NEW  BOOKS FOR SUMMER 1997

Boileau & Narcejac. Vertigo.  Pbk  Bloomsbury  May  97  £5.99
No longer with the police for reasons he did not care to remember, Flavieres was not a man to be surprised by little side-slips of human conduct. So, when his old friend Paul Gevigne said `Look here. I want you to keep an eye on my wife,' Flavours thought the reasons were pretty obvious. but he was wrong - very wrong. Madeleine Giving was a mystery, especially to her husband; that was why he had come to Flavieres. In fact, he sometimes wondered if she was the Madeleine he had married. To Flavieres she was to become more than a mystery -an obsession that slowly but relentlessly drove him to his own destruction. 

Delacorta. Diva.  Pbk  Bloomsbury  May 97  £5.99
Meer Serge Gorodish, burned-out classical pianist turned con-artist, and his playmate Alba, kinky, kleptomaniacal and thirteen years old. Together, this duo captured France, America and Britain as the hit film Diva swept through these countries. `The  hook  of the year',  proclaimed  Le Matin; `Lovers of class will go bananas over this one', said  Liberation.  Set  in the  neon  lights of  the Parisian punk underground, Diva is a rollicking tale of two infatuations, two stolen tapes and three sets of competing blackmailers. Totally fresh and original, it is filled with double-crosses, cunning reversals and a cast of wild characters. Perverse, romantic and funny, Diva features two of the most off-the-wall characters who have ever lived - fast and dangerously - in the pages of a novel. Delacorca is the pen name of Daniel Odier, a young Swiss novelist and screenwriter about whom Anais Nin once wrote, `He is an outstanding writer and a dazzling poet.'
Born in Geneva in 1945, Daniel Odier studied painting in Rome, received his university degree in Paris, and worked as a music critic for a leading Swiss newspaper before taking off for a tour of Asia which culminated in a book on Taoism. His first hook, The Job: Interviews with William Burroughs, was published in the United States in 1969. Since then, he has published seven novels in France under his real name. As `Delacorta' he has written four books, Diva, Nana, Luna and Lola; the first has been made into the hit film Diva and the last into a film by French national television. 

Ethel Lina White.  The Lady Vanishes.  Pbk  Bloomsbury  May 97  £5.99
Iris Carr, an English girl holidaying in the pre-war Balkans, becomes friendly with Miss Froy, to all
appearances an innocent, middle-aged governess. They return to England on the same train, but Miss Froy suddenly disappears from her compartment. A conveniently available doctor tries to convince Iris that she is suffering from hallucinations and that Miss Froy, never existed; but she enlists the help of a somewhat improbable Sir Galahad, and together they fall headlong into a world of secret agents and disguised identities. 

Evan Hunter. The Blackboard Jungle.  Pbk  Bloomsbury  May 97  £5.99
The Blackboard Jungle is one of the towering novels of the twentieth century. Its title is now a phrase in everyday use; its style and theme among the most widely copied in the world. No other writer has matched Evan Hunter's shatteringly brutal story of life in a New York slum school. No other book has painted such a vivid picture of young hoodlums in the making or their teachers fighting a vain and losing battle to bring a semblance of decency and honesty into their lives. It is an unforgettable book.
`The author has not used his shocking material merely to appal ... with tough-minded sympathy he has built an extremely good novel' New York Times. 

Robert Bloch. Psycho.  Pbk Bloomsbury  May 97  £5.99
Out of print for several years now, Psycho is back as part of Bloomsbury's Film Classics series. There can be few people who have not seen Hitchcock's powerful masterpiece-the lonely Bates' Motel, the runaway secretary, the face at the window and the most chilling movie scene ever where Janet Leigh is stabbed in the shower by a knife-wielding maniac.
`Icily terrifying' - New York Times,
`Adroit and blood-curdling' - New York Tribune,
‘A terribly chilling tale' - Publishers Weekly. 

Robert L. Pike.  Bullitt  Bloomsbury  pbk  May  £5.99
Lieutenant  Clancy  of  New  York  City's  52nd Precinct faces one of the toughest assignments of
his career: Johnny Rossi, gangster and racketeer, has welched on the rest of his West Coast mob and is to testify before the State Crime Commission. It is Lieutenant Clancy's job to see that he stays alive to do it. It may not sound too difficult when you have two loyal detectives like Sergeants Kaproski and Stanton to help you keep a round-the-clock watch on the hoodlum,  but  it proves almost beyond them. 

Armitage Trail. Scarface.  Pbk  Bloomsbury  May 97  £5.99
Armitage Trail was a pseudonym for the American author Maurice Coons. The son of a theatrical impresario who managed the road tours of the New Orleans Opera Company, and also manufactured furniture and farm silos, Maurice Coons left school at 16 to devote all his time to writing stories. By 17 or 18, he was already· selling stories to magazines. By his early twenties he was writing whole issues of various detective-story magazines under a great assortment of various names. And at 28 - after going to New York to write more stories, and from there to Hollywood to write movies - he dropped dead of a heart attack at the downtown Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles.
  At the time of his death, he weighed 315 pounds, had a flowing brown moustache, and wore Barrymore-brim Borsalina hats. He was survived by his brother, humorous writer Hannibal Coons.
  Maurice Coons gathered the elements for Scarface when living in Chicago, where he became acquainted with many local Sicilian gangs. For a couple of years, Coons  spent  most of his  nights prowling Chicago's gangland with his friend, a lawyer, and spent his days sitting in the sun room of his Oak Park apartment writing Scarface. He never did meet Al Capone, who was the inspiration for his immortal character, though Capone was very much alive when his book was published.
When Howard Hughes was making plans to produce the movie, Coons wanted Edward G. Robinson to play the leading role because of his resemblance to Capone but being Hollywood, it ended up with Paul Moon playing Scarface, a different-looking sort of man altogether. The author did not live to see the picture, but Al Capone did, and screenwriter Ben Hecht had to talk fast to convince his henchmen that .Scarface was not based on him. Scarface was also made into a film in 1983, directed by Brian de Palma and starring AI Pacino.
Armitage Trail's only other surviving novel is  The Thirteenth Guest ( 1929). Both his novels prefigure the birth of hard-boiled fiction and Black Mask magazine. 

Jane Adams.  Cast the First Stone.  Pbk  Pan  May  97  £5.99
Portland Close seems like a quiet, pleasantly uneventful place - until Eric Pearson and his family move in and their house starts to regularly come under attack by groups of angry, stone throwing locals.  Pearson claims he is being persecuted because he has the journal of the late Simon Blake JP;  a journal that exposes a sinister child pornographic ring that looks set to topple some extremely powerful people,. Then the allegations begin that he himself is a child abuser.
When DI Mike Croft is called in to look into the case, it seems at first that Pearson's claims of persecution are simply the work of a bitter, obsessed man.  But then poachers in nearby woodlands find the body of a young boy who has undergone a horrific assault.
Jane Adams was born in Leicester and is married with two children.  She has a degree in sociology, and has had a variety of jobs including being the lead vocalist in a folk rock band. Her long-held ambition is to travel the length of the Silk Road by motorbike.  Cast the First Stone is her second book, following the critically acclaimed The Greenway. Both books are set in Norfolk.  Her third book, Bird will be published in hardback by Macmillan in September 1997.
"A quiet, touching work of great impact...Adams's debut last year, The Greenway hinted at a promising crime-writing talent; Cast the First Stone amply confirms that view."    Marcel Berlins, The Times
 "Gripping, scary, a wonderful read. She could rise to the top of the genre..."   Yorkshire Evening Post
 "Ordinary it certainly is not..Jane Adams will keep you on the edge of your  seat from the first few pages until the chilling climax."    Stirling Observer 

Iain Pears. Death and Restoration.  Pbk HarperCollins  May  97  £5.99
The monastery of San Giovanni has few treasures - only a painting doubtfully attributed to Caravaggio. So Flavia di Stefano of Rome’s Art Squad is surprised to receive a tip-off that a raid is being planed on the building.
When the raid takes place, the thieves are disturbed and snatch the wrong painting, a curious icon of the Madonna, remarkable only for the affection in which it is held by the local population. Or is this what they wanted all along? Does the legend of the icon’s miraculous powers hold any clues? And who murdered the French dealer found in the Tiber soon afterwards?
Flavia, with the help of English art dealer Jonathan Argyll, immerses herself in the intrigues of monastic and police politics in an attempt to solve the double mystery, but the solution is murkier and more complex than anyone could have known…. 

Peter Mass.  Underboss.   HarperCollins  May 97  £16.99
In what law enforcement officials described as the American Mafia's highest-ranking desertion, John Gott’s right-hand man in the Gambino organised-crime family has defected and is expected to be a Government witness against Mr. Gotti on charges that he is the nation's top Mafia leader, law enforcement officials said yesterday.
  The  Gotti confidante, Salvatore Gravano, who was indicted last year as a co-defendant with  Mr.  Gotti on murder and racketeering charges, has entered the Federal Witness Protection Program and was secretly, transferred last week from a Federal jail in Manhattan where he had been held without bail with Mr. Gotti, officials said.
  The authorities asserted that because of the two men's close ties, Mr. Gravano's testimony could provide a crushing blow to Mr. Gotti, who has been acquitted on lesser charges at three trials in the last five years and has become the No.1 target of Federal investigators.   - The New York Times, November 12,1991 

Alexander Moorrees. Strange Happenings at the Independence Club.  pbk  Minerva  may 97  £5.99
First in a trilogy
He would start furiously searching through the books immediately, shaking them with clenched fists and seemingly blind eyes as if the words inside had no meaning for him. All that mattered to him was to flip through the books as if he hoped the words would dislodge from the pages and then drop to the floor in a large pile at his feet.
Sander's bright blue eyes looked across the elegant reading room, he turned his sophisticated gaze towards the crowded bookshelves and wondered where was the mysterious stranger who was usually there.
Sander finds a microfilm message that details plans for a nuclear bomb hidden away within the innocent pages of a library book. He finds himself caught up by fast and dangerous events after a chance discovery.  The serenity of the library is exchanged for exotic climes, Sander becomes embroiled in international terrorism and plutonium smuggling - what other secrets lurk behind the beautiful facade of the hallowed halls of the library?
The twists and turns of the story lead Sander to Isabella Ogilvy and sparks of passion ignite: they have only a little time together before she disappears.  The search intensifies as strange phone call leaves Sander in no doubt that his love has been kidnapped.
Read and follow the trail, peoplewatching will never seem such an idle sport again. 

Ted Lewis. Billy Rags.  Pbk  Allison & Busby  May 97  £5.99
Billy Cracken is in maximum security, serving a 25-year sentence.  With seventeen years to run, without remission, and a wife and child waiting for him on the outside, Billy Cracken is in maximum security, serving a 25-year sentence.  With seventeen years to run, without remission, and a wife and child waiting for him on the outside, there seems no alliterative to going over the wall. But if Billy escapes it means Walter Colman doesn't.  This  self appointed  `baron'  of the prison,  still running his organisation from the inside, tries to stop Billy - and fails. Being on the outside Billy finds he has to evade two enemies - the police and Walter's private army bent on revenge ...
TED LEWIS was born in Manchester in 1940.  His first novel, All the Way Home and all the Night Through was published in 1965, followed by Jack's Return Home - filmed as Get Carter with Michael Caine - which created the noir school of British crime writing and pushed him into the best-seller list. Ted Lewis died prematurely in1982.
`Lewis writes tensely and well' Sunday Times
`Ted Lewis is a name to watch’  Sunday Express
 `When it comes to dealing with your actual ... hard men, no one has done it better than the late, great Ted Lewis' John Williams, Arena 

Alan Scholefield. The Drowning Mark.  Macmillan  June 97  £16.99
One of the  strangest and most mysterious parts of Britain is the Suffolk coast. Here, where fog and icy winds prevail, whole towns have crumbled into the North Sea - and their church bells are still said to toll beneath the waves when storms approach. The village of Lexton is a world of its own: remote, lonely and depopulated, as if crapped in a time-warp and in its tragic past. Amidst its cliffs, beaches and reedy inlets, bodies are sometimes found . . .
The corpse of a Chinese man drifts with the incoming tide till it scrapes against the boat newly moored below the `big house'. On board are Dr Alexandra Kennedy, with her lover Mike Harley, an ex London copper seriously wounded when he saved her from a horrifying assault. Their gruesome discovery initiates a full-scale police investigation . . . but their own continuing curiosity stirs up hostility and resentment among the local inhabitants. As Alex is increasingly confronted with inexplicable and frightening occurrences, she begins to realise that in this isolated village there hides an evil intelligence which is terrifyingly dangerous. And the elderly chatelaine of the nearby  mansion is both the custodian and the prisoner of dark secrets which are about to erupt in a lethal flowering. 

Geoffrey Archer. Java Spider.  Pbk Arrow  May 97  £5.99
Although Java Spider is a novel, it does raise important moral issues about the sale of arms by governments to countries which have far from perfect human rights records. It begs the question: should Britain be selling arms to a country where brutal military force, backed by frequent use of torture, is used to keep the lid on those who demand more democracy and better human rights? Or is the economic importance of the arms trade to Britain perceived as too important to worry about moral issues? Geoffrey Archer travelled to East Timor as a `tourist', but he was watched the whole time by plain clothes policemen, and followed wherever he went.
About the Author:
Geoffrey Archer worked for 25 years as an on-screen reporter with ITN. For the last fifteen of those years he was Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent. He has covered conflicts in Ulster, the Lebanon and Bosnia, and has also reported on the Falklands War and the Gulf , War. In the summer of 1995, as a result of his success as a novelist, he decided to leave the world of television news and is now writing books full-time. 

Brian Masters.  ‘She Must Have Known’  pbk  Corgi  June 97 £6.99
The trial of Rosemary West was the culmination of one of the century's most notorious murder
investigations. The bodies found at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester outraged a nation and led to the
arrest of Frederick West for the killings of twelve young women. When he hung himself on New Year's Day I995, he seemed to have cheated justice.
The subsequent trial of his wife for the same crimes was a media sensation. From his courtroom vantage point, Brian Masters examines the evidence put to the jury and the facts behind the case. In this psychologically acute and legally penetrating account, he looks at how and why an evil psychopath was able to ensnare so many in a web of unseeing complicity.
About the Author
BRIAN MASTERS has written over twenty books on subjects as diverse as French literature, the dukedoms in Great Britain, E. F Benson and Marie Corelli.  His ground-breaking study of mass murderer Dennis Nilsen, Killing for Company, won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction in 1985.  He is the author of the critically acclaimed The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer.  He is also highly regarded for his journalism, in particular his features for the Mall on  Sunday’s magazine Night and Day.
'Brian Masters is a very fine writer who consistently questions the nature of justice and how it is administered'    Minette Walters
  'By far the most interesting book on the subject…profound and illuminating'   Sunday Telegraph
  `Like the author’s previous books on Nilsen and Dahmer, it sets out the facts in detail, so the reader can make up his own mind. A classic of criminological literature.'   Spectator
  'Masters has marshalled his arguments with such skill that one wonders why he is not making his fortune at the Bar….another serious, compelling account of a serial  Killer'   Sunday Times 

Dennis Lehane.  Darkness, Take My Hand.  Pbk Bantam  June 97  £5.99
Praise for Dennis Lehane's first novel: A Drink Before the War ' ... is hip and with a plot in overdrive, relentlessly violent and cathartic' Time Out
 When wisecracking detectives Patrick Kenzie and  Angie Gennaro agree to protect the son of a prominent psychiatrist who believes she may have angered the Boston Irish Mafia, they soon find  bodies are piling up around them - seemingly  unconnected with their case. And what’s more all the clues point to an unlikely suspect- a serial  killer who has been in prison for twenty years, so he can't be killing again, can he?
As Angie and Patrick try to find out what kind of human being could perform such horrifying acts of rape. mutilation, torture and dismemberment, they discover that the killer's motive is disturbingly rooted in their own distant past. In a series of heart-stopping climaxes that grow ever more terrifying and bloody, the two work frantically with the Boston cops, the FBI, the local Mafia and the people from their old neighbourhood to unearth the killer before they become victims themselves.
About the Author
DENNIS LEHANE lives in Boston, USA.  He holds an M.FI. in creative writing and his first novel. A Drink Before the War, won the Shamus Award. 

Terence Strong.  Rouge Element.  Heinemann,  June 97  £10.00
No stranger to researching his thrillers in danger zones, bestselling author Terence Strong followed up earlier Loyalist contacts in Northern Ireland from The Tick Tock Man (about bomb disposal in Ulster and London) to investigate and unearth a Pandora's Box of information about Ulster's secret war never before told.
These stunning revelations are woven into the fabric of his unusual and effective thriller which combines a legal drama with the fast action for which he is renowned.
It is a neat trick, but it wasn't easy to pull off, as the author freely admits.
`The action thriller is a very immediate beast, but legal procedures are mind- numbingly slow,' he says. `TV and film can bridge that gap by cutting, so you're unaware that it takes at least nine months or a year for a murder charge to come to trial. It took some doing and a lot of rewrites to get there.'
His own solicitor and barrister legal team - Bill Webb and Christopher Sutton- Mattocks - helped enormously, with additional input coming from Michael Mansfield QC and exonerated `arms-to-Iraq' businessman Gerald James, who knows what it's like to have to fight the might and vindictiveness of the British establishment.
ROGUE ELEMENT tells the story of a quiet Ulsterman who, for twenty years, worked under cover for MI5, helping to contain Loyalist terror gangs.
Then MI5 asks one favour too many, an act of personal betrayal.
When he refuses, he sees his world collapse. During the blossoming hope of peace when the IRA announces its ceasefire, he is accused of murdering a key Republican negotiator. And the evidence against him is overwhelming.
Only one man believes his innocence. His brother-in-law Chris Lomax, whose life the Ulsterman once saved when they swerved together in the Falklands.
An expert tracker and just retired from the SAS as a burnt-out case, Lomax finds himself on the trail of the most dangerous adversary of all. A rogue element within the secret state,
Aided by the crusading zeal of defence lawyer Sam Browne, as renowned for her fiery temperament as her goods looks, Lomax has to take on the police, government and the legal system in a harrowing attempt to prove his friend's innocence.
Yet, as justice runs its course, they are destined to investigate and discover dark secrets about Ulster’s past and MI5’s inextricable involvement in it.
That includes a terrifying and long-forecast prophecy that is already moving inexorably towards horrific fulfilment as a nation is betrayed.