Here's the next batch of November reviews added recently:
Author
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Book Title
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Monday, 30 November 2015
South Downs Crime & Mystery
Not the SCROOGE you thought you knew...
Just
in time for Christmas, available now to order at Amazon at a special price of
just £1.99!
The Humbug
Murders is the first title in the new Ebenezer Scrooge Mysteries series by New
York Times bestselling author L.J. Oliver.
As the
December nights grow long and cold in Victorian London, the Christmas geese are
getting fat - as are the pockets of ambitious young moneylender Ebenezer
Scrooge.
In his
Cheapside counting house Ebenezer receives an early-morning visit from his old
mentor, Reginald Fezziwig. Not that strange, except that Fezziwig claims to be
dead. Murdered, in fact. And his ghost predicts other victims will follow -
including Scrooge himself - unless Ebenezer finds the real culprit.
Aided by
an unconventional female clerk named Adelaide Owen, the two mingle with some of
the city’s most colorful characters - the Artful Dodger, Fagin, even a wily
young reporter named Charles Dickens. But the truth is murkier than the Thames
at twilight, and one misplaced word, one glance askew, and the ever-thrifty
Scrooge and his fellow detective will be forced to pay the ultimate price...
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Special Offer on the Mr and Mrs Darcy Series
For a limited time,
you can enter the wonderful world of Mr and Mrs Darcy for only 99p!
Mr & Mrs Darcy, the joyous
newlyweds from Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice, have not even left for their honeymoon when they
find themselves embroiled in a mystery involving one of their wedding guests.
The lovely Caroline Bingley is
engaged to marry a rich and charismatic American. Unfortunately, this
windswept courtship is marred by many strange events - nocturnal wanderings,
spooked horses, carriage accidents, and even an apparent suicide attempt. Soon
the whole Bingley family seems the target of a mysterious plot, with only the
Darcys recognising the danger.
Sinister forces are afoot and
the Darcys must get to the bottom of this mystery before the blushing bride
descends into madness - or worse.
 And, if you fall in love with this charming series, the next two books in the series, Suspense and Sensibility and North by Northanger are only £1.99. Enjoy!
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Sunday, 29 November 2015
Books to look forward to from Simon and Schuster
JANUARY 2016
Joe Goldberg came to Los Angeles to start over, to forget about what happened in New York. But in a darkened room in Soho House everything suddenly changed. She is like no one he's ever met before. She doesn't know about his past and never can. The problem is, hidden bodies don't always stay that way. Hidden Bodies is by Caroline Kepnes.
The Sign of Fear is by Robert Ryan. The skies above London hum with danger. And in the Channel enemies lie in wait... Autumn, 1917. London is not the city that Dr John Watson and Sherlock Holmes once bestrode like giants. Terror has come from the sky and Londoners are scurrying underground in fear. Then a twin tragedy strikes Watson. An old friend, Staff Nurse Jennings, is on a boat-ambulance torpedoed in the Channel with no survivors. And his concert-going companion, Sir Gilbert Hardy, is kidnapped. Then comes the gruesome ransom demand, for Sir Gilbert and four others, which will involve terrible mutilation unless the demands are met. Help comes from an unlikely source when Watson finds himself face-to-face with his old ruthless adversary, the "She Wolf" Miss Pillbody. She makes him a remarkable offer and so an unlikely partnership is formed - the enemy spy and Sherlock Holmes's faithful companion, a detective duo which will eventually uncover a shocking case of state-sponsored murder and find Watson on board a German bomber, with a crew intent on setting London ablaze.
A time of turbulence 1975. A summit has been arranged between the Rhodesian government and various nationalist leaders, and is due to take place in railway dining car 49, midway along Victoria Falls Bridge. But Matthew Charamba, a key player in the battle for majority rule in Rhodesia, is hiding a deadly secret. A time of terror Claire and Erik are living in Stockholm, raising their son, Ben. But their quiet life is about to unravel in explosive fashion. Each have hidden pasts, to which the other is oblivious, and those pasts have come back to find them. Time for Paul Dark to take action. When his family is kidnapped, Paul Dark, the most resourceful and dangerous double-agent of the 20th Century, must take action or lose the most precious people in his universe. Spy Out the Land is by Jeremy Duns.
A time of turbulence 1975. A summit has been arranged between the Rhodesian government and various nationalist leaders, and is due to take place in railway dining car 49, midway along Victoria Falls Bridge. But Matthew Charamba, a key player in the battle for majority rule in Rhodesia, is hiding a deadly secret. A time of terror Claire and Erik are living in Stockholm, raising their son, Ben. But their quiet life is about to unravel in explosive fashion. Each have hidden pasts, to which the other is oblivious, and those pasts have come back to find them. Time for Paul Dark to take action. When his family is kidnapped, Paul Dark, the most resourceful and dangerous double-agent of the 20th Century, must take action or lose the most precious people in his universe. Spy Out the Land is by Jeremy Duns.APRIL 2016
MAY 2016
Berlin
1943. August Schlegel lives in a world full of questions with no easy answers.
Why is he being called out on a homicide case when he works in financial
crimes? Why did the old Jewish soldier with an Iron Cross shoot the block
warden in the eye then put a bullet through his own head? Why does Schlegel
persist with the case when no one cares because the Jews are all being shipped
out anyway? And why should Eiko Morgen, wearing the dreaded black uniform of
the SS, turn up and say he has been assigned to work with him? Corpses, dressed
with fake money, bodies flayed beyond recognition: are these routine murders
committed out of rage or is someone trying to tell them something... The Butchers of Berlin is by Chris
Petit.
JUNE 2016
The
Lost Swimmer by Anne Turner. Rebecca Wilding, an archaeology professor,
traces the past for a living. But suddenly, truth and certainty are turning
against her. Rebecca is accused of serious fraud, and worse, she suspects - she
knows - that her husband, Stephen, is having an affair. Desperate to find
answers, Rebecca leaves with Stephen for Greece, Italy and Paris, where she can
uncover the conspiracy against her, and hopefully win Stephen back to her side,
where he belongs. There's too much at stake - her love, her work, her family.
But on the idyllic Amalfi Coast, Stephen goes swimming and doesn't come back.
In a swirling daze of panic and fear, Rebecca is dealt with fresh allegations.
And with time against her, she must uncover the dark secrets that stand between
her and Stephen, and the deceit that has chased her halfway around the world.
Saturday, 28 November 2015
A Confession by Barbra Leslie
Today's
guest blog is by debut author Barbra Leslie
I
have a confession to make.
Until the late 2000s, the only mystery books I’d ever read were Agatha Christies. (I loved cozy English books when I was a child, and if there was murder in the drawing room at the same time, well, so be it!) Like any writer, I have always been a reader: from my grandmother’s discarded Harlequin Romances when I was a girl to the Victorians by the time I was a young teenager, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. I went from Norman Mailer to George Eliot, from T.S. Eliot to (God help me) Ayn Rand. But somehow – maybe because there weren’t any in the house when I was growing up, and maybe because my very limited pocket money (earned from working at Zellers, a local budget department store, one of the two big stores in the rural Nova Scotia town in which I grew up) meant that when I was set loose in a bookstore, I wanted to choose books I had heard of, read about, knew were considered classics. I was a fervent autodidact.
Yes,
I realize how painfully snobbish that sounds, now. Snobbish was the
last thing I could ever have been considered, however, growing up as I
did. I was the last of six children, living in an apartment over my
family’s small grocery store in a rural village. But I thought
mysteries were, like science fiction (another favourite genre of mine now), the
equivalent of the Harlequin Romances I had long ago discarded – perhaps
entertaining, but throw-away fiction, to be picked up at the three-for-a-dollar
bin at charity shops.
Fast
forward to late 2007, perhaps 2008. My mother had fallen and broken
her ankle and foot badly, and needed someone with her – she wasn’t strong
enough for crutches and she was unable to walk. I flew from Toronto,
where I live, to Nova Scotia to be with her for a bit. In the years
since I’d last stayed with my mother for any period of time – in other words,
since high school – she had discovered her own love for mysteries, and her
bookshelves were crammed with books I’d never read before. For a
book junkie like me? Heaven.
And,
I was hooked.
While
I have since read more varied and widely within the genre, the first
mystery/crime writers I read as an adult were those my mother loved.
James
Lee Burke: I wish I could remember which of James Lee Burke’s Dave
Robicheaux series I read first. His writing is so lush, it’s like a
hot, humid summer night in Louisiana – the setting for the series. His
hero is an Iberia Parish homicide detective/private detective/bait shop owner
(the series spans many years), a Vietnam vet who struggles with sobriety and
his often off-the-rails partner, Clete Purcell. Dave’s moral
code is what drives the series, his tortured goodness in the face of evil. James
Lee Burke was the first mystery writer I read, and was moved to tears while
reading. While I am loathe to pick a favourite of that series, I
think The Tin Roof Blowdown, his post-Katrina Robicheaux, is one of the best
American novels of that decade. I haven’t yet read Burke’s Holland
series – and as a book lover, is there any nicer feeling than having books from
a favourite author to look forward to?
Dennis
Lehane: Dennis Lehane is an American treasure, and his
Kenzie-Gennaro books probably had the most influence on me at the time,
putting the bug in my ear to want to write my own crime fiction. His
style is more old-school noir than James Lee Burke’s almost Southern Gothic
style. The south Boston, urban P.I.-style books are deceptively
simple, but they pick you up and don’t let you go. The plots are
tight, the violence feels absolutely real, and the supporting characters are as
entertaining as the main ones – a great feat.
Robert B Parker: My mother was a huge Robert B Parker fan - and I'm glad she got to see one of her favourite actors, Tom Selleck, play Parker's Jesse Stone in s series of TV movies. (The fact that they were also filmed in Nova Scotia, where she lived, made it even more of a thrill for her.) But her favourite series and mine- and most of Parker's readers, come to that - are the Spenser books. Spenser, again, is like an old-school noir hero - the gentle tough guy who likes to crack wise. He's smart, loyal and dogged, and doesn't suffer fools gladly; a Raymond Chandler character if ever there was one. He was one writer who could make my mother laugh when she was reading; a memory of her that I treasure.
My
mother died in November 2010 of mesothelioma. So while I have other
favourites now – Nicola Griffith’s Aud series, Patricia Highsmith, Tana
French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, off the top of my head – it’s the early
mysteries I read and talked about with my mother that I will always have the
most fondness for.
Cracked by
Barbra Leslie Titan Books £7.99 (Out now)
Danielle
Cleary is a nice middle-class girl with a bad habit. After her stormy marriage
to the love of her life ends, the former personal trainer and amateur fighter
jumps down the rabbit hole into a world of crack cocaine -- delivered to her
door by a polite but slightly deranged dealer – and endless game shows, with
her best friend Gene. But when Danny’s twin sister Ginger is murdered, Danny
and her rock musician brother fly to California to find their nephews – and the
people who killed their sister. Fighting withdrawal, nosy cops and crazy
drug dealers, she kicks ass and takes names, embracing her inner vigilante in a
quest to avenge her sister and save her family. Cracked is a
darkly comic roller-coaster ride to redemption. From the streets of
Toronto to the underbelly of Orange County; from private jets to the depths of
the Maine wilderness, Danny struggles with bad guys and her own demons to find
the killers.
You
can follow her on Twitter (@barbrajleslie
Friday, 27 November 2015
New Top Notch Thrillers from Ostara
The new titles from Ostara
Publishing’s Top Notch Thriller imprint feature a bleak, almost Kafka-esque spy
thriller set in London at the fag-end of the 1960’s and a poignant war story
set on the Western Front in 1917, not so much in the trenches but under them.
Drawn Blanc, first published in 1970,
was the debut novel of author, lecturer, screenwriter and artist Reg Gadney
(who also painted the cover illustration). It starkly portrays the bleak world
of the British Intelligence service trying to recover from the debacle of the
Kim Philby years of betrayal. The new way of operating is to trust no-one at
all and recruit small cells of agents on an ad hoc basis. One such recruit – a
very reluctant volunteer – is Czech dissident O.B. Blanc who finds himself
mounting a surveillance operation which rapidly turns violent and Blanc
realises he could be the hunted rather than the hunter.
When first published, Drawn Blanc was
praised by The Guardian for describing “territory bordering on Greene-land and
Kafka country.”
In The Tunnellers, first published in
1986, Raymond Hitchcock (who served in the Royal Engineers during WWII until
wounded on the Normandy beaches), tells the story of the young British Sappers
who dug tunnels 90-feet below the German trenches on the Messines Ridge in
Flanders in order to plant huge mines designed to blow an unsuspecting enemy
sky high. Except the Germans are not unsuspecting…and are digging tunnels of
their own.
Told through the eyes of two young
Somerset lads transported from an idyllic rural life to the foul, damp darkness
of trench warfare, Raymond Hitchcock’s tense and sensitive thriller pulls no
punches when describing the brutality of the underground war conducted by the
Sappers who know – with their casualties running at a thousand a month – they
are expendable.
*
Top Notch Thrillers is the leading
imprint for reviving and reissuing great British thrillers which do not deserve
to be forgotten. Among its authors have been: Geoffrey Household, John Gardner,
Duncan Kyle, Adam Hall and Brian Callison. The series editor is Mike Ripley.
Forthcoming titles in 2016: Smear Job
and Bonfire Night – the last two ‘Callan’ novels by James Mitchell, plus Foiled
Again and Cast Adrift – a brace of ‘Nick Madrid’ comic thrillers by Peter
Guttridge.
For Further Information
http://www.ostarapublishing.co.uk
Alex Blackmore on Hidden Truths
Today's guest blog post is by former city finance lawyer turned author Alex Blackmore.
I'm a big fan of plots that deliver a light
bulb moment. When you read something and you think "no, that could never
happen......or could it?" I'm not a
conspiracy nut but I think there's a lot we don't know about the world. For
example, last year I interviewed the late Caspar Bowden who was Chief Privacy Adviser
at Microsoft in 2011. He told his employer that selling cloud computing to
non-American governments would effectively allow mass surveillance of those
countries’ citizens’ data. Most dismissed him as a fantasist and a conspiracy
theorist at the time. Then Snowdon happened and revealed PRISM i.e. everything Caspar
said was spot on.
Hidden truths
My first book, Lethal Profit looked at this idea of hidden truths in the context
of big business profiting from the sales of pharmaceuticals. In the book the
organisation ACORN was manufacturing and distributing a virus for which only
they had a cure. They were essentially living the corporate dream: creating a
captive, desperate market and making themselves the sole supplier. I don't
doubt that this happens in ‘the real world.’ I suspect that most of the time we
have no idea of the extent to which corporates (and politicians being lobbied
by them) don’t care about human lives and experiences, despite the fuzzy
advertising campaigns.
Buying strategic control?
Ideas of profit motive run through Killing
Eva too but this time based on the consequences of a completely free market. It
seems to me that everything is effectively for sale now, from our book shops to
our utilities companies, banks, food stores, some medical care and even - in a
way - our government, given that we borrow so heavily. How easy would it be to
hold these things ransom by innovatively/covertly buying up infrastructure and supply
chains and then applying political pressure? We all assume that someone in the
know must have put safeguards in place to stop a third party from ‘buying’
strategic control. But most of us have no idea.
The science bit – wreaking chaos
I have a bit of a taste for the sci fi too.
It's odd as I'm not really a very sciency person but I love the potential it
has to wreak chaos. In Lethal Profit it was a virus that could be 'held' in
algae, injected into human bodies that would then self destruct (“not in
existence but yes theoretically possible” said the man from Kings). In Killing Eva I'm looking at ideas of
perception - how you could alter someone's perception by playing with their
brain. It's not exactly advanced science I know but I couldn't stop think about
how your perception of the world around is so very influenced by what's going
on in your head not what’s actually there.
The protection of your DNA
I also thought a lot about the idea of
security, something that’s so frequently in the headlines now. How could an
individual ensure maximum protection for something priceless? We are so clever
now, us humans, that we can break, replicate or hack just about everything –
apart from DNA, that’s the only feature that remains individual to all humans. As
far as we know.
The horror of suspense
I tend to steer clear of really gruesome
torture and death scenes just because that doesn't have the same impact on me
as something more psychological. I often think creating fear, terror, suspense
is much more in what you don't say - planting those seeds of something awful
and then just letting them grow in the reader's mind. Because we all love the
suspense of a ruined house at midnight, an alpine village full of returning
dead people or crime glimpsed from a passing train. As long as it's happening
to someone else of course. Suspense is not something you can experience first
hand.
Great shoes
At the centre of all this is my main character,
Eva Scott, a young woman who knows nothing about science or the behind the
scenes global political struggles, cartels or exploitation. She is drawn into
the maelstrom when she starts receiving calls from her dead brother. Eva isn’t
a policewoman or a spy so she’s very much on her own with what she discovers.
However, she is a brave and instinctive character with a dogged determination
that is totally relentless. She also
wears great shoes.
The trailer can be seen below.
Killing Eva by Alex
Blackmore is published by No Exit Press, Paperback £7.99 and ebook
Witnessing a dramatic death at London's Waterloo Station triggers
a series of events that shatter Eva Scott's world. Dying words uttered on the
station concourse awaken a history she had thought long buried. But the past is about to be
resurrected, in all its brutal reality. Eva's
life is soon out of her hands. A
genetic key is keeping her alive; but foreshadowing her death. People from her past materialise and
then disappear, testing the limits of her sanity. Inextricably linked to her
survival is the potential takedown of an economic power, on which hang the
lives of many others. The
only way out is through . . But Eva's life is no longer her own . . And it's killing her.