Friday 17 June 2011

Couple of Highlights from Headline Publishers


The brilliant new Elizabethan thriller from the highly acclaimed author of Sacred Treason. 1564: Catholic herald William Harley, Clarenceux King of Arms, is the custodian of a highly dangerous document. When it is stolen, Clarenceux immediately suspects a group of Catholic sympathisers, the self-styled Knights of the Round Table. Francis Walsingham, the ruthless protege of the queen's Principal Secretary, Sir William Cecil, intercepts a coded message from the Knights to a Countess known to have Catholic leanings. He is convinced that Clarenceux is trying to use the document to advance the cause of the Catholic Queen. And soon Clarenceux enters a nightmare of suspicion, deception and conspiracy. Conflict and fear, compounded by the religious doubts of the time, conceal a persistent mystery. Where has the document gone? Who has it and who really took it? And why? The roots of betrayal are deep and shocking: and Clarenceux's journey towards the truth entails not just the discovery of clues and signs, but also the discovery of himself. The Roots of Betrayal is due to be published in July and is by James Forrester the pen-name of Dr Ian Mortimer.


Joseph Finder's first Nick Heller novel, Vanished, was published to widespread acclaim. Now Nick Heller returns in an explosive new thriller Buried Secrets. When private investigator Nick Heller returns home to Boston to set up his own agency, he soon gets an urgent case closer to home than expected. Alexandra Marcus - teenage daughter of hedge fund titan and Heller family friend Marshall Marcus - has been kidnapped. But it's no ordinary kidnapping - she has been abducted by professionals, buried alive in an underground casket, a video camera streaming her desperate pleas live over the internet. With a limited supply of food and water, time is quickly running out. Nick is determined to catch the perpetrators but when Marcus is arrested by the FBI for fraud, accused of operating a Ponzi scheme, Nick realises that he has some powerful enemies who may have the motivation to go after his daughter and a conspiracy that reaches up to the very highest levels of government. Nick must play a dangerous game if he hopes to flush out those responsible before Alexa is buried for good...

Both James Forrester and Joseph Finder will be at Theakston’s Old Peculair Crime Writing Festival in July.

For those of you that missed reading Dr Yes by Bateman when it came out in hardback then you can have a second chance. The paperback version is due out just before the end of June.




One to look forward to in August is A Serpent Uncoiled by Simon Spurrier.

A missing mobster. A bizarre spiritualist society. And three deaths, linked by a chilling forensic detail. Working as an enforcer in London's criminal underworld brought Dan Shaper to the edge of breakdown. Now he's a private investigator, kept perilously afloat by a growing cocktail of drugs. He needs to straighten up and rebuild his life, but instead gets the attention of his old gangland masters and a job offer from George Glass. The elderly eccentric claims to be a New Age Messiah, but now needs a saviour of his own. He has been marked for murder. Adrift amidst liars and thugs, Shaper must push his capsizing mind to its limits: stalked not only by a unique and terrifying killer, but by the ghosts of his own brutal past.

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