NEW  BOOKS FOR SUMMER 1997

Clive Egleton  The Alsos Mission   Severn House   May 97   £16.99
I944: The Nazi terror is dead - or is it?

Natasha Cooper  Sour Grapes   Simon & Schuster   July 97   £15.99
Sour Grapes is the latest novel from Natasha Cooper: a tightly plotted, entertaining mystery that provides a stunning and fascinating insight into the machinery of deceit. Prompted by a lecture she heard at the Crime Writers Association by a Forensic Pathologist from the Maudsley Hospital, Natasha Cooper asks How do you tell if someone's really lying?
In pursuit of material for a thesis on lie-detection, young post-graduate Emma Gnatche encounters a City accountant serving four years in prison for a fatal hit and run, he insists was nothing to do with him. During a police interview, he had claimed his car had been stolen before the crash, later admitting he had been the driver. Now he is insisting that his first version was true. So who's telling the truth? The task is to find out when he started lying - and why. But is there such a thing as an accurate lie-delector?
As Willow King begins to untangle the complex web of deceit that surrounds the crime, she has to follow strands of manipulation, violence, fear and terrible unhappiness before reaching the shocking truth.
Natasha Cooper, is the pseudonym of a very successful romantic novelist, whose books have been published in the UK, France, USA, Canada and Scandinavia.

Robin Cook Chromosome Six   Macmillan   June 97   £16.99
A new bestseller from the master of medical suspense.
Once again the bestselling author of Coma and Contagion draws his readers into the elaborate and convoluted world of modern nedical practice in a story of escalating tension and complex human relationships and rivalries.

Lee Child  Killing Floor   Bantam Press   June 97   £9.99
An action-packed thriller from a new British talent.

Martyn Bedford   Exit, Orange and Red   Bantam Press   July 97   £15.99
Constance Amery and Inspector Pink are plunged into a major battle.

Evelyn Anthony  The Legacy   Bantam   May 97   £15.99
A widow and her step-son' battle over their inheritance

Clare Curzon  All Unwary   Little Brown   May 97   £15.99
May Matsukawe, a half-English, half-Japanese girl, runs away from her boarding school. Her parents are close to estrangement, and when, after she turns up at her mother's house, her father, a multi-millionaire, sends a business associate to escort her back to school, she becomes increasingly distraught. When this man is found murdered later that night in a nearby hotel, the first question asked by Mike Yeadings and his colleague’s in the Thames Valley police is- could May be a killer?

Phillip M. Margolin The Last Innocent Man   pbk Little Brown   May 97   £5.99 
David Nash, an ice-cool defence lawyer, is practically unbeatable in the courtroom. Most of his clients are guilty. Some are monster’s. Suddenly Nash is assailed by doubts: what is the effect on society of each victory, each rapist and murderer set free - and whet is the cost to his soul? When he takes on a client accused of a brutal murder for once he can believe in the man's innocence, but as The case moves towards trial he realises that he, the master at handling juries, is being manipulated himself.

Susanna Gregory   A Bone of Contention   Little Brown   June 97   £15.99
Cambridge,1352. Matthew Bartholomew, physician to Michaelhouse College, is called to examine some mysterious bones found in the King's Ditch. Next day he is called to the Ditch again: a student has been found dead there. Shortly afterwards a skeletal hand is discovered in the same place, hailed by townsfolk as the final remains of local martyr Simon d'Ambrey, and hence a holy relic.
  When Bartholomew finds that the hand is wearing a ring apparently identical to one worn by the missing daughter of a prominent citizen, he knows that his investigative skills are called for. The third engaging medieval mystery following A Plague On Both Your Houses and An Unholy Alliance.

Sarah Dunant  Transgressions   Virago   June 97   £14.99
Sometimes survival is just as shocking as surrender ... Terrifying and bold, Sarah Dunant’s breakthrough psychological thriller transcends genres and audiences.
Alone in her Victorian house, Elizabeth Skorvecky is trying to piece her life together again. After a bitter split from her boyfriend of seven years, increasing isolated from her friends, her only companions are a hard-boiled trashy novel she is translating from Czech, her cat and her music. It seems that things might just be fine. But as the hot city summer ends and the days draw in, the violence and dark sensuality of the translation begin to escalate, invading her dreams and then some deeply unsettling things start to occur.
First it's just a missing CD, then music playing in an empty kitchen at midnight.... Is there someone or something in the house ? She changes the locks but it persists. Poltergeist? Angry Spirit? Is she losing her mind? Then at four o'clock the morning she is woken up and suddenly, sickeningly, Elizabeth knows she is very sane- and being stalked. A dark and emotionally complex thriller, Transgressions an electrifying tour de force of eroticism and suspense.
Sarah Dunant is the author of six crime novels and winner of the Silver Dagger Award. Cultural commentator for many Years the presenter of BBC's The late Show, she is also editor of War of the Words, and with Ray Porter, The Age of Anxiety Virago also publish her first novel, Snow Stormes in a Hot Climate.

David Bowker   The Butcher of Glastonbury   Gollancz   May 97   £15.99
'Bowker piles on the atmospherics to good effect’ - Literary Review*
In her Glastonbury home, a thirteen-year-old girl discovers the bodies of her family, hacked to pieces by a vicious attacker. Although present in the house at the time of the murders, she saw and heard nothing.
Called in to assist with the investigation, Chief Superintendent Laverne and his partner, DI Savage, find their efforts hampered by the obstructive behaviour of their hosts; and by the interference of visiting FBI agent Angela Roth, recently dispatched to England to study Laverne's less than orthodox working methods.
As the detectives argue amongst themselves, a second family is slaughtered. As before, there are no witnesses to the deed, not a signalpiece of forensic evidence to point to the killer.
While the local police draw their own conclusions, Laverne's own brand of investigative instinct has pinpointed the killer. But he has no proof. All he can do is wait - until the Butcher of Glastonbury returns to kill . . . again.
David Bowker is the author of The Secret Sexist and The Death Prayer: the screenplay of which is currently being developed by the twice Oscar-winning producer Judy Counihan. David Bowker lives in Bedfordshire.

Christopher Lee  The Killing of Sally Keemer   Gollancz   June 97   £15.99 See Review
A new case for the Bath detective.
Chief Superintendent Leonard's self-indulgent Sunday, reading books in bed, has left him unprepared for Monday's new murder inquiry: a woman found dead in a toilet on the Paddington to Bristol train. He recognises her as the rather attractive woman - long in the leg. short in the skirt and well suited to both - who briefly distracted him from his book on the Saturday evening Paddington to Bath express. Sally Keemer was a partner in a small Bath-based PR agency. All nice and respectable. But she may have known more than was good for her about some of the darker dealings of the firms her company represented, and about the private lives of some of her clients. There's a whiff of blackmail, and rumours that she was supplying her clients with extra services not listed on her company's books.

Christopher Lee   The Bath Detective   pbk Gollancz   June 97   £5.99
There's dirty work in the City of Wafers - but Inspector Leonard's here to clean up.
It’s easy to underestimate the eccentric. quietly spoken Inspector James Boswell Hodge Leonard, with his bicycle and his tweeds. And superiors who make the mistake of doing so soon discover that he's not too keen on toeing the Establishment line.
When the grisly corpse of a traveller is found outside a Roman bath, Leonard's orders are to clear up the mess with no fuss. But he soon begins to kick over Bath's social dustbins and out tumbles a decade of secrets and suspects, smelling high heaven.
Christopher Lee is the author of the long-running BBC radio comedy The House, and of the BBC series This Sceptred Isle. He is also the BBC defence and diplomatic correspondent. Christopher Lee lives in Somerset.

W.J.Burley The Second Wycliffe Omnibus   Gollancz   June 97   £15.99
Featuring Wycliffe and the Last Rites, Wycliffe and the Schoolgirls and Wycliffe and the Dead Flautist.
W. J. Burley lives with his wife in Holywell, near Newquay. He is the author of nineteen Wycliffe Novels. A highly successful television series, starring Jack Shepherd as Chief Superintendent Wycliffe, has recently been broadcast by HTV.

W. J. Burley  Wycliffe and the Redhead   Gollancz   June 97   £16.99
A brand new case for the Cornish detective.
A fracas in a hotel Gents results in a man's death. Mainly on the evidence of Simon Meagor, antiquarian bookseller, George Barker is convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. On his release he kills himself.
Barker's daughter Morwenna- the redhead - holds the bookseller responsible for her father's death and the break-up of her family. She conceives an obsessive hatred for him and, apparently by chance. becomes involved with a recluse who prescribes a dramatic therapy the consequences of which bring Wycliffe into a case which deeply disturbs his own peace of mind . . .

Harry Ashe   The Profiler   pbk Vista   June 97   £5.99
The Profiler-the toughest job in European crime fighting. Across fifteen nations. beheaded and dismembered bodies are turning up, gruesomely displayed. Claudine Carter, Britain's foremost psychological profiler, is assigned by Europol -the European Union's FBI -to track down the killers.
Against a background of personal tragedy that could destroy her career, and facing threats from within the organisation as deadly as those without, Claudine Carter joins a brilliant forensic pathologist and a maverick computer wizard to build a picture of people committing the worst atrocities in the EU's criminal history. Panic-and the pressure on Claudine-rises throughout Europe as the killings continue. And when the mass-murderers discover Claudine is hunting them, she joins the list of intended victims. At the top.
Harry Asher is a former journalist who now lives in Winchester.