Books to look forward to from Bitter Lemon Press

Tito Ihaka, the unkempt, overweight Maori cop was demoted to Sergeant due to insubordination and pigheadedness. He investigates the unsolved killing of 17 year old girl at an election night party in a ritzy villa near Auckland. Ihaka is also embroiled in a very personal mystery. A freelance journalist has stumbled across information that Ihaka's father Jimmy, a trade union firebrand and renegade Marxist, didn't die of natural causes. The stories weave themselves into an exciting climax in an atmosphere of political manoeuvring and intrigue surrounding the USA's confrontation with New Zealand over its anti-nuclear stance. Fallout is by Paul Thomas and is due to be published in March 2015.

Tin Sky is by Ben Pastor and is due to be published in April 2015.  Ukraine, 1943. Having barely escaped the inferno of Stalingrad, Major Martin Bora is still serving on the Russian front as a German counterintelligence officer. At a time when weariness, disillusionment, and battle fatigue are a soldier's daily fare, Bora seems to be one of the few whose sanity is not marred by the horrors of war. Two Russian generals in his custody die within twenty-four hours of each other. Everything appears to exclude the likelihood of foul play, but Bora begins an investigation, a stubborn attempt to solve a mystery that will come much too close for comfort.

The novel is set in the Pantanal,the Brazilian lowlands bordering Bolivia. One bright Sunday on the banks of the Paraguay River, the narrator witnesses the fatal crash of a small ‘plane. He finds a kilo of cocaine in the dead pilot's backpack which he pockets . Thus begins a long slide into corruption. When the crash site is located several days later, the pilot's body is missing. Our hero gets involved in a busted cocaine deal and ends up owing a Bolivian drug gang so much money that blackmailing the wealthy family of the dead pilot seems to be the only way out. The family secretly agrees to pay serious money to recover the body of their son. Our hero doesn't have the pilot's body so someone else's will do. Or so he thinks.  The Body Snatcher is by Patricia Mello and is due to be published in June 2015.

Behind God’s Back is by Harri Nykanen and s due to be published in January 2015. There are two Jewish cops in all of Helsinki. One of them, Ariel Kafka, a lieutenant in the Violent Crime Unit, identifies himself as a policeman first, then a Finn, and lastly a Jew. Kafka is a religiously non-observant 40-something bachelor who is such a stubborn, dedicated policeman that he's willing to risk his career to get an answer. Murky circumstances surround his investigation of a Jewish businessman's murder. Neo-Nazi violence, intergenerational intrigue, shady loans – predictable lines of investigation lead to unpredictable culprits. But a second killing strikes closer to home, and the Finnish Security Police come knocking. The tentacles of Israeli politics and Mossad reach surprisingly far, once again wrapping Kafka in their sticky embrace.