NEW  BOOKS FOR SUMMER 1997

Stewart 0'Nan --- Speed Queen --- pbk Viking --- July 97 --- £10.99
Majorie Standiford sits on Oklahoma's death row, hours away from execution, speaking into a tape recorder, telling her life story. She's answering questions about how she became the Speed Queen, one of the Sonic Killers - how mainlining speed with her husband, Lamont, and her lover Natalie, grew into dealing, how, dealing turned into robbery, and robbery into mass murder. She's telling her story because she wants to set the record stright to correct the lies In Natalle's bestselling book.
Marjorie's book will be better. It will be writen by Americas most popular novelist - the king of horror.
Told in Marjorie’s dreamy, bemused voice, and scored by the blare of the dashboard radio, The Speed Queen is a taut, violent darkly comic tale set against a unquely American landscape of joints fastfood endless highways and telling of lives in uncontrollable overdrive

John Mortimer --- Felix in the Underworld --- Viking --- June 97 --- £16.99 See Review 
Felix Morsom has made a decent enough living as an author. His novels no longer touch the best-seller list, it’s true, but he has been described as the Chekhov of Coldsands-on-Sea and was even once shortlisted for the Booker. Were it not for the delicious Brenda Bodkin. his publicist, and their endlessly unconsummated passion, his life story might be very dull indeed.
Then he receives a tape through the post which tells the harrowing tale of a man whose life was destroyed by PROD - the Parental Rights and Obligations Department. On a radio phone-in he hears the man, Gavin, again and then at a book signing Gavin introduces him to Miriam, who assures Felix that he is the father of little Ian. Before he knows it, Felix is in receipt of a huge bill for lan's maintenance and, as if that weren’t drama enough, he very quickly finds himself the chief suspect in a murder case.
To discover who really did it, our fastidious hero has no choice but to enter the underworld, and live amongst the down and outs of London. There amid the litter and unpleasant smells he finds ndship and an unexpected grace. But it takes Brenda Bodkin to rescue him...

Stephen Marlowe The Lighthouse at the End of the World   pbk Viking   June 97  £10.99
The year is 1899. Edgar Allan Poe, famous for his writing, infamous for his scandalous ways, has disappeared and then resurfaced at a Baltimore hospital, mortally ill. What, in that blank space of time, had he done? The Lighthouse at the End of the World offers an answer and raises questions yet more mystifying
The story is spun on two separate inexorably converging levels. On one Edgar Allan Poe tells of his nightmare youth, of his obsession with the thirteen- year old cousin whom he made his child bride, of his public triumphs and his private demons. On the other we follow a phantom Poe living and loving in a Paris viewed through the tinted glass of his fictional detective, the immortal G. Auguste Dupin. Indeed, Dupin himself comes very much alive as he tracks Poe to America, bringing with him the icy logic bestowed on him by his creator. Even as Poe lays bare the intimate details of his life, Dupin pitilessly exposes secrets of the psyche that are the keys to the ultimate mystery of self, and self-damnation.
This is a detective story, a tale of genius and madness, of passion and terror of metaphysics, disintegrating personality and blighted love...all the threads of Poe's unique body of work woven together to meet his last and greatest challenge, the reinvention of himself.

Matthew Branton The Love Parade   pbk Hamish Hamilton   May 97   £10.99
'You hear yourself sometimes, and you 're like, this guy is Raymond Carver meets Marquez but with Faulkner undertones and Updyke’s bite and you think, what am I saying. I wonder what it must have been like to do Swift’s press or Defoe's marketing. You know? When there wasn't much else. 'Well, it's very much like the Bible."
Quentin Tarantino meets Stella Gibbon in The Love Parade, the ultimate nineties novel, contemporary and retro, sassy and smart.

Janet Evanovich   Three to Get Deadly   Hamish Hamilton   May 97   £13.99
Shortlisted for this year's Gold Dagger Award
How did Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter, became the most unpopular woman in Trenton, New Jersey? By taking on the job of tracking down Uncle Mo, a candy store owner universally recognised as one of the most harmless men in town.
Stephanie Plum, the infamous New Jersey bounty hunter is back with new friends in tow and a disastrous hair-do. Lula, a big, blonde ('230 pound, black, kick-ass Shirley Temple'), former hooker turned file clerk wants to team up with Stephanie and bust some serious criminals. However, it turns out the only case available is Uncle Mo, a popular all over town sweet-seller who has jumped bail. Is Mo what he seems? Or is he really a gun-toting vigilante? Hot on the trail, Stephanie and Lula fight their way through a maze of dead drug dealers, hounds from hell and crooked lawyers.  Is it time for Stephanie to find a new job? Is this the end?
Laced with fruity language (Lula hasn't had a language makeover yet), wise-cracks and appearances from old favourites, Ranger, Grandma Mazur and of course Joseph Morelli, Three to Get Deadly is a cocktail of humour and intrigue in Janet Evanovich's usual brilliant style.
Janet Evanovich is originally from South River, New Jersey, and now lives in New Hampshire. Her first novel, One for the Money was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1995 and her second Two for the Dough published in 1996.

Todd Charles   A Test of Wills  hb/pbk  Headline   June/Sep 97   £ 16.99/£5.99
It is 1919, the Great War is over and Inspector Ian Rutledge returns to Scotland Yard to resume his once-brilliant career. But he is burdened with a heavy secret. He is still suffering from shell shock and constantly  hears in his head the taunting voice of Hamish Macleod, a young soldier who was killed on the battlefield. In a desperate gamble to salvage his sanity, Rutledge Takes on his first assignment. But a colleague, jealous of his pre-war successes, assigns him to a case that spells disaster no matter what the outcome. In a Warwickshire village, Colonel Harris, an ex-Army officer, has been murdered and the Chief suspect is Captain Wilton, an influential and popular war hero.
Fighting his sickness Rutledge digs into the lives of the villagers - in particular, the victim's ward, who is engaged to Captain Wilton. But the one man who might have witnessed the killer is a drunken, war-ravaged ex-soldier who chills Rutledge with the realisation that if he loses control of himself, he, too, could fall into this state.
Charles Todd lives in Greenville, Delaware. He has travelled extensively in England and knows the county well. A Test of Wills is the first in a projected series featuring Inspector lan Rutledge.

Peter Tonkin The Zero Option   Severn House   June 97  £16.99

Mark Sullivan  The Purification Ceremony   Hodder & Stoughton   June 97   £16.99

Chris Ryan Emergency Response   Century July 97   £15.99
Sequel to Stand By.

Susan Moody  Sacrifice Bid   Headline   May 97   £l6.99
Sacrifice Bid is the fifth in the highly acclaimed Cassie Swann mystery series.
Times are looking lean for Cassie Swann. ith the bridge supplies business in a temporary slump and no new sources of incomc on the horizon, the cupboard is literally bare and she's shocked to find
herself cadging drinks off randy OAPs.
But her own problems are forgotten when one of her bridge group, Lolly Haden White, starts showing worrying signs of mental distress. Are her lapses of memory and dark moods simply a consequence of
growing old, or is there something more sinister behind her sudden decline?
Realizing that she knows next to nothing of Lolly's life story, Cassie decides to do a little investigating, only to find that Lolly has done an extraordinarily efficient job of covering up the details of her early life - and in particular the time she spent in Africa as a young woman.
Cassie begins to suspect that some long- suppressed secret from those days has come back to haunt Lolly - and when a brutal murder shocks the village, Cassie is convinced that the evil Lolly long ago battled against has to be confronted again.
SUSAN MOODY, a former Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association, is the author of the Penny Wanawake detective series, and the suspense novels Playing with Eire, Hush-a-Bye, House of Moons and The Italian Garden, as well as Misselthwaite, the sequel to Frances Hodgson Bumett's classic children's novel The Secret Garden.

Stephen Leather  The Tunnel Rats   Hodder & Stoughton   July 97   £16.99
International thriller

Harry Kemelman  The Day the Rabbi Left Town   Severn House   June   £16.99
A new Rabbi Small Mystery.

HRF Keating (ed)  Win Lose or Die   Severn House   July 97   £17.99
Anthology of murderous games from top crime writer.

Quintin Jardine --- Skinner's Mission ---  Headline ---- May 98 --- £16.99
When an Edinburgh car showroom is torched, leaving a fortune in luxury sports cars destroyed and one badly charred body, Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner wonders if a life of crime has finally caught up with one of Edinburgh’s most. elusive villains. But the corpse turns out not to be that of Jackie Charles, the owner of the showroom but his wife Carole. And now Skinner finds himself on the same sides of Jackie - a man whom he’s been trying to nail for Years - in the search for his wife’s killer.
However Skinner’s number one priority is a murder closer to home. Ever since memories of his first wife Myra’s death resurfaced under hypnosis, the question of how she really died has become an obsession. As he follows a trail of clues that leads him unnervingly back into the emotional minefield of the past, he is set to discover a Myra he could never have imagined. A Myra whose fate is inextricably linked across the years with the present investigations. 

Donald James   Monstrun   Century   June 97   £9.99
Thriller set in Russia in the early years of the 2lst century.

Reginald Hill  The Four Clubs   Severn House   May 97   £16.99
Football hooligans threaten anarchy.

Michael Gilbert  Into Battle   Robert Hale   May 97   £16 99
In early l914 Luke Pagan leaves the police and joins MI5.

Jonathan Gash  Different Women Dancing   Macmillan   June 97   £16.99
When business man Leonard Mostem is killed in a seemingly innocent traffic accident, Dr Claire Burtonall and 'Bonn' meet for the first time, as both are eye- witnesses. At first it seems their worlds are far apart. Clare is a dedicated doctor and lives a safe, middle-class life with her property developer husband, Clifford. Bonn is an enigmatic'goer - a gigolo - newly promoted to run his own syndicate of male prostitutes for the Pleases Agency.
When Clare begins to suspect that Mostem's death was no accident and then; unbelievably, it emerges that he was a former business partner of her husband's, she starts her own investigation.  She enlists the help of the streetwise Bonn to uncover horrific possibility that her comfortable; affluent life is actually founded. on. murder, and is quickly pulled into the precarious and dangerous underworld in which Bonn and his friends and associates move.
Jonathan Gash is the author of the highly successful Lovejoy novels, which were adapted into the long running immensely popular TV series.  Dr Clare Burtonall is his new series character-this time a strong female lead. Jonathan is also a doctor, specialising in tropical medicine and lectures world-wide on the subject.  He is married with three daughters and four grandchildren and lives near Colchester in Essex.