NEW  BOOKS FOR SPRING 1997

Duane Franklet --- Bad Memory --- Gollancz --- April 97--- £15.99
The computer thriller of the year - and your systems manager’s worst Nightmare!
It begins with computers misconfigured, shipments misdirected, trickle of angry calls to the sales division. But within days the trickle turns into a flood, and the minor glitch into a major crisis. He calls himself Hektor, his operation Trojan Horse. With a carefully assembled underground team of’ consultants', he has breached the walls of the Houston-based Simtec Corporation, the world's large manufacturer of personal computers. Bypassing the best security can buy - codes, gates. guards - he has come through the back door and is attacking Simtec's computer network. The company is under siege.
Barry Shepard, respected troubleshooter and number three man at Simtec, has received a ransom note promising that a one-time, one million-dollar payoff will protect the company and its reputation further damage. To Simtec. a million dollars is small change. It’s also extortion-the dirtiest word in the corporate dictionary-and the company leaders vow to fight. But Hekcor has made one final threat. If he carries it out, Simtec’s crash will be heard all the way to Wall Street - and the aftershock be felt throughout corporate America. And for Barry. his wife and daughter, the results could be terminal.
Duane Franklet runs his own systems analysis business in Houston Texas. Bad Memory is his first novel. 

Ian Morson --- A Psalm for Falconer --- Gollancz --- April 97 --- £15.99
Falconer strays from Oxford - with dramatic results.
A hunt for some rare texts from the library of a rogue bishop has taken Master William Falconer far from Oxford to the remote Conishead Priory. While crossing the treacherous shifting sands of Lancaster Bay witnesses the recovery of a body from the sandbanks marking the changing course of the River Kent.
Back at the priory. the body is identified as that of a monk who disappeared fifteen years earlier. But his death may not have been an accident - the dead man was to have been the new abbot, and the current abbot. who took his place exactly fifteen years ago. is themonks' prime suspect.
Beneath the calm surface of devotion and psalm singing. Falconer begins to uncover more than one secret that could be the reason for murder. His investigations lead him across the remote fastnesses of the lakes and mountains north of Conishead Priory and back. But it is only when Falconer is visited by the wraith of an ancient hermit that he discovers a treachery kept hidden for fifteen years.
Ian Morson is the author of three previous falconer novels. He lives in Berkhamsted. 

Raymond Flynn --- A Fine Body of Men --- Hodder --- April 97 £16.99
In Raymond Flynn's third darkly gleeful novel, Detective-Inspector Robert Graham investigates the murder of a low-life whom no one will miss - and its connection with a series of unsolved sex crimes - in shamelessly seedy Eddathorpe.
The salacious newspaper reports are the only beginning of the revelations which surround the life and death of the busy nineties entrepreneur Vince Lowther. As the enquiry develops a discredited psychological profiler from the Midlands sniffs a connection with a series of undetected sex crimes committed elsewhere. The problems, as Graham's sceptical colleagues see it, centres round one inescapable fact: Lowther was undoubtedly a boy, the other victims were girls...
Loyalties become increasingly confused as Graham has to contend with a sniping campaign by a smooth-as-silk rival for promotion, a hostile press, and apparently unsympathetic CID chief and an investigation that refuses to throw up a convincing case against a killer.
Raymond Flynn spent twenty-six years with the Nottinghamshire Constabulary. Starting as a
uniformed constable, he later moved to the CID, serving for twelve years as the detective inspector in charge of the Fraud Squad in Nottingham, where he still lives. He turned to writing after taking medical retirement. He was a finalist in the 1992 Ian St James Short Story competition and won the Gooding Prize for short stories in 1994. A Public Body is his second novel. Seascape With Body, his first novel, is now a New English Library paperback.

Julia Wallis Martin --- A Likeness in Stone --- Hodder --- March 97 £16.99 See Review 
When a diver discovers the remains of a body, he awakens memories of a murder committed twenty years before, with devastating consequences. An exciting, dark debut thriller with the psychological insight of Minette Walters.

Andrew Taylor --- The Lover of the Grave --- hb/pbk Hodder --- April/Sep 97 --- £16.99/5.99
THE 3RD LYDMOUTH MYSTERY
After the coldest night of the year, they find the man's body. He is dangling from the Hanging Tree on the outskirts of a village near Lydmouth, with his trousers round his ankles. Is it suicide, murder, or accidental death resulting from some bizarre sexual practice?
Journalist Jill Francis and Detective Inspector Thornhill become involved in the case in separate ways and meet at the scene of the crime.  They both follow the investigation into the dead man's murky family history and Jill is also drawn unwillingly into the affairs of the small public school where the dead man taught.Meanwhile a peeping Tom is preying upon Lydmouth: Jill has just moved into her
own house and is frightened that she is being watched.  And there are more complications on a personal level, for both policeman and reporter.
Subtle and atmospheric, The Lover of the Grave is both classic crime and modern suspense, told with all the rich characterisation and strong writing that makes Andrew Taylor so highly and deservedly praised.
Andrew Taylor is the author of the award-winning crime series featuring William Dougal.  He has also written thrillers for adults and teenagers, and novels of psychological suspense, including the much-praised The Barrel Window.  His first Lydmouth mystery, An Air That Kills, and the second, The Mortal Sickness are available from NEL in paperback.  Andrew Taylor lives with his wife and their two children in the Forest of Dean, on the borders of England and Wales.

J.D. Robb --- Immortal in Death --- Hodder --- April 97 --- £16.99
Eve Dallas is a police lieutenant in New York City - In the late 21st century. This fascinating futuristic crime novel is the third written under this pseudonym by best-selling author Nora Roberts.

Michael Larsen --- Uncertainty --- pbk Sceptre --- Jan 97 --- £10.00
Martin Molberg, a Danish journalist, goes to Los Angeles in search of the murderer of his girlfriend. His only clue - a photo of her in a sexually explicit situation with a man he has never seen. It is to lead him into a terrifying web of computer-enhanced imagery, pornography and industrial theft on a gobal sale, and to take him to the brink of insanity.
Born in Copenhagen in I96I, Michael Larsen worked as a film reporter before becoming a full-time writer Uncertainty has been a critically acclaimed best-seller in Denmark and Germany.

Alison Dye --- An Awareness of March --- Sceptre --- April 97 --- £15.99
In New York City in I994, an ageing reporter, Jackie Mollov relives the day of a murder committed thirty five years earlier. The dead Young woman and the three people suspected of killing her were known to Jackie, who had been following them in secret pursuit of a vicarious life for himself. In a cruel twist of events he was assigned to cover the story for his newspaper and his connection to the central chararters in the. drama has haunted him ever since But on his journey through the many layers of his dark and lonely past he meets kindness for the first time in the young Miguelito and begins to find redemption.
Born in New York State, Alison Dye now lives in Dublin. Her novel The Sense of Things was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in I994, and was followed by Memories of Snow

David Kessler --- A Fool for a Client --- Hodder --- March 97 --- £16.99 The pinnacle of Sean Murphy's career as a terrorist was the blowing up of a doctor and a 3-year-old child in a busy shopping mall. But when he fled to New York and thwarted attempts to extradite him, he set in motion a chain of events that not even he could have anticipated. For the murderer has become the victim. Murphy is dead, and a 23-year-old American medical student stands trial for his murder in a case which has become a cause celebre in the USA: the People of the State of New York versus Justine Levy. Justine insists on conducting her own defence, proceeding to alienate jurors and refusing to co-operate with Rick Park.er, a young, inexperienced black lawyer whom the judge has appointed to act as standby counsel.
It is a case that polarises public opinion, some see Murphy's death as the execution of a terrorist while others see it as the murder of a freedom fighter. Was Justine acting as an avenging angel for society or was her motive more personal? Shocks and surprises are in store as layer upon layer of mystery is peeled away and the reader finally confronts the tormented soul of a most unusual heroine.
A Fool for a Client is an intelligent and thought-provoking political thriller from an exciting and accomplished new talent.
About the Author Born and brought up in London, David Kessler lived in Israel for many years. He works as a technical and business writer for a London computer company. His interests include physics, philosophy, British and American law, psychology and intentional politics. A Fool for a Client is his first novel.

M. John Harrison --- Signs of Life --- Gollancz --- April 97 --- £16.99
An up-to-the-minute romantic thriller by an influential cult writer.
At twenty-five years old, the beautiful Isabel Avens dreams of flying like a bird. In his late forties, Mick 'China Rose runs a fast- and some2imes illegal - courier service to the genetics industry. They meet at a small aerodrome in the Midlands and become lovers.
Mike’s work makes him rich. and life with Isobel is all he ever wanted: but Isobel, obsessed and wasted by her dreams, is soon dissatisfied. Beautiful, she wants to be more beautiful: earthbound, she wants to fly. And when she takes a new DNA-based genetic treatment, Mick finds our more than he wants to know - not just about Isobel, but about the goods hisfirm has been carrying all these years . . .Set in London and Budapest, Signs of Life is a thoughtful, sparely written page-turner. fashion and fast cars, computers, biotechnology and the Eastern European Mafia make it a contemporary romantic thriller set around the scandals of cosmetic surgery. medical-waste dumping and genetic engineering.
M. John Harrison was born in 1945. He published his first story, in 1966,and has subsequently published five novel and three collections of stories. After spending ten years climbing and fell-running in Yorkshire, he now lives in London.

Eric Adams --- Birdland --- Hodder --- April 97 --- £16.99
In this sinister psychological thriller, Katie Jacobs' search for her long-lost brother leads to Bodega Bay the eerie California coastal town where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds. There she unravels a shocking mystery.

James Cameron --- Titanic --- Hodder --- March 97 --- £16.99
The first novel by the innovative director of the Terminator films, Aliens and True Lies thrillingly explores how the designer's fabulous vision turned into seagoing history's worst disaster. Soon to be a blockbusting movie.

Richard Herman jnr --- The Power Curve --- Hodder --- Jan 97 --- £16.99
A frlghteningly plausible political thriller and a breathtaking aerial warfare adventure from a former fighter pilot. Having taken Hong Kong, China is poised to capture Japan ... and the world shudders on the brink of war.

Stephen Leather --- The Solitary Man --- Hodder --- Jan 97 --- £16.99
From an author 'in the top rank of thriller writers' (Jack Higgins) comes a gripping international thriller about a man who is forced to confront a deadly world of terrorism, vicious warlords and uncompromising traitors.

Gwen Hunter --- Wildkin --- Hodder --- April 97 --- £16.99
Mara was born in the impenetrable reaches of the bayous, into a race of slaves. And her destiny was to be given to the Eldest... The new DeLande novel by W H Smith Fresh Talent author Hunter.

Lucian K Truscott IV --- Heart of War --- Hodder --- Feb 97 --- £16.99
The new political-military thriller from the best-selling author of Dress Gray Army Blue concerns a nail-biting power struggle between a ruthlessly ambitious general and the female major determined to expose him.

Rankin Davis --- Abuse of Process --- Coronet --- April 97 --- £5.99
From the bestselling author of The Right To Silence.
The Crime: Seven brutal murders of teenage girls have sickened the nation.
The Accused: Long-distance lorry driver Trevor Speakman, sullen and simple-minded, is the man in the dock.
The Evidence: Means, motive and opportunity: the circumstantial evidence against Speakman is overwhelming. He's as good as convicted.
The Defence: Only three people are prepared to fight for Speakman's right to a fair trial. Solicitor Leone Stern, junior defence barrister Toby Sloane and courtroom sketch artist Jack Forth join forces in an attempt to uncover the secrets surrounding the case.
The closer they get to discovering the shocking truth, the more their lives are in deadly danger... 

Terri Windling --- The Wood Wife --- Legend Pbk --- April 97 --- £5.99
"You've asked me what these creatures are and, I must admit, I don not know. Spirits, phantastes, fairies, ghosts - no single word seems adequate. They appear in the shapes we clothe them with - and at first I thought it was only Anna who had the power to do this, but now I've seen creatures form my own recent poems, flickering like moths in the mesquite grove."
Davis Cooper had written these words in a letter to a friend from his house in the Arizona desert. Now he was dead, found drowned in a dry riverbed. The truth of Cooper's letter was brought home to Maggie Black when she took up the poet's legacy and moved into his house - now hers - to write his biography, as she had intended through long years of correspondence. Far from the cities in which she has always lived, Maggie is about to discover a kind of magic that is new to her - but as old as the hills.
Maggie Black will be changed forever by her experiences.
'A wonderful elegant fantasy - sensuo