Books to look forward to from Faber & Faber

 In the final part of Alan Glynn’s spectacular loose trilogy of conspiracy thrillers, someone is assassinating the most powerful players in the global financial markets.  A Wall Street investment banker is shot dead while jogging in Central Park.  Later that night, one of the savviest hedge-fund managers in the city is gunned down outside a fancy Upper West Side restaurant.  Are these killings part of a coordinated terrorist attack, or just coincidence?  Investigative journalist Ellen Dorsey has a hunch that it’s neither.  Days later, when an attempt is made on the life of another CEO, the story blows wide open . . . Racing to stay ahead of the curve, Ellen encounters Frank Bishop, a recession-hit architect, whose daughter has gone missing.  The search for Lizzie and her boyfriend takes Frank and Ellen from a quiet campus to the blazing spotlight of a national media storm – and into the devastating crucible of a personal and a public tragedy.  Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows once again is James Vaughn, legendary CEO of private equity firm the Oberon Capital Group.  Despite his failing health, Vaughan is refusing to give up control easily, and we soon see just how far-reaching and pervasive his influence really is.  Set deep in the place where corrupt global business and radical politics clash, Alan Glynn’s Graveland is an explosive and hugely topical thriller and is due to be published in June 2013.

Norwegian by Night   is the debut novel by Derek B Miller and is due to be published in February 2013.  He will not admit it to Rhea and Lars – never, of course not – but Sheldon can’t help but wonder what it is he’s doing here . . .Eighty-two years old, and recently widowed, Sheldon Horowitz has grudgingly moved to Oslo, with his grand-daughter and her Norwegian husband.  An ex-Marine, he talks often to the ghosts of his past – the friends he lost in the Pacific and the son who followed him into the US Army, and to his death in Vietnam.  When Sheldon witnesses the murder of a woman in his apartment complex, he rescues her six-year-old son and decides to run.  Pursued by both the Balkan gang responsible for the murder, and the Norwegian police, he has to rely on training from over half a century before to try and keep the boy safe.  Against a strange and foreign landscape, this unlikely couple, who can’t speak the same language; start to form a bond that may just save them both.  An extraordinary debut, featuring a memorable hero, Norwegian by Night is the last adventure of a man still trying to come to terms with the tragedies of his life.

A beautiful teenage girl, Simona Biondi, has gone missing from her home in the Italian capital.  Castagnetti, the private detective hired by her parents, trawls the streets of Rome, finding himself drawn into the dark, erotic world of a TV empire belonging to a media mogul turned politician called Mario Di Angelo.  He unearths a murky world in which nubile young women, desperate for stardom, are prepared to do anything to get a break; in which powerful men are happy to exploit that desperation in order to make money and make love.  Castagnetti discovers that Anna Sartori, a young woman on the fringes of the Di Angelo empire, went missing almost twenty years ago.  Anna Sartori’s best friend, he finds out, was Simona Biondi’s sister.  This is a world, Castagnetti realises, where secrets are like fireworks: you don’t see them until they explode.  Death of a Showgirl is by Tobias Jones and is due to be published in April 2013

Eleven Days is the second in his acclaimed Carrigan and Miller police procedural series and is due to be published in June 2013.  In Eleven Days Stav Sherez conjures up a terrifying mystery.  A fire rages through a sleepy West London square, engulfing a small convent hidden away among the residential houses.  When DI Jack Carrigan and DS Geneva Miller arrive at the scene they discover eleven bodies, yet there were only supposed to be ten nuns in residence.  It’s eleven days before Christmas, and despite their superiors wanting the case solved before the holidays, Carrigan and Miller start to suspect that the nuns were not who they were made out to be.  Why did they make no move to escape the fire?  Who is the eleventh victim, whose body was found separate to the others?  And where is the convent’s priest, the one man who can answer their questions?  Fighting both internal politics and the church hierarchy, Carrigan and Miller unravel the threads of a case, which reaches back to the early 1970s, and the upsurge of radical Liberation Theology in South America – with echoes of the Shining Path, and contemporary battles over oil, land and welfare.  Meanwhile, closer to home, there’s a new threat in the air, one the police are entirely unprepared for.  Spanning four decades and two continents, Eleven Days finds Carrigan and Miller up against time as they face a new kind of criminal future.

Back from the Dead is by Peter Leonard and is due to be published in January 2013.  Bahamas, 1971, and Ernst Hess, missing presumed dead, regains consciousness to find himself stuck in a hospital bed on a strange ward in a foreign country . . . The follow-up to the acclaimed Voices of the Dead, Back from the Dead pitches us and the gang – Harry, Cordell, Colette and Joyce – back into a desperate fight to the death, which moves from the Bahamas to Florida, and from Germany to the South of France, as their worst fear comes back to haunt them.  Whip-smart, action packed and darkly funny, the second part of Peter Leonard’s glorious two-hander packs some serious punch.

The summer of 1941.  Russia has been invaded.  As Hitler’s forces smash into Soviet territory, annihilating the Red Army divisions in its path, a lone German scout plane is forced down.  Contained within the briefcase of its passenger is a painting of a hyalophoria cecropia, otherwise known as a red moth.  Military Intelligence dismisses the picture as insignificant, but Stalin suspects a German plot.  He summons his old adversary, Inspector Pekkala – the elusive Finn who was once Tsar Nicholas II’s personal detective – to discover the real significance of the red moth.  As the storm gathers around him, Pekkala soon finds himself on the path of the most formidable art thieves in history, whose real target is a secret and prized possession of the Romanovs, once considered to be the eighth wonder of the world.  However, as the Soviet Union crumbles in the face of the advancing cataclysm, Pekkala realizes that to protect the Tsar’s treasure he must break through enemy lines in a desperate mission to outfox the German invaders, or face the wrath of Stalin himself.  The Red Moth is the fourth book in the series to feature Inspector Pekkala by Sam Eastland and is due to be published in February 2013.

‘It’s just to say that no-one has come to pick Nathan up from school, and we were wondering if there was a problem of some kind?’  As Mark Douglas photographs a pod of whales stranded in the waters off Edinburgh’s Portobello Beach, he is called by his son’s school: his wife, Lauren, hasn’t turned up to collect their son.  Calm at first, Mark collects Nathan and takes him home but as the hours slowly crawl by, he increasingly starts to worry.  With brilliantly controlled reveals, we learn some of the painful secrets of the couple’s shared past, not least that it isn’t the first time Lauren has disappeared.  And as Mark struggles to care for his son and shield him from the truth of what’s going on, the police seem dangerously short of leads.  That is, until a shocking discovery . . . Gone Again is by Doug Johnstone and is due to be published in March 2013.