.' Cosmopolitan 
'She knows how to create an atmosphere of unease and incipient horror' P.D.James 
'Evil Acts is imbued from the start with a powerful and compelling atmosphere. Read it... but not when you're alone' Glasgow Herald 

Robert Wilson --- Blood Is Dirt --- HarperCollins --- March 97 --- £15.99If I come across as original and blackly funny a thriller again this year, I`II feel myself doubly blest.' Irish Times (of The Big Killing)
Bruce Medway, fixer, and debt collector for anyone in a deeper hole than himself in sweat-soaked Benin, west Africa, has heard a few stories in his time. The one that Napier Briggs tells him is patchy but it doesn't exclude the vital fact that two million of his dollars have gone missing. Bruce is used to imperfect information - people get embarrassed at their own stupidity, and criminality. But for the first time it leads to the gruesome and brutal death of a client. It would all have ended there but for Napier's daughter, the sexy, sassy and sussed Selina Aguia, a canny commodities broker. She brings money to the game and launches Bruce into the savage world that her apparently innocuous father had chosen to inhabit - a world of oil and toxic waste scams, of mafia money laundering, of death and violence fuelled by drink, drugs and sex. And where a power-hungry Nigerian presidential candidate, a rich, blow-loving American and mafia capo are fighting a silent war in which pawns are badly needed. Worse for Bruce, Selina wants revenge, and with the scam she invents it looks as though she'll get it. But this is a world where blood is dirt - nobody really cares. Not even if they love you.