Books to Look Forward to from Corvus and Atlantic

AD 58: Rome is in turmoil once more. Emperor Nero has surrounded himself with sycophants and together they rampage by night through the city, visiting death and destruction as they go. Meanwhile, Nero's extravagance has reached new heights. The Emperor's spending is becoming profligate at the same time as the demands of keeping the provinces subdued have become increasingly unaffordable. Could Nero withdraw from Britannia, and at what price for the Empire? As the bankers of the Empire scramble to call in their loans, Vespasian is sent to Londinium on a secret mission, only to become embroiled in a deadly rebellion led by Boudicca, a female warrior of extraordinary bravery. As the uprising gathers pace, Vespasian must fight to stay ahead of Rome's enemies and complete his task- before all of Britannia burns. The Furies of Rome is by Robert Fabbri and is due to be published in January 2016.

When celebrity chef Brede Ziegler is discovered stabbed to death on the steps of the Oslo police headquarters it sends a shockwave through the city’s in-crowd.  Police investigator Billy T takes on the case, but I seems nobody really knew the dead man – including is wife, the restaurant co-owner and the editor of his memoir.  While Billy T struggles to find evidence, Hanne Wilhelmsen returns to Oslo after a long absence.  Hanne discovers that Ziegler has also ingested a lethal dose of painkillers.  As the plot thickens, Hanne and Billy T are pulled deeper into the nefarious world in which Ziegler lived.  Was who he said he was? And can those who claim to have known him best be trusted?  No Echo is by Anne Holt and is due to be published in May 2016.

Promises of Blood is by David Thorne and is due to be published in February 2016.  Even the dead like to keep their secrets. When William Gove, a dying millionaire and patriarch of a vast estate in Essex, asks Daniel Connell to execute his will, Daniel has no idea what he's getting himself into. Rather than leave his fortune to his three children, Gove has chosen ten names at random from the phone book. When he dies, Daniel sets out to track down the recipients. But a chance remark by one of them - that perhaps this is God's way of compensating her for the disappearance of her daughter - gives him pause. When another recipient also mentions a missing person, Daniel begins to suspect that there may be something darker at work. What he discovers is both shocking and dangerous - it sets him on a lethal trajectory with a powerful family who believe themselves to be above the law, no matter how dark and twisted their secrets may be...

Laura is making a fresh start.  Recently divorced and relocated to Bristol, she is carving a new life for her and her nine-year-old daughter, Autumn.  But things aren’t going as well as she hoped.  Autumn’s sweet nature and artistic bent are making her a target for bullies.  When Autumn fails to return home from school one day, Laura goes looking for her and finds a crowd of older children taunting her little girl.  In the heat of the moment, Laura makes a terrible mistake.  A mistake that will have devastating consequences for her and her daughter.  Bone by Bone is by Sanjida Kay and is due to be published in March 2016.

Distress Signals is by Catherine Ryan Howard and is due to be published in June 2016.  The day Adam Dunne’s girlfriend Sarah, fails to return from a business trip, his perfect life begins to fall apart.  Days later, the arrival of her passport ad a note that reads ‘I’m sorry – S’ sets off real alarm bells.  Adam connects Sarah to a cruise ship called the Celebrate – and to Estelle, who disappeared from the same ship in similar circumstances a year before.  To get answers, Adam must do things of which he never thought himself capable.  And he must try to outwit a murderer who seems to have found the perfect hunting ground. 

You Sent me a Letter is by Lucy Dawson and is due to be published in March 2016. On the morning of her fortieth birthday, Sophie wakes in the darkness of her bedroom – and finds a stranger watching her from the foot of the bed.  The intruder hands Sophie a letter and issues an ultimatum: the message is to be opened at her forthcoming party, at exactly 8p.m.  Any failure to comply will not end well. What can the letter possibly contain? And why must it be read in front of everyone she loves?  When the clock strikes eight, the course of several people’s lives will be altered forever.

1998, John Hart, a photojournalist determined to capture the devastation of the civil war in Kosovo, risks his own life to free three women imprisoned by Serbian soldiers.  2015, John is left to care for the daughter of one of the women he freed in Kosovo.  She is determined to track down the Captain: a war criminal and her father.  But when the Captain takes her life, John Hart sets out for revenge.  His quest takes him across Europe and into Africa, where he confronts the man who shows no remorse, and no regard for life.  The Templar Succession is by Mario Reading and is due too be published in April 2016.

Having shot someone in what he believed was self-defense in the chaotic streets of postwar

Berlin, East End Londoner turned spy Joe Wilderness finds himself locked up with little chance to escape. But an official pardon from Burne-Jones, a senior agent at MI6, means he is free to go. His return to London is brief, for another assignment from Burne-Jones puts him into the line of danger again. The operation will take him back to Berlin, where he spent several years working the black market after the war, the city now the dividing line between the West and the Soviets. Khrushchev and Kennedy are playing a game of chicken, gambling with the fate of millions of German lives.  On August 13, 1961, barbed wire is laid down, separating the Soviet controlled sectors from the rest of the city. With an old paramour at threat in the divided city, and the inscrutable Khrushchev developing plans for something that could change the fate of the Cold War, Wilderness is thrust into matters well beyond his control. And meanwhile, MI6's new man in Moscow has to improvise some quite unusual techniques in order to get the information he needs . . .  The Unfortunate Englishman is by John Lawton and is  due to be published in May 2016.

Some secrets never die. They’re just locked away.  Alex Dale is lost. Destructive habits have cost her a marriage and a journalism career. All she has left is her routine: a morning run until her body aches, then a few hours of forgettable work before the past grabs hold and drags her down. Every day is treading water, every night is drowning. Until Alex discovers Amy Stevenson. Amy Stevenson, who was just another girl from a nearby town until the day she was found after a merciless assault. Amy Stevenson, who has been in a coma for fifteen years, forgotten by the world. Who, unbeknownst to her doctors, remains locked inside her body, conscious but paralysed, reliving the past.  Soon Alex’s routine includes visiting hours at the hospital, then interviews with the original suspects in the attack. But what starts as a reporter’s story becomes a personal obsession. How do you solve a crime when the only witness lived, but cannot tell the tale? Unable to tear herself away from uncovering the unspeakable truth, Alex realises she’s not just chasing a story—she’s seeking salvation. Try not to Breathe is by Holly Seddon and is due to be published in January 2016.

Books to Look forward to from Atlantic Books and Corvus Publishers

The past never stays buried at Bliss House...Rainey Bliss Adams' perfect life came to an end one spring afternoon, when her husband was killed in an explosion that horrifically burned their fourteen year-old daughter, Ariel.  Desperate for a new start, she takes Ariel to live in the beautiful house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where the Bliss family has lived for over a century.  Once there, Ariel starts to mysteriously heal.  But as a series of tragedies begins to unfold, it becomes clear that a darkness lurks behind the dignified facade of Bliss House - one which will drive both mother and daughter apart, as each is forced to confront its evil on her own...Richly Gothic, creeping and dark, Bliss House is a haunting tale of loss, love - and the secrets our houses can keep. Bliss House is by Laura Benedict and is due to be published in January 2015.

The purest kind of detective story involves a crime solved by observation and deduction, rather than luck, coincidence or confession.  The supreme form of detection involves the explanation of an impossible crime, whether the sort of vanishing act that would make Houdini proud, a murder that leaves no visible trace, or the most unlikely villain imaginable.  Virtually all of the great writers of detective fiction have produced masterpieces in this genre, including Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, G.K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr, Dashiell Hammett, Ngaio Marsh, and Stephen King.  In this definitive collection, Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler selects a multifarious mix from across the entire history of the locked room story, which should form the cornerstone of any crime reader's library.  The Locked Room Mysteries is edited by Otto Penzler and is due to be published in January 2015.

In Saint Paul, Minnesota state investigator Kirk Stevens and his sometime colleague FBI

special agent Carla Windermere witness the assassination of a local billionaire.  The shooter flees the scene, but not before the pair see his face - and the blank expression in his eyes.  Stevens and Windermere investigate and are led across the country, down dead ends and into long-forgotten cold cases, until they finally discover a chilling clue: a high tech murder-for-hire website.  It's a break in the case but only the beginning.  Who is the dead-eyed shooter?  Who recruits the assassins?  And who profits from the fee?  It is a race against the clock, and the killer has his next target in sight...  Kill Fee is by Owen Laukkanen and is due to be published in February 2015.

Rome’s Lost Son is by Robert Fabbri and is due to be published in March 2015.  Rome, AD 51: Vespasian brings Rome's greatest enemy before the Emperor.  After eight years of resistance, the British warrior Caratacus has been caught.  But even Vespasian's victory cannot remove the newly made consul from Roman politics: Agrippina, Emperor Claudius's wife, pardons Caratacus.  Claudius is a drunken fool and Narcissus and Pallas, his freedmen, are battling for control of his throne.  Separately, they decide to send

Vespasian East to Armenia to defend Rome's interests.  But there is more at stake than protecting a client kingdom.  Rumours abound that Agrippina is involved in a plot to destabilise the East.  Vespasian must find a way to serve two masters - Narcissus is determined to ruin Agrippina, Pallas to save her.  Meanwhile, the East is in turmoil.  A new Jewish cult is flourishing and its adherents refuse to swear loyalty to the Emperor.  In Armenia, Vespasian is captured.  Immured in the oldest city on earth, how can he escape?  And is a Rome ruled by a woman who despises Vespasian any safer than a prison cell?"

Nothing Sacred is by David Thorne and is due to be published in February 2015.  A mother's nightmare: her children taken from her, unexplained injuries all over their bodies.  Her only explanation: an evil visitation, the work of malevolent spirits.  Desperate for answers, she turns to Daniel Connell, lawyer and old flame.  But the truth he uncovers is more disturbing than they ever imagined.  From the mountains of Afghanistan to the dark heart of Essex, Daniel finds himself in a terrifying world where monsters are real - and nothing is sacred.

2013: A bomb goes off in As Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.  Veteran photojournalist John Hart and his beautiful Kurdish translator are caught in the blast – and the ensuing chaos.  1198: Johannes von Hartelius, ancestor of John Hart, discovers that the Copper Scroll, the most prized possession of the Knights Templar, has been stolen.  The code-written scroll is said to hold the secret of Solomon’s Treasures.  2013: Hart finds a secret message from his forbear inside the Holy Spear.  Is it possible that the mountain in Iran known as Solomon’s Prison holds the Copper Scroll?  Hart seeks to find out, echoing Von Hartelius’s epic battle, nearly one thousand years earlier.  The Templar Inheritance is by Mario Reading and is due to be published in April 2015. 

At a dive bar in San Francisco’s edgy Tenderloin district, Emily Rosario is drinking whiskey and looking for an escape.  When a mysterious and wealthy Russian approaches her, she thinks she has found an exit from her drifter lifestyle and drug-addict boyfriend.  A week later she finds herself drugged, disoriented and wanted for robbery.  On the other side of town, cop Leo Elias is broke, alcoholic, and desperate.  When he hears about an unsolved bank robbery, the stolen money proves too strong a temptation.  Elias takes the case into his own hands, hoping to find the criminal and the money before anyone else.  The White Van is the debut novel by Patrick Hoffman and is due to be published in January 2015.

Books to Look Forward to From Corvus and Atlantic Books

When private investigator Sandro Cellini is invited to attend a glamorous launch party for a luxury residence overlooking the glittering expanse of Florence, he has no idea what he's walking into.  Behind the ancient and luxurious facade of Palazzo San Giorgio, there lies a series of terrible secrets; an old torture chamber, hidden for centuries in the bowels of the building, and a much more recent malevolence.  The former head of security for this elite development has just died under suspicious circumstances and Sandro finds himself - quite literally - stepping into dead man's shoes.  He soon discovers that other unsavoury incidents have tainted the prestigious opening.  When one of the residents is found murdered in her room, events begin to spiral out of control.  Sandro must work to untangle the complex web of relationships that exists between residents and staff to unmask a deadly killer.   The Killing Room is by Christobel Kent and is due to be published in July 2014.

Masters of Rome is by Robert Fabbri and is due to be published in August 2014.  Britannia, 45 AD:

Vespasian's brother, Sabinus, is captured by druids.  The druids want to offer a potent sacrifice to their gods - not just one Roman Legate, but two. They know that Vespasian will come after his brother and they plan to sacrifice the siblings on mid-summer's day.  But to whom will they be making this sacrifice?  What were the gods of this land before the Celts came?  Only the druids still hold the secret and it is one of pure malevolence.  Vespasian must strive to save his brother whilst completing the conquest of the south-west of the haunted isle, before he is drawn inexorably back to Rome and the heart of Imperial politics.  Claudius' three freedmen remain at the locus of power.  As Messalina's time as Empress comes to a bloody end, the three freedmen each back a different mistress.  But which woman will be victorious?  And at what price for Vespasian?"

Less than six months after taking office, the Norwegian Prime Minister is found dead.  She has been shot in the head.  But was it a politically motivated assassination or personal revenge?  The death shakes the country to its core.  The hunt for her killer is complicated, intense, and gruelling.  Hanne Wilhelmsen must contain the scandal before a private tragedy becomes a public outrage, in what will become the most sensitive case of her career...  This is a story of lies, intrigue, and politics.  The Lion's Mouth questions who holds the power in Norway, and how far they will go to use it.  The Lion’s Mouth is by Anne Holt and is due to be published in November 2014.

When a group of minor celebrities are thrown a lifeline – a new reality television programme set in a notoriously haunted house – they snap the opportunity up.  But as they explore the shadowy old building, uncanny things start to happen.  While the camera rolls, their orchestrated fear turns into terror, as they realize not all of the happenings in the house are for effect…  Night after Night is by Phil Rickman and is due to be published in October 2014.

Missing Women Turn Up in Novels

© Morgan M Miller

Today's guest blog is by Holly Goddard Jones whose debut novel The Next Time You See Me was published this month.  Her short stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, Epoch, and elsewhere, and they’ve been anthologized in two volumes of New Stories from the South (2007 and 2008) and in Best American Mystery Stories 2008. 

When I began The Next Time You See Me in early 2008, it didn’t once occur to me that I was tapping into what would become a literary zeitgeist: the “missing woman” crime thriller. The big books in the U.S. that year were the Twilight series, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, though you could perhaps see a ripple of things to come with the success of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, which debuted in English in 2008 with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Titled originally in Swedish as Män som hatar kvinnor, or Men Who Hate Women, one of the book’s several plot strands concerned the mystery of a girl who has been missing, and presumed dead, for nearly 40 years.

Fast-forward to today and missing woman books seem to be everywhere. Or maybe what I’m experiencing is what my husband and I used to call the Grey Pontiac Grand Am Effect: once you drive one, it seems like everyone is driving one. While The Next Time You See Me was being copyedited, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl raced to the top of the bestsellers lists. Noting some of the broad similarities between that book and my as-of-yet-unpublished novel—missing 30-something woman, examination of life in a forgotten corner of middle America—I was nervous to delve in, but I did, and I had the best possible experience: I loved the book, but I also thought it was so different from The Next Time You See Me that the two didn’t really bear a meaningful comparison.

That’s funny in retrospect. After Flynn generously blurbed Next Time, I couldn’t escape the comparison—from reviewers, readers, even my friends. “Missing woman” wasn’t just a plot detail; it was the book’s hook. Soon enough I started getting my own blurb requests, and two of them right out of the gates were for novels about missing women. I was torn. On the one hand, trends seem to drive the contemporary book industry, and if a link to a wildly successful book puts Next Time into a curious reader’s hands, excellent. On the other, I’m a literary writer with an earnest collection of short stories and a college teaching job. I never meant to get on any bandwagon.

That we all honed in on a missing woman mystery as interesting subject matter isn’t surprising, given the emphasis the media (especially America’s 24-hour news programs and entertainment magazines) place on missing women—and the more horrifying the women’s ordeals, the better. But who am I too judge? They’re only satiating voracious appetites like mine.

I’ve followed each of the stories with horror and fascination: Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard. There’s even a quasi-technical term for the sociological trend: missing white woman syndrome. Without engaging my web browser I can conjure up the frozen-in-time likenesses of an array of pretty, smiling, sometimes doomed faces, and that’s part of the fascination, too: those yearbook photos and photos in front of the Christmas tree that remind us so much of our own. The picture of Jaycee Dugard from just before her disappearance—long straight blond hair drawn back with a headband, bangs, awkwardly large adult front teeth? I know that girl. I was that girl.

I can’t speak for Gillian Flynn or any of the other writers who’ve made contributions to the missing woman sub-genre, but here’s what seems to be true for me as a writer: I start with what fascinates, horrifies, and obsesses me—sometimes to my shame—and then I dig in. I question it. I see what happens if I subvert some of the expected details of the familiar narrative, and in that way I hope that I’m wringing some meaning out of what might otherwise be an empty exercise in schadenfreude. My novel’s missing woman, Ronnie Eastman, disappears in the early 90s, before the internet and 24-hour cable news and celebrity concern-trolls such as Nancy Grace. And though she is a white woman—I wonder now if it would have been braver and better for me to make another choice—she’s also a person whom most of the people in her small southern town have written off as wild, irredeemable, and deserving of whatever bad card she’s dealt. The what-if questions driving this story for me from the start were: What if a woman goes missing, and she’s so on the fringe of society that almost no one thinks to miss her? How might that woman have touched the lives of those around her, without their even realizing it?

My book about a missing woman is as much about the people she left behind as Ronnie herself, and that’s true in life, as well: a missing woman is a vessel for our societal prejudices and preoccupations. She shows us what we value—youth, and a particular kind of middle class, mostly white beauty—and what we despise, or fear. There’s the perpetrator (and a set of corresponding frozen-in-time likenesses, with mug shots replacing yearbook photos) to despise and fear, of course, but also the woman herself. What did she do to invite her fate? A female victim of violence is a paradox: sacred, entitled to protection and reverence, but also (unlike a child) culpable. No wonder we can’t stop fixing our gaze on her.

More information about Holly Goddard Jones can be found on her website.  She can also be contacted on Facebook and also on Twitter @goddardjones