NEW  BOOKS FOR SUMMER 1997

Joe Canzius  Dead Men Also Dream   pbk Vista   May 97   £5.99
Can Byron Desire pull off the big score?
Byron. Sonia, Willy and the Moss Side triplets are family' - mixed-race kids who grew up in rare together. Not what you'd call law-abiding, not often, but it’s all for one and one for all.
George Crooks was a bookie who crossed Byron,s path and wound up dead, though nobody ever knew who offed him. Now his widow Rhona runs a catering firm in the Berkshire executive belt. But she has more than catering on her mind...
Which is where Byron and Sonia come in-and from then on it’s cross. double and triple-cross all the way, with a healthy dose of perversion thrown in . . .
Joe Canzius is the pseudonym of leading crime writer Mike Phillips, author of An Image to Die For. He is Writer in Residence on London's South Bank. 

Mark Timlin A Street that Rhymed at 3am.   pbk Gollancz   May 97   £5.99
Neate Street, London SE, three o’clock in the morning on Christmas Day. A street that rhymed at 3 a.m.
Sharman's Christmas with his daughter Judith starts with the worst of gifts: news that his ex-wife Laura, her new husband and their baby son have been killed in a bomb explosion on an aeroplane. Sharman and Judith seek what little consolation they can from each other, but she instinctively knows that Sharman needs to take his mind off things. Pushed by her he accepts a seemingly straightforward if unlovely job, baby-sitting a big-time American dealer who's in custody but doing one last deal - only this time on the right side of the law.
But when Sharman's around, babysitting’s one step away from carnage and disaster. Wanted by the police. he turns for help from the most unlikely source: the Yardie gangs that infest the estates of Brixton in south London. And what began as work turns to vengeance for his ex-wife's murder, and ends up a fully automatic and casualty-strewn battle to save the innocence, and the life, of his daughter.
Praise for Mark Timlin:
'It takes an expert to handle violence in fiction and Mark Timlin is an expert . . . enjoyably amoral rough stuff' - Sunday Telegraph
One of crime's most high-octane authors, - Time Out  

Marianne Macdonald  Ghost Walk   Hodder   June 97   £16.99
Dido Hoare, thirty-something antiquarian bookseller, would say that there are already enough complications in her life. Then she stumbles - literally - over the un- conscious body of one of her more eccentric customers. 

Kay Mitchell A Rage of Innocence   Hodder   May 97   £16.99
In Malminster it's hot and humid. DCI Morrissey is expecting trouble, but not the kind he gets.    'Police procedurals are ten a penny, but this is a prime example of the genre at its best' - Yorkshire Post.  

Kate Ross  The Devil in Music   Hodder   May 97   £16.99
At a mist-shrouded villa on Lake Como, an Italian nobleman is grooming a young English tenor. One of them will die by violence. Enter Julian Kestrel, Regency dandy and amateur sleuth, in his fourth case. 

Q Deadmeat   pbk Sceptre   May 97   £6.00
One night Clarkie and Froogy, two young black guy’s, leave a South, London club, with thier, friend Bones. When Froogy’s Prized Beetle breaks down on the way home, for a joke they abandon the comatose Bones in it. The next morning the pair are arrested on suspicion of murder- Bones’s. So Begins the tale of a vicious, serial killer, a new designer drug and a scheme involving the Internet to launder its proceeds. With only the slender protection of the spells of an aging obeah priestess, Clarkie knows he could also end up deadmeat. Little does he know how close to the killer he really is ...
Q is a Londoner. His first story appeared in The Fred and he self-published an earlier version of Deadmeat which he sold in serial form in clubs. 

James Maw   Year of the Jaguar   pbk Sceptre   May 97   £6.99
The Literary Review hailed James Maw’s début Hard Luck, as `a brilliantly evocative novel - as colourful and unique as Oliver Twist and Huckleberry Finn'. This is his second novel.
A literary thriller in the. tradition of early William Boyd and Tim Parks, Year of the Jaguar tells of Jay Morgan’s Journey to Mexico to track down the father he has never seen. His odyssev is by turns funny and frighterning as he encounters a host of colourful characters. Rut as Jay travels further south, a progressively sinister impression of his father emerges. Is he a thief, a smuggler, a murderer even? The. onlv certainty is that. the closer Jay gets to finding out, the more danger he is in.

W. J. West   The Quest for Graham Greene   Weidenfeld & Nicolson   May 97   £20 00
A chance discovery of lost papers in a shop cellar in Ealing, its friendships rekindled at the funeral of a Catholic priest: thus, not unlike one of Greene's own novels, began W. J. West's quest which has culminated in this starling book. Told as a gripping detective story, the book exposes the reasons for Greene’s sudden exile, his fascination with the Mafia, his obsession with Catholicism,and his own involvement with MI6. This is the book to get to the heart of one of this century’s most important- and elusive - writers. . 

Mark T Sullivan  The Purification Ceremony   Hodder   June 97   £16.99
Combining elements of Deliverance with Snow Falling on Cedars, an atmospheric thriller about a woman deer hunter, trapped deep in the snows of British Columbia, who discovers that she and her party are themselves the relentlessly tracked prey of a diabolical killer. 

Eric L Harry    Protect and Defend   Hodder   May 97   £16.99
The world is brought to the brink of apocalypse in this tale of International terrorism, civil war and anarchy. The latest epic novel by the best-selling author of Arc Light. 

Sarah Kennedy  Charlotte’s Friends   Hodder   May 97   £16.99
Charlotte has had a solitary childhood, eked out in large houses with empty people doing empty things. She has two close friends from her schooldays: they don't know it, but they are the focal points of her life. She will do anything to keep them for herself, despatching anyone, male or female, who gets in the way of the Family.
Sarah Kennedy's first novel is a compelling psychological thillier that examines the devastating effects of a damaged childhood. A mixture of Highsmith and Rendell, a new style in suspense.
Sarah Kennedy is a well known TV presenter and broadcaster who hosts the daily Dawn Patrol programme on Radio 2. She is the author of two non-fiction best-sellers, but this is her first novel. 

Richard Belsky  Loverboy   Hodder   May 97   £16.99
A serial killer thriller which keeps you guessing right up to its startling conclusion. In 1978 the Loverboy m urders stopped as suddenly as they had started. Now, journalist Lucy Shannon wonders whether Loverboy has returned. 

Kinky Friedman   The Love Song of Edgar Hoover   pbk Faber   May97   £4.99 'The Sam Spade of South Texas. Only soft boiled. And hipper. And funnier.' Mail on Sunday
The is back-and in a lot more trouble than he's bargained for! Soon after Pollv Price hires him to find her missing husband, Kinkv smells a rat. But it's not until he's been shot by the D.C. police and locked in a burning limousine by a Chicago chauffeur that he figures he may be the one with his tail in a trap.
When a Iongtime friend complains of being watched by mysterious men, of getting threatening telephone calls from a dead gangster named Leaning Jesus, and then disappears - along with the lovely Polly - Kinky· comes to the only conclusion that could conceivably link these disparate events: the FBI is after him! 

Donald James   Monstrum   Century   5th June 97   £9.99
A visionary thriller in the tradition of Kolmysky Heights and Gorky Park.
In the early years of the first part of the twenty-first century, Russia is beset by civil war. The Anarchists have been defeated by the White Armies of National Democracy. Police Inspector Constantin Vadim has lost his wife Julia Petrovna (one of the leading Anarchist generals) and his son has been killed in the fighting.
Julia reappears on the run from the secret police and the new military dictator Koba. In a bizarre twist of fate, Vadim is transferred to Moscow as Homicide Inspector, but in reality becomes a double for Koba. Put in charge of Moscow's bloodiest ever murder investigation, that of a series of crimes committed by `the Monstrum', he finds himself at the epicentre of the new Russia. But with imprisonment hanging over him, Vadim finds his double life mirrored in every act he makes in this strange new world. 

Matthew Hall   The Art of Breaking Glass   Orion   July 97   £16.99
An outstanding debut by an American writer, this thriller centres around a fascinating character - a man who kills the rich and powerful in order to give to the poor. Arrested and briefly consigned to a psychiatric ward, he falls in love with his nurse, and avenging her tragic past becomes the focus of his obsessive, psychotic mind. Rich characterisation and stylish writing are the hallmarks of a novel which is as tender as it is violent, as moving as it is frightening. 

Nancy Taylor Rosenberg  Abuse of Power   Orion   March 97   £16.99
Rachel Simmons joins the police department of her small California city expecting to serve her community. But when she witnesses an incident of police corruption - and reports it - she must fight for her life and the safety of her loved ones against a host of unknown enemies. With the immediacy of today's headlines and the powerful, hard-hitting prose that has become her trademark, Nancy Taylor Rosenberg delivers another major-league thriller. 

Eliette Abecassis  The Qumran Mystery   Orion   July 97   £16.99
A best-seller in France - an outstanding debut thriller about the life and death of Christ, and the disappearance of a Dead Sea Scroll that would uncover the truth. Enter palaeographer David Cohen and his son Ari, assigned by the Israeli secret services to track down the missing parchment. A compelling modern mystery unfolds alongside an even more gripping ancient one. 

Anthony Masters  The Men   Constable   June 97   £15.99
The three men have been closely bonded ever since they made a remarkable escape from Occupied France in 1940. Now, in leafy Surrey, the Festival of Britain is being celebrated, but the atmosphere in the village where they all live is tense. A young gardener has been found with his throat cut.
Tim Groves, who had a nervous breakdown after the war, is persuaded by his wife Lucy to return to France in an attempt to retrace the dark events that broke him. His two ex-army friends try to prevent him from going.
The journey has its own tragedy for Tim, and Lucy Groves' own life is soon under threat.