September 2019
It is said that everyone over a certain age can remember distinctly what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated, or that Princess Diana had been killed in a Paris car crash, but I, for one, could recall all too clearly where I was standing when a policeman told me that my wife had been murdered. Bill Russell is acting as a volunteer steward at Warwick races when he confronts his worst nightmare - the violent death of his much-loved wife. But worse is to come when he is accused of killing her and hounded mercilessly by the media. His life begins to unravel completely as he loses his job and his home. Even his best friends turn against him, believing him guilty of the heinous crime in spite of the lack of compelling evidence. Bill sets out to clear his name but finds that proving one's innocence is not easy - one has to find the true culprit, and Bill believes he knows whom it is. But can he prove it before he becomes another victim of the murderer. Guilty Not Guilty is by Felix Francis.
October 2019
The Lying Room is by Nicci French. Neve Connolly looks down at a murdered man. She doesn't call the police. 'You know, it's funny,' Detective Inspector Hitching said. `Whoever I see, they keep saying, talk to Neve Connolly, she'll know. She's the one people talk to, she's the one people confide in.’ A trusted colleague and friend. A mother. A wife. Neve Connolly is all these things. She has also made mistakes; some small, some unconsciously done, some large, some deliberate. She is only human, after all. But now one mistake is spiralling out of control and Neve is bringing those around her into immense danger. She can't tell the truth. So how far is she prepared to go to protect those she loves? And whom does she really know? And whom can she trust? A liar. A cheat. A threat. Neve Connolly is all these things.
In the next Mitch Rapp thriller, a bioterrorist threat threatens an America already weakened by internal divisions. The head of ISIS, Sayid Halabi, survived Mitch Rapp's attack on him, but while he convalesced, he plotted. Once healed, Halabi kidnaps a brilliant Yemeni microbiologist and forces him to produce anthrax. ISIS releases videos of his progress and uses them to stir up hysteria in the States in the midst of an extremely divisive presidential election. ISIS contracts with a Mexican drug cartel to smuggle the anthrax into the US, but the anthrax is really just a feint. Unknown to anyone but Halabi's team, he also kidnapped people infected with the virus with the plan to use the drug cartels' human trafficking capability to smuggle these infected people into the US. If he succeeds, it would trigger a pandemic that would kill untold millions. Mitch and Irene Kennedy are, of course, on the case. But their ability to act is weakened by the fact that the man who is likely to be the next president despises them. When the DEA stumbles upon a shipment of anthrax coming into California, though, the current president has no choice but to give Mitch Carte blanche to go after both the smugglers and ISIS. Mitch must infiltrate the drug cartel that has partnered with Halabi in a black ops mission compromised by political manoeuvres and threatened by an unprecedented bioterrorism attack. Lethal Agent is by Vince Flynn and Kyle Mills
Virgil Flowers will have to watch his back--and his mouth--as he investigates a college culture war turned deadly in Bloody Genius by John Sandsford. At the local state university, two feuding departments have faced off on the battleground of PC culture. Each carries their views to extremes that may seem absurd, but highly educated people of sound mind and good intentions can reasonably disagree, right? Then someone winds up dead, and Virgil Flowers is brought in to investigate . . . and he soon comes to realise he's dealing with people who, on this one particular issue, are functionally crazy. Among this group of wildly impassioned, diametrically opposed zealots lurks a killer, and it will be up to Virgil to sort the murderer from the mere maniacs.
A man, wearing his daughter's wedding ring, is found in front of his fireplace, a bullet hole in his chest. A funeral director searches desperately for his brother - a man who doesn't seem to be missed. A woman struggles to protect her children and her life as her husband turns ever more dangerous. Fredrika Bergman and Alex Recht believe that these three cases are totally unrelated... until they uncover a connection between these three people that changes everything. Soon Bergman and Recht are pulled into an escalating series of events where old sins return to haunt all involved. And someone is leaving them taunting messages... but who, and why? Flood is by Kristina Ohlsson.
November 2019
Seventeen years after the fall of the Third Reich, Max Weill has never forgotten the atrocities he saw as a prisoner at Auschwitz-nor the face of Dr Otto Schramm, a camp doctor who worked with Mengele on appalling experiments and who sent Max's family to the gas chambers. As the war came to a close, Schramm was one of the many high-ranking former-Nazi officers who managed to escape Germany for new lives in South America. There, leaders like Argentina's Juan Peron gave them safe harbour and new identities. With his life nearing its end, Max asks his nephew Aaron Wiley-an American CIA desk analyst-to complete the task Max never could: to track down Otto in Argentina, capture him and bring him back to Germany to stand trial. Unable to distinguish allies from enemies, Aaron will ultimately have to discover not only Otto, but the boundaries of his own personal morality, how far he is prepared to go to render justice. Accomplice is by Joseph Kanon.
The Siberian Dilemma is by Martin Cruz Smith. Journalist Tatiana Petrovna has disappeared. Arkady Renko, iconic Moscow investigator and Tatiana's on-off lover, hasn't seen her since she left on a case over a month ago. No one else thinks Renko should be worried - Tatiana is known to disappear during deep assignments - but he knows her enemies all too well and the criminal lengths they will go to keep her quiet. Given the opportunity to interrogate a suspected assassin in Irkutsk, Renko embarks on a dangerous journey to Siberia to find Tatiana and bring her back. Renko finds Siberia to be a land of shamans and brutally cold nights, oligarchs wealthy on northern oil and sea monsters that are said to prowl the deepest lake in the world. With these forces at work against him, Renko will need all his wits about him to get Tatiana out alive.
Kiss the Girls and Makes Them Cry is by Mary Higgins Clark. When talented journalist Penelope "Casey" Harrison starts to research a piece about the #MeToo movement that includes an incident in her own life that she has been trying to put out of her mind for years, she does not realise that the young man who drugged and assaulted her at a fraternity house party in college is now a wealthy, powerful industrialist on the eve of a merger which will make him a billionaire-and who will do anything, even murder, to cover his tracks.
December 2019
Mister Wolf is by Chris Petit. Germany, 1944. On the 10th anniversary of the Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler and his private secretary Bormann return for a dinner to the lakeside resort hotel where Hitler arrested his old friend Ro hm. Hitler's erratic behaviour is losing him support in the Nazi party; Bormann is the puppet master. They both believe an assassination attempt on the Fuhrer to be imminent. Hitler is remembering his niece, Geli; she was his closest confidante until her `suicide' in 1931. Rumours of a scandalous affair still swirl; as well as claims of obscene drawings being passed around Munich, alleged to be of Geli by Hitler - political dynamite in the wrong hands . . . But as Hitler announces he wants to retrieve the pictures from the safe, Bormann finds they aren't there. Their whereabouts become a matter of urgency. As Bormann uses whatever means necessary to keep the Fuhrer in power, August Schlegel, now employed by the Gestapo, is still trying to piece together his own family's role in the Nazi party. His curiosity is piqued by an item of interest in an auction that relates to his missing father. But curiosity can be a very dangerous thing. As a shift in power looms, and losing the war seems a genuine possibility, panic begins to set in; will anyone make it out of Berlin alive?
Six friends trapped by one dark secret. It was supposed to be our last weekend away as friends, before marriage and respectability beckoned. But what happened that Saturday changed everything. In the middle of the night, someone died. The six of us promised each other we would not tell anyone about the body we buried. But now the pact has been broken. And the killing has started again … Who knows what we did? And what price will we pay? The Six is by Luca Veste.
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