Books to Look Forward to from Transworld Publishing

January 2018

PERFECT HUSBAND. PERFECT FATHER. PERFECT LIAR? Vivian Miller is a CIA analyst assigned to uncover Russian sleeper cells in the USA. After accessing the computer of a potential Russian spy, she stumbles on a secret dossier of deep-cover agents living in her own country. Five seemingly normal people living in plain sight. A few clicks later, everything that matters to Vivian is threatened - her job, her husband, even her four children . . . Vivian has vowed to defend her country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But now she's facing impossible choices. Torn between loyalty and betrayal, allegiance and treason, love and suspicion, who can she trust? Will her next move be the right one?  Need to Know is by Karen Cleveland

March 2018

Panic Room is by Robert Goddard.  Sometimes the danger is on the inside . . . High on a

Cornish cliff sits a vast uninhabited mansion. Uninhabited except for Blake, a young woman of dubious background, secretive and alone, currently acting as housesitter. The house has a panic room. Cunningly concealed, steel lined, impregnable - and apparently closed from within. Even Blake doesn't know it's there. She's too busy being on the run from life, from a story she thinks she's escaped. But her remote existence is going to be invaded when people come looking the house's owner, missing rogue pharma entrepreneur, Jack Harkness. Suddenly the whole world wants to know where his money has gone. Soon people are going to come knocking on the door, people with motives and secrets of their own, who will be asking Blake the sort of questions she can't - or won't - want to answer. And will the panic room ever give up its secrets?

Bryant & May – Hall of Mirrors is by Christopher Fowler.  The year is 1969 and ten guests are about to enjoy a country house weekend at Tavistock Hall. But one amongst them is harbouring thoughts of murder. . . The guests also include the young detectives Arthur Bryant and John May - undercover, in disguise and tasked with protecting Monty Hatton-Jones, a whistle-blower turning Queen's evidence in a massive bribery trial. Luckily, they've got a decent chap on the inside who can help them - the one-armed Brigadier, Nigel `Fruity' Metcalf. The scene is set for what could be the perfect country house murder mystery, except that this particular get-together is nothing like a Golden Age classic. For the good times are, it seems, coming to an end. The house's owner - a penniless, dope-smoking aristocrat - is intent on selling the estate (complete with its own hippy encampment) to a secretive millionaire but the weekend has only just started when the millionaire goes missing and murder is on the cards. But army manoeuvres have closed the only access road and without a forensic examiner, Bryant and May can't solve the case. It's when a falling gargoyle fells another guest that the two incognito detectives decide to place their future reputations on the line. And in the process discover that in Swinging Britain nothing is quite what it seems... So gentle reader, you are cordially invited to a weekend in the country. Expect murder, madness and mayhem in the mansion!

Detective Aidan Waits returns - on the hunt to find the identity of The Smiling Man. 'An

arresting new talent' Metro `I usually experienced the presence of a dead body as an absence, but in this case, it felt like a black hole opening up in front of me' Disconnected from his history and careless of his future, Detective Aidan Waits has resigned himself to the night shift. An endless cycle of meaningless emergency calls and lonely dead ends. Until he and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter `Sutty' Sutcliffe, are summoned to The Palace, a vast disused hotel in the centre of a restless, simmering city. There they find the body of a man. He is dead. And he is smiling. The tags have been removed from the man's clothes. His teeth filed down and replaced. Even his fingertips are not his own. Only a patch sewn into the inside of his trousers gives any indication as to who he was, and to the desperate last act of his life... But even as Waits puts together the pieces of this stranger's life, someone is sifting through the shards of his own. When the mysterious fires, anonymous phone calls and outright threats escalate, he realises that a ghost from his own past haunts his every move. And to discover the smiling man's identity, he must finally confront his own.  The Smiling Man is by Joseph Knox.

April 2018

The Fenlands, 1954 It is a tough winter; the temperatures have fallen too low too quickly and the floods are the worst anyone can remember. Most people have lost everything but there are some who have found themselves eager for the chance at a new start. For Jimmy Devlin, it's a little of both. Forced from his home by an uncompromising bailiff, Jimmy has nothing to his name and the prospect of work digging urgently needed drains could be the opportunity he's been waiting for. But Jimmy, it seems, has a knack for finding trouble. Before long, he's caught up in the wrong business with the people from the fairground passing through town. But, on the run from the law, he has nowhere else to turn.   Mercury Falling is by Robert Edric

American by Day is by Derek B Miller.  She knew it was a weird place. She'd heard the stories, seen the movies, read the books. But now police Chief Inspector Sigrid Odegard has to leave her native Norway and actually go there; to that land across the Atlantic where her missing brother is implicated in the mysterious death of a prominent African-American academic. America. And not someplace interesting, either: upstate New York. It is election season, 2008, and Sigrid is plunged into a United States where race and identity, politics and promise, reverberate in every aspect of daily life. To find her older brother, she needs the help of the local police who appear to have already made up their minds about the case. Working with - or, if necessary, against - someone actually named Sheriff Irving 'Irv' Wylie, she must negotiate the local political minefields and navigate the back woods of the Adirondacks to uncover the truth before events escalate further.

May 2018

Snap decisions can be fatal . . . On a stifling summer's day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack's in charge, she said. I won't be long. But she doesn't come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed for ever. Three years later, mum-to-be Catherine wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note that says: I could have killed you. Meanwhile Jack is still in charge - of his sisters, of supporting them all, of making sure nobody knows they're alone in the house, and - quite suddenly - of finding out the truth about what happened to his mother. But the truth can be a dangerous thing . . .  Snap is by Belinda Bauer

Open Your Eyes is by Paula Daly.  Haven't we all wanted to pretend everything is fine? Jane doesn't like confrontation. Given the choice, she'll let her husband, Leon, fight their battles. She'd prefer to focus on what's going well, the good things in life. But when bestselling crime author Leon is brutally attacked in the driveway of their home, in front of their two young children, Jane has to face reality. With her husband in a coma, Jane must open her eyes to the problems in her life, and the secrets that have been kept from her, if she's to find out who hurt her husband - and why. Maybe it's time to face up to it all. Who knows what you might find . . . 

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Ultimatum is by Frank Gardner.  After helping to avert a deadly attack on London, Luke

Carlton has been welcomed on board as a full-fledged member of SIS and is assigned the role of case officer running agents. He is sent undercover into Iran to 'turn' and recruit an officer in that country's infamous Revolutionary Guard Corps: the word is that a conservative group within the IRGC doesn't like the direction post-revolutionary Iran appear to be taking and are planning something big to embarrass their own government - and frighten the country's new 'allies' in the West. The intelligence services need to find out who and what, and fast...but then a senior British government minister on an official visit to Iran goes missing, his close protection officers are found murdered...