Books to Look Forward to From Faber and Faber

July 2017

In Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania, Officer Henry Farrell's life is getting complicated. Widowed and more traumatised than he cares to admit, he is caught up in an affair with a local woman, and with helping out his friend's barn construction job - on which the clock is ticking. When a troubled old acquaintance of theirs becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his girlfriend, it becomes increasingly clear that something seriously dark is at large in the woods that surround them. Against this old and strange landscape - where silence rules - a fascinating and troubling case ensues, as Henry struggles for his very survival. Fateful Mornings is by Tom Bouman.

Walk in Silence is by John Gordon Sinclair.  Find the boy. Bring him home. Keep him safe. Keira Lynch is a lawyer who's used to trouble, but she's only just landed in Albania, and already, she's neck deep. She thought money would help her find the boy, in an underworld where bribes are as common as bent cops, but his kidnappers want something else. They want the freedom of one of their gang members. A man Keira is about to help bring to trial back in the UK; a man who once put three bullets in her chest. Can she stay silent, and save the boy? Or will she have to play the game in a brutal world where anything can be bartered - trust, loyalty, even lives?

What really happened to Sarah Cook? A beautiful blonde teenager, Sarah Cook disappeared fifteen years ago, the same night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban Ohio home. Her boyfriend Brad Stockton - black and from the wrong side of the tracks - was convicted of the murders and sits on death row, though he always maintained his innocence. As his execution nears, his devoted sister, insisting she has spotted Sarah at a local gas station, hires PI Roxane Weary to look at this cold case. Reeling from the recent death of her cop father, Roxane is drawn to the story of Sarah's disappearance, especially when she suspects a link between it and one of her father's unsolved murder cases. Despite her self-destructive tendencies, Roxane starts to hope that she can save Brad's life and her own. The Last Place You Look is by Kristen Lepionka.

Kitty Peck and the Daughter of Sorrow is by Kate Griffin.  Summer 1881: the streets of Limehouse are thick with opium...and menace. At eighteen Kitty Peck has inherited Paradise, a sprawling criminal empire on the banks of the Thames. Determined to do things differently to her fearsome grandmother, she now realises that the past casts a long and treacherous shadow. Haunted by a terrible secret and stalked by a criminal cabal intent on humiliation and destruction, Kitty must fight for the future of everyone she cares for...

August 2017

The Girl in Green is by Derek B Miller and takes us deep into modern Iraq, where British journalist Thomas Benton and relief worker Marta Strom are persuaded by ex-US soldier Arwood Hobbes to embark on what may be a fools' errand in a last-chance effort to atone for their failure to save a local girl more than twenty years previously, following Operation Desert Storm. Set against the shattered landscape and broken heart of Iraq. 

Former Army Ranger Van Shaw is recently single, out of money, and struggling to keep on the straight and narrow. So when an old contact, Mick O’Hassan, shows up on his doorstep, fresh out of prison and claiming to know the whereabouts of a hidden stash of gold, Van feels the powerful pull of his past. The trouble is, some things are too good to be true, and before they know it Van and O’Hassan are trapped in a game with few rules and too many deadly players. Turns out, the only easy part of a life of crime is getting sucked back in . . .  Every Day Above Ground is by Glen Erik Hamilton.

September 2017

A Patient Fury is by Sarah Ward.  When Detective Constable Connie Childs is dragged from her bed to the fire-wrecked property on Cross Farm Lane she knows as she steps from the car that this house contains death. Three bodies discovered - a family obliterated - their deaths all seem to point to one conclusion: One mother, one murderer. But D.C. Childs, determined as ever to discover the truth behind the tragedy, realises it is the fourth body - the one they cannot find - that holds the key to the mystery at Cross Farm Lane. What Connie Childs fails to spot is that her determination to unmask the real murderer might cost her more than her health - this time she could lose the thing she cares about most: her career.

October 2017

Nine Lessons is by Nicola Upson.  In the years before the Great War, M. R. James told ghost stories by candlelight to a handful of friends and scholars. Now, twenty-five years later, those men are dying, killed off one by one . . . In contemporary Cambridge, the people of the town are gripped by fear and suspicion as a serial rapist stalks the streets. In the shadow of King’s College Chapel, Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose faces some of the most horrific and audacious murders of his career.

Walk In Silence by John Gordon Sinclair

Today on the blog as part of the Walk in Silence blog tour author John Gordon Sinclair gives us an insight to the storyline, characters and inspirations behind his latest novel.

“There’s no law that says you have to obey the law.” Keira Lynch: lawyer.

One week before she is due to give evidence in the trial of a man who put three bullets in her Keira Lynch sets off for Albania to honour a promise she made to Kaltrina Dervishi – a former client.

Before her murder Kaltrina confided to Keira that she had a young son called Ermir back in Albania whose life would be in danger if his whereabouts were known. Keira swore that if anything should happen to Kaltrina, she would make sure Ermir was well looked after. With the help of a two-bit punk by the name of Daud Pasha, Keira tracks the boy down, but soon finds herself in a situation where she’s not only trying to save him, but stop his life following the same path as hers… and becoming a killer.

Walk In Silence opens with a scene that mirrors a chapter near the beginning of Blood Whispers (2nd novel) in which we see the young boy Ermir’s grandparents being murdered, but ‘filmed’ from a different angle: The neighbours notice a young boy covered in blood outside their window and realise it’s Ermir. We then jump forward in time to find Keira Lynch already in Albania preparing to meet seedy fixer Daud Pasha who claims to know of Ermir’s whereabouts.

When Keira was just eight years old she picked up a gun and shot a man. Through troubled teenage years into adulthood there was only ever one question on her mind…could she kill again?

Keira Lynch – also known as - Niamh McGuire, first appeared in Seventy Times Seven and although important to the story was a relatively minor character. When I finished the book – set in the early nineties - I wanted to continue the story, but the main characters of Sean McGuire and Danny McGuire were not suitable to take the storyline forward.

Keira seemed the obvious choice. In her first appearance in a leading role (Blood Whispers) she is trying to come to terms with her childhood and what happened to her, but by the time we get to her in Walk in Silence she is much more composed and resigned to what she has become. It’s difficult to go into too much detail without giving away major plot points in each of the three novels, but Seventy Times Seven, Blood Whispers and Walk In Silence are a loose trilogy with the latter two books much more closely linked both in plot and character. 

Both books have action that takes place in rural and coastal Albania respectively. There were many reasons for choosing to locate the book there.

From the golden sandy beaches that front the Adriatic to the dramatic mountainous regions in the north Albania is a country of contrast.

The Albanian civil war in 1997 - sparked by a failed pyramid scheme backed by the government that saw billion dollar losses for its citizens - led to over 2000 civilian deaths. “Guns were the first thing we went for, then flour for bread,” said Aleksander Marleci, a local politician in the town of Shkodra, in northern Albania.

Up until the early nineties it had very few - if any- cars and the roads so bad that the police would pull drivers over for driving in a straight line: there were so many potholes that only a drunk wouldn’t swerve to avoid them. Including these small details elevates what would have been an ordinary driving scene into battle between driver and road. It’s one of the nuggets thrown up by research.  It’s also interesting to note that Albania is one of the only countries in the world to ban religion.

The Kosovo Albanian rebel group the KLA was formed in the wake of the conflict that took place in the late nineties. Most of those involved went on to join the Albanian army, the police force or the criminal under world. Even well established criminal enterprises like the Mafia prefer not to deal with the Albanian underworld because of their readiness to shoot first and forget about asking questions.

Albania can be as dangerous as it is beautiful - depending on the company you keep.

With the collapse of communism and the end of Enva Hoxha’s rule, Albania finally began to open up to the West and after a massive investment program was voted one of the top ten holiday destinations in the world by the New York Times. A troubled and intriguing part of the world with a complex narrative, it’s the perfect setting for the equally complex Keira Lynch to find herself in a spot of bother.

When writing I try to imagine watching the movie version of my book (a minor delusion). I edit as if I’m editing film; nothing stays that holds up the action. Even in conversations with my literary editor I tend to refer to Chapters as Scenes. In my self deluded state I can imagine having a conversation with the location manager who thanks me for setting the book in such a diverse and filmic area of the world.

Walk in Silence by John Gordon Sinclair is out now (Faber & Faber, £12.99)

The first time it happened Keira had no choice.

The second, she was protecting her Client. The third time Keira Lynch killed someone there was no question in her mind…it was becoming too easy.

Buy it from SHOTS A-Store

Books to Look Forward to From Faber & Faber

January 2017

 

Her Every Fear is by Peter Swanson. Following a brutal attack by her ex-boyfriend, Kate Priddy makes an uncharacteristically bold decision after her cousin, Corbin Dell, suggests a temporary apartment swap - and she moves from London to Boston. But soon after her arrival Kate makes a shocking discovery: Corbin's next-door neighbour, a young woman named Audrey Marshall, has been murdered. When the police begin asking questions about Corbin's relationship with Audrey, and his neighbours come forward with their own suspicions, a shaken Kate has few answers, and many questions of her own. Jetlagged and emotionally unstable, her imagination playing out her every fear, Kate can barely trust herself. so how can she trust any of the strangers she's just met? 

February 2017

My name is Ruby. I live with Barbara and Mick. They're not my real parents, but they tell me what to do, and what to say. I'm supposed to say that the bruises on my arms and the black eye came from falling down the stairs. But there are things I won't say. I won't tell them I'm going to hunt for my real parents. I don't say a word about Shadow, who sits on the stairs, or the Wasp Lady I saw on the way to bed. I did tell Mick that I saw the woman in the buttercup dress, hanging upside down from her seat belt deep in the forest at the back of our house. I told him I saw death crawl out of her. He said he'd give me a medal for lying. I wasn't lying. I'm a hunter for lost souls and I'm going to be with my real family. And I'm not going to let Mick stop me.  The Doll Funeral is by Kate Hamer.

When a distressed young woman arrives at their station claiming her friend has been abducted, and that the man threatened to come back and 'claim her next', Detectives Carrigan and Miller are thrust into a terrifying new world of stalking and obsession. Taking them from a Bayswater hostel, where backpackers and foreign students share dorms and failing dreams, to the emerging threat of online intimidation, hacking, and control, The Intrusions explores disturbing contemporary themes with all the skill and dark psychology that Stav Sherez's work has been so acclaimed for. Under scrutiny themselves, and with old foes and enmities re-surfacing, how long will Carrigan and Miller have to find out the truth behind what these two women have been subjected to?  The Intrusions is by Stav Sherez

March 2017

On a normal Wednesday afternoon, Judge Scott Sampson is preparing to pick up his six-year-old twins for their weekly swim. His wife Alison texts him with a change of plan: she has to take them to the doctor instead. So Scott heads home early. But when Alison arrives back later, she is alone - no Sam, no Emma - and denies any knowledge of the text ...The phone then rings: an anonymous voice tells them that the Judge must do exactly what he is told in an upcoming drug case and, most importantly, they must 'say nothing'. So begins this powerful, tense breakout thriller about a close-knit young family plunged into unimaginable horror. As a twisting game of cat and mouse ensues, they know that one false move could lose them their children forever. Say Nothing is by Brad Parks.

April 2017

In New Orleans, Texas Ranger John Q is out of his jurisdiction, and possibly out of his depth. It seems everyone in Louisiana wants to send him home, and every time he asks questions there's trouble: from the pharmacist to the detective running scared to the pimp who turned to him as a last resort. Before John Q knows it, he looks the only link between a series of murders. So who could be trying to set him up, and why, and who can he turn to in a city where Southern tradition and family ties rule? Infused with the rhythms of its iconic setting, The Contract is by J M Gulvin.

May 2017

The Quiet Man is by James Carol.  In Vancouver, the wife of a millionaire is dead following an explosion in her own home.  Everyone thinks her husband is responsible, but former FBI profiler Jefferson Winter isn’t so sure.  He method is too perfect; the lack of mistakes, uncanny.  He’s seen a series of carefully orchestrated murders – once a year, on exactly the same day, a woman dies in a situation just like this one.  That date is fast approaching and Winter knows another victim has been selected.  Can he identify the quiet man before he strikes again?

June 2017

Find the boy. Bring him home. Keep him safe. Keira Lynch is a lawyer who's used to trouble, but she's only just landed in Albania, and already, she's neck deep. She thought money would help her find the boy, in an underworld where bribes are as common as bent cops, but his kidnappers want something else. They want the freedom of one of their gang members. A man Keira is about to help bring to trial back in the UK; a man who once put three bullets in her chest. Can she stay silent, and save the boy? Or will she have to play the game in a brutal world where anything can be bartered - trust, loyalty, even lives?  Walk in Silence is by John Gordon Sinclair.

Books to look forward to from Faber and Faber

In nineteenth-century Istanbul, a Polish prince has been kidnapped.  His assassination has been bungled and his captors have taken him to an unused farmhouse.  Little do they realize that their revolutionary cell has been penetrated by their enemies, who use the code name La Piuma (the Feather).  Yashim is convinced that the prince is alive.  But he has no idea where, or who La Piuma is - and has become dangerously distracted by falling in love.  As he draws closer to the prince's whereabouts and to the true identity of La Piuma, Yashim finds himself in the most treacherous situation of his career: Can he rescue the prince along with his romantic dreams?  The Baklava Club is by Jason Goodwin and is due to be published in June 2014.

All Day and a Night  is by Alafair Burke and is due to be published in July 2014.  When psychotherapist Helen Brunswick is murdered in her Park Slope office, the entire city suspects her estranged husband - until the District Attorney's Office receives an anonymous letter.  The letter's author knows a detail that police have kept secret: the victim's bones were broken after she was killed, echoing a signature used twenty years earlier by Anthony Amaro, a serial killer serving a life sentence.  Now, Amaro is asking to be released from prison, arguing that he was wrongly convicted, and that the true killer is still on the loose.  Ellie Hatcher and her partner JJ Rogan are tapped as the 'fresh look' team to reassess the original investigation that led to Amaro's conviction.  The case pits them against both their fellow officers and a hard-charging celebrity defence lawyer with a young associate named Carrie Blank, who has a personal connection to the case.  As both the NYPD and Amaro's legal team search for certainty in years of conflicting evidence, their investigations take them back to Carrie's hometown, and to deadly secrets left behind.  In her first series book for Faber, the author returns to one of the most memorable characters in contemporary US crime writing, NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher.

When Claire Cooper was eight years old her mother mysteriously vanished during Hop-tu-naa, the Manx Halloween.  At fourteen, Claire is still struggling to come to terms with her disappearance when she's befriended by a group of five teenagers who mark every Hop-tu-naa by performing dares.  But Claire's arrival begins to alter the group's dynamic until one year a prank goes terribly wrong, changing all their futures and tearing the friends apart.  Six years later, one of the friends is killed on Hop-tu-naa in an apparent accident.  But Claire, now a police officer, has her doubts.  Is a single footprint found near the body a deliberate taunt?  As another Hop-tu-naa dawns, bringing with it another death and another footprint, Claire becomes convinced that somebody is seeking vengeance.  But who?  And which of the friends might be next?  If she's to stop a killer and unlock the dark secrets of her past, Claire must confront her deepest fears, before it's too late.  Dark Tides is by Chris Ewan and is due to be published in October 2014.

The White Crocodile is fate.  Tess Hardy thought she had put Luke, her violent husband, firmly in her past.  Until he calls from Cambodia, where he is working as a mine-clearer, and there's something in his voice she hasn't heard before.  Fear.  Two weeks later, he's dead.  Was it really an accident, or was Luke murdered?  Against her better judgment, Tess is drawn to Cambodia, taking a job at the same humanitarian mine clearance charity Luke had been working for.  The White Crocodile is judgement.  What greets her is a country full of strange beliefs, where danger is all around.  Teenage mothers are disappearing from villages around the minefields, while others are being found mutilated and murdered, their babies abandoned.  The White Crocodile is death.  Tess hears whispers of the White Crocodile, a mythical beast that brings death to all who meet it.  Caught in a web of secrets and lies that stretches all the way from Cambodia to another murder in England, and a violent secret twenty years old, Tess must find out the truth, and quickly - because the crocodile is watching...  White Crocodile is by K T Medina and is due to be published in August 2014.

Smoke and Mirrors  is by James Carol and is due to be published in September 2014.  A Dead Lawyer, Eagle Creek, Louisiana.  Lawyer Sam Galloway is burned alive in an apparently motiveless attack.  The local sheriff's department calls in former FBI profiler Jefferson Winter to consult on the case.  A Serial Killer So far there's just one body, but there are going to be more.  A deadline has been set, the clock is ticking, and Winter has just thirteen and a half hours to track down the killer, before he strikes again.  A Dark Secret Winter knows all about secrets.  His father, one of America's most notorious serial killers, had everyone fooled for years.  Winter also knows that the problem with secrets is that they have a nasty habit of turning against you when you least expect it. 

Blood Whispers is by John Gordon Sinclair and is due to be published in June 2014.  'Truth

is, it's all lies.’  Teresa Gow is under arrest for a string of offences ranging from prostitution to attempted murder.  Lawyer Keira Lynch wants the charges dropped and her client taken into protective custody.  The CIA and a Serbian drug trafficker by the name of Fisnik Abazi, want Teresa dead.  Keira's cool head and laid-back approach has earned her the respect of most of the big-time players on the Glasgow crime scene.  She doesn't tell lies, she 'stylises the truth', and they trust her with their darkest secrets.  In a room full of murder suspects, Keira will finger the culprit every time.  They put her uncanny ability down to luck, but there's a more sinister explanation.  Keira has a dark secret of her own - when she was eight years old she killed a man.  It takes one to know one.  In a deadly game where nothing is what it seems and no one is who they say they are, Keira Lynch finds herself facing the biggest challenge of her life.  The question is not will she kill again, but when...

Forthcoming books to look forward to from Faber and Faber

Playing Dead is the debut novel by Julia Heaberlin and is due to be published in July 2012.  The letter that turns Tommie McCloud’s world upside down arrives from a stranger only days after her father’s death.  The woman who wrote it claims that Tommie is her daughter—and that she was kidnapped as a baby thirty-one years ago.  Tommie wants to believe it’s all a hoax, but suddenly a girl who grew up on a Texas ranch finds herself linked to a horrific past: the slaughter of a family in Chicago, the murder of an Oklahoma beauty queen, and the kidnapping of a little girl named Adriana.  Tommie races along a twisting, nightmarish path while an unseen stalker is determined to keep old secrets locked inside the dementia-battered brain of the woman who Tommie always thought was her real mother.  With everything she has ever believed in question, and no one she can trust, Tommie must discover the truth about the girl who vanished—and the very real threats that still remain.

  

The Devil I Know is a thrilling novel of greed and hubris, set against the backdrop of a brewing international debt crisis.  Told by Tristram, in the form of a mysterious testimony.  It recounts his return home after  a self-imposed exile only to find himself trapped as a middle man played on both sides – by a grotesque builder he has known since childhood on the one hand, and a shadowy businessman he’s never met on the other.  Caught between them, as an overblown property development begins in his home town of Howth, it follows Tristram’s dawning realisation that all is not well. The Devil I Know is by Claire Kilroy and is due to be published in August 2012.

Seventy Times Seven is the debut novel by actor J (ohn) G (ordon) Sinclair and is due to be published in September 2012.  Danny McGuire doesn't like his job, but he's good at it.  Since his brother's murder eight years earlier he has become a professional killer: a hit man for hire, bent on retribution.  The Job: Danny's been contracted to eliminate the 'Thevshi' - the Ghost - the most elusive informant that has ever penetrated the Republican movement in Northern Ireland.  But there's a problem: the Thevshi claims to know who's responsible for his brother's death.  Danny's never killed someone he needed to talk to first.  The Target: When Finn O'Hanlon (A.K.A. the Thevshi) is attacked in a bar in Alabama he realises that his past has finally caught up with him.  Forced to flee, he embarks on a desperate journey to find Danny McGuire before it's too late.  The Complication: But Danny and Finn are up against someone who's spent years hiding a secret, and it's a secret they'll go to any lengths to protect.

Time On My Hands is by Giorgio Vasta and is due to be published in August 2012.  Palermo, Sicily, 1978.  The Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro has just been kidnapped in Rome by members of the notorious Red Brigades.  Two months after his disappearance on 9th May, Moro is found dead in the boot of a car.  A trio of eleven-year-old schoolboys, Nimbo, Raggio, and Volo, avidly follow the news of the abduction as their admiration for the brigatisti grows.  When the boys themselves resolve to abduct a classmate and incarcerate him in a makeshift 'people's prison', the darkness within their world, and the world of the novel, becomes all-pervasive.  A vivid and hellish description of Sicily in the late seventies, Time on my Hands is an unforgettable novel from a significant new voice in Italian fiction.

Pierced is the follow-up novel to Thomas Enger’s debut novel Burned and once again features Henning Juul.  A Convicted Killer: Despite always maintaining his innocence, Tori Pulli, once a powerful player on Oslo's underground crime scene, has been found guilty of murder.  A Loose End: Scarred reporter, Henning Juul, is contacted by Pulli, who claims that if Henning can help clear his name he can give him details of who was responsible for the fire which killed his six-year-old son, Jonas.  A Double Threat: Desperate to continue his own search for justice, Henning realises that the information Pulli promises is life threatening, to both of them and to others.  As events take a deadly turn, Henning finds himself on the trail of two killers for whom the stakes have never been higher…  Pierced is due to be published in July 2012.

When Rob Hale wakes up in hospital after a motorcycle crash he is told that Lena, the woman he claims was travelling with him, doesn't exist.  The woman he describes bears a striking resemblance to his recently deceased sister, Laura, but has he really only imagined her?  Rob sets out to find the answers to who Lena is and where she has gone.  He is aided by Rebecca Lewis, a London-based PI, who has come to the Isle of Man at the behest of his parents to investigate his sister's suicide.  But who is Rebecca really and how did she know his sister?  Together Rob and Rebecca follow the clues to discover who took Lena.  In doing so they discover that even on an island where most people know each other, everyone hides a secret, and that sometimes your best option isn't to hide but to stay and fight.  Safe House is by Chris Ewan and is due to be published in August 2012.