NEW  BOOKS FOR SUMMER 1997

Alex Keegan --- Robin --- Piatkus --- July 97 --- £16.99
Detective Sergeant Caz Flood is attending the birth of her best friend's first baby when the news comes in: a particularly gruesome murder has bcen discovered on her Brighton patch. Birth or death. innocence or corruption. friendship or career? There is no choice - Caz must be involved in the biggest case the local force has seen in years if she is to achieve her ambition to reach the top. But Caz underestimates the effect the so-called Fry-Up Murder will have even on her iron nerves. And, as Caz begins to investigate the background to the murder. what she discovers almost brings her to her knees...
Tough. gritty and uncompromising, Alex Keegan's Caz Flood novels have earned critica1 praise - "Keegan writes with wit and energy...an exceedingly good detective story" Evening Standard

Judith Cutler --- Dying On Principle --- Piatkus --- May 97 --- £4.99 "Thoroughly modern, sharp, witty and literate" Margaret Yorke.
The cutting edge of contemporary city crime. Lecturer Sophie Rivers' move to state-of-the-art George Muntz College seems to have been a good one. Until a young computer technician is found dead - and Sophie finds that her home and office have been bugged.

Mark Morris--- Longbarrow --- Piatkus --- June 97 --- £16.99
A chilling tale of an old evil awakening once more from "One of the finest horror writers at work today" Clive Barker
If you run round the church seven times in an anti-clockwise direction, you’ll wake the Seven Sleepers...
When David Wisher's mother inherits a house in the peaceful Yorkshire village of Longbarrow, David feels he is coming home. For he's seen the house in his dreams. And when he eventually arrives in Longbarrow. he finds a place touched by the stories and beliefs of the past. There's old Jonas Dyer, whose mystical visions have driven. him to the verge of madness: the little men, too small to be human. who are said to come out of the river: and Black Shuck, a ghostly dog whose appearance heralds approaching death. Most extraordinary of all, there’s the legend of the Seven. Sleepers. defeated in an ancient battle and trapped throughout the centuries, their evil powers dormant.
Redcap, Uther, Vinegar Tom, Gerennius, Shuck, Pyewackett and Cullen. Together they spread terror, pestilence and destruction. Now. because of David's unwitting actions. the Seven Sleepers are stirring once more...
Mark Morris lives near Leeds with his wife and young family. He became a full-time writer in 1988 on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the release of his first novel, Toady. Since then he has published four more novels, Stitch, The Immaculate, Secret of Anatomy and Mr Bad Face, as well as a collection of short stories, Close To The Bone. 

Mark Morris---  Mr Bad Face --- Piatkus --- June 97 --- £5.99
The children killed the neighbourhood bogeyman - but now he's back for revenge . . . An anonymous parcel: a surprise present for a teenage girl; a burglary in which nothing of value is stolen. Harmless practical jokes? Or the beginning of a nightmare . . .

Jon Stock --- The Riot Act --- Serpent 's Tail Mask Noir --- July 97 --- £8.99
When street-fighting anarchist Dutchie's New Age girlfriend Annalese is killed by a bomb blast in Oxford Street, he vows revenge. But how can he track down the terrorists responsible, especially when they're 'sleeping' in the City, posing as foreign exchange dealers?
Fortunately for him, the security services need someone to go after them - someone who is expendable. In return for a clean police file, Dutchie is given the chance. But there's a catch. He has to cut his hair, buy a suit and embark on the sort of respectable career his father, a Lloyds name, always wanted him to pursue. The Riot Act charts the transformation of a dreadlocked class warrior into a yuppie living in Clapham with a sensible woman called Charlotte. It explores the 90s world of violent protesters who turn up at marches for a fight rather than for a cause, a disaffected MI5, and the City, where the dealing rooms trade in their own brand of mayhem.

George P. Pelecanos --- A Firing Offense --- Serpent 's Tail Mask Noir --- June 97 --- £8.99 See Review
'George Pelecanos has broken with tradition in so many ways, it feels as if he has launched a category of his own. Partly, it's his convincing evocation of an unfamiliar setting, but mainly it’s the feeling that we are definitely in the present - here is your first turn-of the-century crime writer.' Charlie Gillett
As the advertising director of Nutty Nathan's - 'The Miser Who 5aves You Money!' - Nick Stefanos knows all the tricks of the electronics business. Blow-out sales and shady deals were his life.
When one of the stockboys disappears, it's not news: just another metalhead who went off chasing some dream of big money and easy living. But the kid reminded Nick of himself twelve years ago: an angry punk hooked on speed metal and the fast life. So when the boy's grandfather begs Nick to try to find the kid, Nick says he'll try.
A Firing Offense demonstrates why George P Pelecanos has achieved cult status in US crime writing. As Barry Gifford puts it: 'To miss out on Pelecanos would be criminal.'
George P Pelecanos works for an independent film production company in Washington DC. Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go is also available from Serpent's Tail.
Praise for A Firing Offense
'Pelecanos is a fresh, new, utterly hardboiled voice. A Firing Offense is full of virtuoso scenes of imaginative sex and substance abuse, suspenseful action, and brooding meditation on a newly lost generation. A contemporary classic.' The Washington Post
'Pelecanos puts together a slam-bang climax that contains all the requisite elements - action, tragedy, victory and random death. It's a terrific start for a quality series.' Mostly Murder

Stella Duffy --- Beneath the Blonde --- Serpent 's Tail Mask Noir --- June 97 --- £8.99
'It is a pleasure and a relief to read someone who is not only first-class but is also thoroughly in tune with today's attitudes, feelings and language.' Marcel Berlins in The Times
Siobhan Forrester, lead singer of Beneath the Blonde. has everything a girl could want - stunning body, great voice. brilliant career. loving boyfriend. Now she has a stalker too. She can cope with the midnight flower deliveries and nasty phone calls, but things really turn sour when intimidation turns to murder.
Saz Martin, hired to seek out the stalker and protect Siobhan. embarks on a whirlwind investigation, travelling with the hand from London to New Zealand via the rest of the world. As jobs go. this one shouldn't be too hard, except Siobhan isn't telling the whole truth and Saz isn't sure she wants to keep the relationship strictly business.
This is the third novel featuring Saz Martin. Calendar Girl and Wavewalker are also available from Serpent's Tail.
Praise for Wavewalker
'Visually, psychologically and emotionally compelling, and thoroughly recommended.' Diva
'A transatlantic, time hopping story that satisfies as a crime novel and displays the lightest of pc touches.' The List
'While Saz may not be up there with the Sherlocks, Marples and Columbos in the sleuthing stakes, her steamy, between-the sheets action with girlfriend Molly certainly beats them all Hands down.' The Big Issue
Stella Duffy lives in London. She teaches improvised comedy. and writes and performs for theatre and radio.

Stewart Home ---  Come Before Christ and Murder Love --- Serpent's Tail High Risk --- July 97 --- £8.99
'The skinhead author whose sperm 'n' blood-sodden scribblings about the insaner fringes of pop culture make Will Self's writings read like the self-indulgent dribblings of a sad middle- class Oxbridge junkie trying to sound hard.' NME
Kevin Callan is running away but the past keeps catching up with him. That's the price he has to pay for using the occult to get his sexual kicks while manipulating everyone around him. Sometimes Callan claims to be the victim of a state-sponsored mind control programme, at others, the man in charge of this operation. Callan has a thousand different identities and as these personas fall apart and are revealed as fictions, the distinct geographical locations of Greenwich and Spitalfields in south and east London merge to form the metafictional landscape of rain-sodden Greenfields.
Come Before Christ and Murder Love explores sex and the occult both as ideologies and as ways of organising 'knowledge'. Here, the traditional distinctions between novelist and critic, truth and fiction, authors and their audience are visibly eroded.
Praise for Slow Death
'Howlingly subversive, graphically nasty and very funny.' The Big Issue
'Skinhead mayhem let loose on the art world of London in a novel that undercuts its boot-boy bravado with wry satire and self-ridicule.' Arena

Peter Guttridge ---  No Laughing Matter  May 97  Headline  £16.99 .Journalist Nick. Madrid is helplessly locked in an advanced. yoga. Position when a naked woman plummets past his window to her death. She is one of 250 comics attending the biggest comedy festival in the world. Nick turns gumshoe  in  Montreal,  the mean streets of the  Edinburgh  festival,  and Hollywood to find her killer. He is helped by Bridget Frost, the Bitch of the Broadsheets, whose pushy and tacky exterior conceals, well, a pushy and tacky interior.
Nick tangles with cynical Hollywood agents, New Age hustlers, a man who hammers nails into his head for a living, wannabe comics and movie stars, rich couples addicted to Twelve Step Recovery programmes - and a toad with an unexpected taste for cigarillos - before he discovers the truth lurking among the dark secrets of Hollywood's biggest stars.
Peter Guttridge was born in Burnley, Lancashire and educated at Oxford and Nottingham Universities. A freelance journalist specialising in literature, film and comedy, for the past ten years he has written for a range of newspapers and magazines, including the Independent, The Times and the Telegraph. He also writes about - and doggedly practises - astanga vinyasa yoga. He lives in Sussex. "A fast moving, laugh-a-line frolic...we gasp with amazement and amusement"
  Reginald Hill "Great fun. A comedy thriller with the quick fire patter of a stand-up gig and twists enough to keep you guessing to the end."   Deborah Moggach

Quintin Jardine ---  Skinner’s Mission --- May 97  Headline  £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.

Charles Todd ---  A Test of Wills  --- June 97  Headline  £16.99 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.
A spectacular debut. A complex crime of emotional and psychological intensity set in 1919.

Stuart Pawson ---  Last Reminder  h/b-pbk May /Oct 97  Headline  £16.99/£5.99
Featuring Yorkshire's Detective Inspector Charlie Priest Detective Inspector Charlie Priest's day hasn't got off to a great start. Late for work for the first time in twenty years, thanks to the sloe gin he consumed the night before, he’s faced with the grim evidence of a crime in the local park before a call comes in to say that a new constable on the beat has discovered a body. Set in the bustling fictional town of Heckley and against the wild East Pennine landscape, Last Reminder is the latest crime novel featuring Charlie Priest, a detective with more convictions to his credit than most Yorkshiremen have had roast dinners.
STUART PAWSON was born in Leeds and now lives in Fairburn, Yorkshire. He has worked for British Coal and, more recently, in the Probation Service, as a mediator between offenders and their victims. His earlier novels include The Picasso Scam, The Mushroom Man and The Judas ,Sheep.

Alan Scholefield ---  Bad Timing  --- June 97  Headline  £16.99
Prison doctor Anne Vernon never liked Ivor Taplin when he was serving a four-year jail sentence for assaulting his wife. But, on his release, Anne discovers that he was in fact a battered husband who only turned on his wife after enduring many violent attacks.
Feeling sorry for Taplin, Anne offers him a job refurbishing her house once he is out of prison. Then, while she is away with her new lover and boss Tom Melville, she receives a phone call to say that her six year old daughter, Hilly has disappeared. Is she lost? Has she been snatched? Or. more likely, has Taplin kidnapped her. Packed with riveting drama and psychological intrigue, Bad Timing is an enthralling mystery.
ALAN SCHOLEFIELD began as a journalist before moving to Fleet Street and from there to Spain to write short stories. Giving up journalism for full-time authorship, he has now written over twenty novels. He lives in Hampshire.

Barbara Parker ---  Criminal Justice --- June 97  Headline  £16.99
A novel of professional conscience and personal betrayal in the legal world

Dean Koontz ---  Demon Seed --- June 97  Headline  £16.99
Proteus is the store of human knowledge; a learning, thinking, self-programming computer designed as a slave to mankind. But Proteus intends to create a ‘child’. And, in the privacy of Susan Abramson’s house, against her will, he commits an inconceivable act of terror.
‘Koontz redefines suspense’ The Times
His novels have sold over 175 million copies worldwide. Dean Koontz lives in Southern California

David James Smith    Gangwars   Century  June 97  £16.99
An extraordinary story of life in the drugs gangs of Britain's cities.
'Ricki was in the gym, working on his biceps, when two men came in and began shooting at him with semi-automatic weapons. He hid behind the leg- press and tried to dodge the bullets that flew past his head. One bullet entered his arm at the elbow and left it through his wrist. He ran out the back of the gym and jumped over a wall. They had gone but a lot of dust had been kicked up by the thirty-five or so bullets which had been fired. Afterwards the gunmen sent the word that it was not over yet and next time he would be killed. Ricki took to wearing a bullet-proof vest. it helped, but it didn't take away the fear. You couldn't know when it was going to happen again...'
David James Smith is the author of The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case. He writes for the Sunday Times Magazine and Esquire. 

Lindsey Davis   Three Hands in the Fountain   Century  June 97  £15.99 See Review
After his jaunt to Spain in A Dying Light in Corduba, inimitable sleuth Marcus Didius Falco returns to his own city, where he sets up in an uneasy partnership with his old friend Petronius. A mysterious and cunning serial killer is threatening the public health of Ancient Rome, as well as the lives of his victims. Aided and abetted by the aristocratic Helena Justina, hindered rather than helped by the snakelike Chief Spy Anacrites, Falco and Petro desperately comb the city for clues to a killer who strikes during festivals - with the next one only days away. Lindsey Davis recreates Ancient Rome with matchless colour and humour.
Lindsey Davis was born in Birmingham and now lives in Greenwich. After an English degree at Oxford she joined the Civil Service but now writes full time. Six of her previous eight Falco novels are in Arrow paperback. 

John Case    The Unbegotten   Century  July  £11.99
The killers are on the loose, with God on their side...
Joe Carpenter is an ex-FBI investigator bent on revenge. His sister and young nephew have been murdered and the killer hospitalised. Despite warnings from the police, Carpenter will stop at nothing to discover why. The mystery originates in a confession in a remote village in Italy; a confession that sends the local priest into a panic and theVatican into an uproar.
It was the confession of the late Dr Baresi, and concerned the work at his fertility clinic - the same clinic attended by Carpenter’s sister and, as he discovers, other victims in a recent series of murders that have swept the world. All were infertile before they were treated by Dr Baresi, and all had then become pregnant. Carpenter must discover the remaining mothers before the hit men, and meanwhile his sister's killer is still on the loose...