Books to Look Forward to From Duckworth Overlook

Former homicide detective and CIA agent Lemuel Gunn left behind the Afghanistan battlefield for a trailer in New Mexico to forge a new career as a private investigator.  Out of nowhere comes Ornella Neppi, a woman making a mess of her uncle's bail bonds business.  She asks Gunn to track down the source of her troubles, a man named Emilio Gava, who has jumped bail after being arrested for buying cocaine.  But no photos of Gava seem to exist.  As Gunn begins his search for a man it seems that someone is protecting, hitting dead end after dead end, he starts to suspect that Gava might not exist at all - The grittiest novel yet from the masterful Robert Littell, A Nasty Piece of Work is unmissable, powerful reading.  As Gunn's game of cat and mouse unfolds - every step leading him closer to the truth - he draws ever closer to an unseen enemy's line of fire.  A Nasty Piece of Work is due to be published in March 2014

Dry Bones is the third book in Fintan Dunne trilogy by Peter Quinn and is due to be published in April 2014.  Fintan Dunne, the detective at the centre of The Man Who Never Returned and Hour of the Cat, is back in this spellbinding story of an ill-fated OSS mission into the heart of the Eastern front and its consequences more than a decade after the war's end.  As the Red Army continues its unstoppable march towards Berlin in the winter of 1945, Dunne and his fellow soldier Dick Van Hull volunteer for a dangerous drop behind enemy lines to rescue a team of OSS officers trying to abet the Czech resistance.  When the plan goes south, Dunne and Van Hull uncover a secret that will change both of their lives.  Years later, Dunne is drawn back into the shadowy realm of Cold War espionage in an effort to clear his friend's name and right an injustice so shocking that men would, quite literally, kill to keep it quiet.

In 1856, a baying crowd of over 30,000 people gathered outside Stafford prison to watch the execution of a village doctor from Staffordshire.  One of the last people to be publicly hanged, the 'Rugely Poisoner', the 'Prince of Poisoners', 'The greatest villain who ever stood trial at the Old Bailey,' as Charles Dickens described him, Dr William Palmer was convicted in 1855 of murdering his best friend, but was suspected of poisoning more than a dozen other people, including his wife, children, brother and mother-in-law - cashing in on their life insurance to fund his monstrously indebted gambling habit.  Highlighting Palmer's particularly gruesome penchant for strychnine, his trial made news across Europe: the most memorable in fifty years, according to the Old Bailey's presiding Lord Chief Justice.  He was a new kind of murderer - respectable, middle class, personable, and consequently more terrifying - and he became Britain's most infamous figure until the arrival of Jack the Ripper.  The first widely available account of one of the most notorious, yet lesser-known, mass-murderers in British history, The Poisoner takes a fresh look at Palmer's life and disputed crimes, ultimately asking 'just how evil was this man?’  With previously undiscovered letters from Palmer and new forensic examination of his victims, Stephen Bates presents not only an astonishing and controversial revision of Palmer's entire story, but takes the reader into the very psyche of a killer.  The Poisoner is due to be published in June 2014.

 In February 2014, Duckworth Overlook is due to publish The Miernik Dossier and The Last Supper by Charles McCarry.  In The Miernik Dossier Cool, urbane Paul Christopher is the perfect American agent, currently working in deep cover in the twilight world of international intrigue.  But now even he cannot tell good from bad in a maze of double and triple-crosses.  As a group of international agents embark on a trip in a Cadillac from Switzerland to the Sudan, Christopher knows that he has to find out which one is about to unleash bloody terrorism - and God help everyone if he makes a mistake.  In The Last Supper on a rainy night in Paris, Paul Christopher's lover Molly Benson falls victim to a vehicular homicide minutes after Christopher boards a jet bound for Vietnam.  To explain this senseless murder, The Last Supper goes back not only to the earliest days of Christopher's life, but also to the origins of the CIA.  Moving seamlessly from tales of refugee smuggling in Nazi Germany to OSS-coordinated guerrilla warfare in Burma and the confusion of the Vietnam War, McCarry creates an intimate history of this shadow-world of deceit and betrayal.