Tuesday 17 November 2015

Books to Look Forward to from Vintage

Amber Knight is London's hottest ticket - pop star, film star, and the front-page subject of daily tabloid gossip. Nick Belsey is less celebrated. His decade-long career at Hampstead CID seems to be coming to an end, and his habit of getting into serious trouble is ongoing. He is currently of no fixed abode. But when Belsey is asked by a desperate mother to help find her son, he finds himself infiltrating the entourage of Amber Knight. It is a world of excess, obsession, lust and greed - precisely as Belsey had expected, and perhaps even hoped for. Soon, though, the blood begins to flow, one sickening crime is followed by the next, and Belsey finds himself in a far more deadly world, whose mysteries he must solve and whose grip he must escape.  The House of Fame is by Oliver Harris and is due to be published in April 2016.

Eileen is by Ottessa Moshfegh and is due to be published in March 2013.The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's carer in his squalid home and her day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a handsome prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father's messes. When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Dawn Prentice was already known to the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit. The previous summer she had logged a number of calls detailing the harassment she and her severely disabled teenage daughter were undergoing. Now she is dead - stabbed to death whilst Holly Prentice has been left to starve upstairs. DS Ferreira, only recently back serving on the force after being severely injured in the line of duty, had met with Dawn that summer. Was she negligent in not taking Dawn's accusations more seriously? Did the murderer even know that Holly was helpless upstairs while her mother bled to death? Whilst Ferreira battles her demons, determined to prove she's up to the frontline, DI Zigic is drawn into conflict with an official seemingly resolved to hide the truth about one of his main suspects. Can either officer unpick the truth about mother and daughter, and bring their killer to justice?  After You Die is by Eva Dolan and is due to be published in January 2016.

‘Henceforth, in the death zones, all people are fair game’  SS Poliziefuhrer, Belorussia, 1943.  As the battle of Kursk rages to the east and the tide turns against the Nazi offensive, Belorussia is declared a death zone – unleashing a terrifying onslaught on the civilian population.  When a visiting General and his wife are murdered, seemingly in a partisan attack, SS retaliation promises to be swift and merciless.  Oberleutnant Heinrich Hoffmann is charged with finding the culprit, at whatever cost.  His only witness: a six-year-old local girl, scared witless. In the man-hunt that follows, Heinrich struggles to retain his humanity in the face of shifting loyalties, violence, and deadly SS politics, amid the chaos of total war.  Death Zone is by Simon Pasternak and is due to be published in April 2016.

Inspector Konrad Sejer is called to investigate the double murder of a mother and her young son. They have been found, knifed repeatedly, in a worn-out caravan on a remote piece of land. A bloody footprint is discovered. Meanwhile, another mother, dying of cancer, confesses to her 21-year-old son that he is adopted. The man who abandoned them, whom the boy has become obsessed by, is not his real father.  Hell Fire is by Karin Fossum and is due to be published in June 2016.

A Rising Man is by Abir Mukherjee and is due to be published in May 2016. Captain Sam
Wyndham, former Scotland Yard detective, is a new arrival to Calcutta. Desperately seeking a fresh start after his experiences during the Great War, Wyndham has been recruited to head up a new post in the police force. But with barely a moment to acclimatise to his new life or to deal with the ghosts which still haunt him, Wyndham is caught up in a murder investigation that will take him into the dark underbelly of the British Raj. A senior official has been murdered, and a note left in his mouth warns the British to quit India: or else. With rising political dissent and the stability of the Raj under threat, Wyndham and his two new colleagues - arrogant Inspector Digby and British-educated, but Indian-born Sargeant Banerjee, one of the few Indians to be recruited into the new CID - embark on an investigation that will take them from the luxurious parlours of wealthy British traders to the seedy opium dens of the city. The start of an atmospheric and new historical crime series.

The Crow Girl is by Erik Axl Sund and is due to be published in April 2016. It starts with just one body - tortured, mummified and then discarded. Its discovery reveals a nightmare world of hidden lives. Of lost identities, secret rituals and brutal exploitation, where nobody can be trusted. This is the darkest, most complex case the police have ever seen. This is the world of the Crow Girl.



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