Forthcoming Books from No Exit Press/Oldcastle Books

 January 2023

Final Term is by Leigh Russell.When a pupil accuses a teacher of molesting her, his career and marriage are threatened... The girl's corpse is discovered in the woods, and the teacher becomes a suspect in a murder enquiry. The victim's best friend is then murdered so she cannot reveal the killer's identity. The investigating team are satisfied the teacher is guilty, apart from Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel, who believes the wrong man has been arrested. All of her colleagues disagree... but if she is right, the real killer remains at large.

Guns, Dames and Private Eyes: The Rivals of Philip Marlowe - Stories from the Golden Age of the American Pulp Magazines is edited by Nick Rennison. The prototypes of Raymond Chandler's immortal private detective Philip Marlowe first appeared in a magazine called Black Mask in the 1930s. Black Mask was not the only pulp magazine of the period to publish crime fiction. There were news stands full of them with titles like Dime Detective, Spicy Mystery Stories and Ten Detective Aces. And there were plenty of other private eyes in action. This was the era in which the hard-boiled American detective was born and Nick Rennison's anthology gathers an exciting selection of stories about the rivals of Philip Marlowe. From the intriguingly named Cellini Smith to the two-fisted female crime-solver Violet McDade, from the crime reporter Johnny Castle to the quick-witted, fast-shooting Marty Quade, these characters have their own style and originality. Authors like Norbert Davis, reputedly the favourite crime author of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cleve F. Adams and Robert Reeves may not have the reputations of Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, another famous name who began his career writing for the pulps, but they knew how to tell a thrilling story. They deserve to be remembered and admired, and this collection highlights more than a dozen of them.

February 2023

Robert B Parker's Fallout is by Mike Lupica. When two seemingly unconnected mysterious deaths occur on his watch, police chief Jesse Stone must pull out all the stops to unravel the truth and stop a killer from striking again. The small town of Paradise is devastated when a star high-school baseball player is found dead at the bottom of a bluff just a day after winning the team's biggest game. For Jesse, the loss is doubly difficult - the teen was the nephew of his colleague, Suitcase Simpson, and Jesse had been coaching the young shortstop. As he searches for answers about how the boy died and why, he is stonewalled at every turn, and it seems that someone is determined to keep him from digging further. Jesse suddenly must divide his attention between two cases after the shocking murder of former Paradise police chief, Charlie Farrell. Before his death, Farrell had been looking into a series of scam calls that preyed upon the elderly. But how do these 'ghost calls' connect to his murder? When threats - and gunshots - appear on Jesse's own doorstep, the race to find answers is on. Both old and new enemies come into play, and in the end, Jesse and his team must discover the common factor between the two deaths in order to prevent a third.

Too many people loved Kelly Rowland. One of them killed her, but was it the man in prison for her murder? Gethin Grey is back in the game. His wife may have left him and he's struggling with life as a single father, but now he's got his biggest case in years. The brutal murder of a young woman called Kelly Rowland has been the talk of the South Wales valleys. Even the conviction of a neighbour, a builder called Morgan Hopkins, failed to stop the gossip. There were too many other suspects still around, among them a pair of coppers: brother and sister. So Gethin was delighted when Morgan's family stumped up the money to pay him and his Last Resort Legals team to reinvestigate the case. But when a new lead takes him undercover into a support group for recovering addicts, Gethin has to confront his own demons. Moving from the former mining towns of the valleys to the shiny new waterfront developments of Cardiff, taking in adult puppet shows and piercing parlors, derelict mines and country clubs, Grey In The Dark is by John Lincoln and lays bare a world in which sex and money collide and everyone has their secrets. 

April 2023

Viper's Dream is by Jake Lamar. A hard-boiled crime novel set in the jazz world of Harlem between 1936 and 1961, Viper's Dream combines elements of the epic Godfather films and the detective novels of Chester Himes to tell the story of one of the most respected and feared Black gangsters in America. At the centre of Viper's Dream is a turbulent love story. And the climax bears an element of Greek tragedy. For the better part of 20 years, Clyde 'The Viper' Morton has been in love with Yolanda 'Yo-Yo' DeVray, a singer of immense talent but a woman consumed by demons. By turns ambitious and self-destructive, conniving and naive, Yo-Yo is a classic femme fatale. She is a bright star in a constellation of compelling characters including the chauffeur-turned-gangster Peewee Robinson, the Jewish kingpin Abraham 'Mr. O' Orlinsky, the heroin dealer West Indian Charlie, the corrupt cop Red Carney, the wife-beating singer Pretty Paul Baxter, the pimp Buttercup Jones and the brutal enforcer Randall Country Johnson. But Viper's Dream has a fast-paced vibe all its own, a story charged with suspense, intrigue and plot twists and spiced with violence and humour. It is also steeped in music. The Viper's story is intertwined with the history of jazz over a quarter century.

May 2023

Salvage this World is by Michael Farris Smith. There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley. In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of South Mississippi, where stores are closing and jobs are few, a fierce zealot has gained a foothold, capitalizing on the vulnerability of a dwindling population and a burning need for hope. As she preaches and promises salvation from the light of the pulpit, in the shadows she sows the seeds of violence. Elsewhere, Jessie and her toddler, Jace, are on the run across the Mississippi/Louisiana line, in a resentful return to her childhood home and her desolate father. Holt, Jace's father, is missing and hunted by a brutish crowd, and an old man witnesses the wrong thing in the depths of night. In only a matter of days, all of their lives will collide, and be altered, in the maelstrom of the changing world.

August 2023

As a favour to her partner, Geraldine agrees to look into the disappearance of a young woman, only to discover that several other young women have also gone missing locally. They all vanished unexpectedly, without trace. When one of the missing women is discovered, unconscious and covered in mud, she dies without recovering consciousness, leaving Geraldine and her team in an urgent race to find the other missing women before it is too late to save them. Without Trace is by Leigh Russell.

September 2023

Master storyteller and award-winning author Chris Offutt’s latest book, Code of the Hills, is a dark, witty, and propulsive thriller of murder and secrets in a town where little is as it seems. Mick Hardin is back in the hills of Kentucky. He’d planned to touch down briefly before heading to France, marking the end to his twenty-year Army career. In Rocksalt, his sister Linda the sheriff is investigating the murder of Pete Lowe, a sought-after mechanic at the local racetrack. After another body is found, Linda and her deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver wonder if the two murders are related. Linda steps into harm’s way just as a third body turns up and Mick ends up being deputised again, uncovering evidence of illegal cockfighting, and trying to connect all the crimes.

October 2023

Never Walk Away is by Nick Triplow. DS Mark (Max)Lomax is a former Demonstration Squad Officer – a Special Branch Unit dedicated to inflitrating political and extremist groups, a world he thinks he has left far behind. Following a botched stakeout of a north London gangster, he finds himself on enforced leave and is called back into his old world of half-truths and conflicting agendas. As he digs into the death of the civil servant, Max is obstructed at evry turn, forcing him to turn to the people he once infiltrated an betrayed for help. With political reputations on the line, the case becomes less about uncovering the truth, then burying it for good.

November 2023

Charlie Walden is the Resident Judge of the Bermondsey Crown Court, where he had hoped for a quiet life, but has found it to be anything but. With the job of balancing the needs of prosecutors, judges, 'Grey Smoothies' – the humourless grey-suited civil servants – and the overall needs of a Crown Court, he soon finds himself struggling to keep the peace with his own delightful humour. In this first full length Walden novel Charlie is faced with a number of topical issues he hadn't anticipated; invited to join the Court of Appeal he finds hmself faced with a case involving the 'confusion' of one of his team; in another, a Trans teacher must be penalised for defacing a statue; a huge and mysterious cat comes to the rescue in yet another case, and so the harrassed Judge must pick his way through this minefield of exasperating casesin order to keep eveyone from the cannabis lobby to the anti-slave traders happy with his judgments. No hope of that quiet life for Charlie then but as ever he picks his way through the issues of the day with satirical good humour, insight and wit in another entertaining look at the British Court system. A Week on Mount Olympus and Other Tales From the Bench is by Peter Walden.

Books to look Forward to from No Exit Press

October 2018

Autumn 1915. World War I is raging across Europe but Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches--though that hasn't stopped young men and women from crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front. Christopher "Kit" Cobb, a Chicago reporter with a second job as undercover agent for the U.S. government, is officially in Paris doing a story on American ambulance drivers, but his intelligence handler, James Polk Trask, soon broadens his mission. City-dwelling civilians are meeting death by dynamite in a new string of bombings, and the German-speaking Kit seems just the man to figure out who is behind them--possibly a German operative who has snuck in with the waves of refugees coming in from the provinces and across the border in Belgium. But there are elements in this pursuit that will test Kit Cobb, in all his roles, to the very limits of his principles, wits, and talents for survival.  Paris in the Dark is by Robert Olen Butler

Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes.  The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines.  Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite in contrast to the sanctioned version drifted to the surface in books one bought off racks in drugstores and bus stations -- stark, bonelike, disturbing books.  No Exit Press are to make Difficult Lives available again, doubling our pleasure by pairing it with Hitching Rides, an equal volume of new essays on other crime writers including Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson.  Difficult Lives – Hitching Rides is by James Sallis.

The Lonely Witness is by William Boyle.  Amy was once a party girl, but now she lives a lonely life. Helping the house-bound to receive communion in the Gravesend neighbourhood of Brooklyn, she knows the community well.  When a local woman goes missing, Amy senses something isn’t right.  Tailing the woman’s suspicious son, she winds her way through Brooklyn’s streets. But before she can act, he is dead.  Captivated by the crime she’s witnessed and the murderer himself, Amy doesn’t call the cops. Instead, she collects the weapon from the sidewalk and soon finds herself on the trail of a killer.

November 2018

Death Rope is by Leigh Russell. Mark Abbott is dead. His sister refuses to believe it was suicide, but only Detective Sergeant Geraldine Steel will listen.  When other members of Mark’s family disappear, Geraldine’s suspicions are confirmed.  Taking a risk, Geraldine finds herself confronted by an adversary deadlier than any she has faced before… Her boss Ian is close, but will he arrive in time to save her, or is this the end for Geraldine Steel?

December 2018

One Law For The Rest of Us is by Peter Murphy.  Two generations of abuse... one shocking conspiracy... a woman determined to expose it all.  When Audrey Marshall sends her daughter Emily to the religious boarding school where she herself was educated a generation before, memories return – memories of a culture of child sexual abuse presided over by a highly-regarded priest.  Audrey turns to barrister Ben Schroeder in search of justice for Emily and herself.  But there are powerful men involved, men determined to protect themselves at all costs.

Heart Attacks is California’s last secret spot – the premier mysto surf haunt, the stuff of rumour and legend. The rumours say you must cross Indian land to get there. They tell of hostile locals and shark-infested waters where waves in excess of thirty feet break a mile from shore. For down-and-out photographer Jack Fletcher, the chance to shoot these waves in the company of surfing legend Drew Harmon offers the promise of new beginnings. But Drew is not alone in the northern reaches of the state. His young wife, Kendra, lives there with him. Obsessed with the unsolved murder of a local girl, Kendra has embarked upon a quest of her own, a search for truth – however dark that truth may prove to be.  In this desolate wasteland the search for the perfect wave becomes a quest for survival, as events lead inevitably to their final, tragic climax.  The Dogs of Winter is by Kem Nunn.

January 2019

On leave from Canada's Community Policing department, Esa Khattak is traveling in Iran, reconnecting with his cultural heritage and seeking peace in the country’s beautiful mosques and gardens. But Khattak’s supposed break from work is cut short when he’s approached by a Canadian government agent in Iran, asking him to look into the death of renowned Canadian-Iranian filmmaker Zahra Sobhani. Zahra was murdered at Iran’s notorious Evin prison, where she’d been seeking the release of a well-known political prisoner. Khattak quickly finds himself embroiled in Iran’s tumultuous politics and under surveillance by the regime, but when the trail leads back to Zahra’s family in Canada, Khattak calls on his partner, Detective Rachel Getty, for help.  Rachel uncovers a conspiracy linked to the Shah of Iran and the decades-old murders of a group of Iran’s most famous dissidents. Historic letters, a connection to the Royal Ontario Museum, and a smuggling operation on the Caspian Sea are just some of the threads Rachel and Khattak begin unraveling, while the list of suspects stretches from Tehran to Toronto. But as Khattak gets caught up in the fate of Iran’s political prisoners, Rachel sees through to the heart of the matter: Zahra’s murder may not have been a political crime at all.  Among the Ruins is by Ausma Zehanat Khan.

February 2019

Jack Harper isn’t a bad man, but he’s stuck in a loveless marriage with a mediocre job just trying to keep sober. The only good thing in his life is his son. When an old college friend introduces him to a new extramarital dating website, he tentatively reaches out to find a distraction from his misery. But when he goes to meet up with his steamy online date, he quickly realises it was a dire choice.  Soon, Jack finds himself desperately trying to prove his innocence for crimes he did not commit, and the life he once had – unhappy as it was – is nothing but a dream. Now, he’s living his worst nightmare. . .  Too Far is by Jason Starr.

Fade to Grey is by John Lincoln.  Gethin Grey is the man you call when there’s nowhere else to turn. His Last Resort Legals team investigates miscarriages of justice. But Gethin is running out of options himself: his gambling is out of control, his marriage is falling apart and there’s no money left to pay the wages…  Izma M was sent down years ago for the brutal murder of a young woman. In jail he’s written a bestseller and become a cult hero, and now the charismatic fading-film-star Amelia Laverne wants to bankroll Gethin to prove Izma's innocence. For Gethin – low on luck and cash – the job is heaven sent. But is Izma M really as blameless as his fans believe?  This seemingly cold case is about to turn very hot indeed…

March 2019

The Conviction of Cora Burns is by Carolyn Kirby.  Birmingham, 1885.  Born in a gaol and raised in a workhouse, Cora Burns has always struggled to control the violence inside her.  Haunted by memories of a terrible crime, she seeks a new life working as a servant in the house of scientist Thomas Jerwood.  Here, Cora befriends a young girl, Violet, who seems to be the subject of a living experiment. But is Jerwood also secretly studying Cora…?

After Brooklyn mob widow Rena Ruggiero hits her eighty-year-old neighbour Enzio in the head with an ashtray when he makes an unwanted move on her, she retreats to the Bronx home of her estranged daughter, Adrienne, and her granddaughter, Lucia, only to be turned away at the door. Their neighbour, Lacey “Wolfie” Wolfstein, a one-time Golden Age porn star and retired Florida Suncoast grifter, takes Rena in and befriends her. When Lucia discovers that Adrienne is planning to hit the road with her ex-boyfriend, she figures Rena is her only way out of a life on the run with a mother she can’t stand. The stage is set for an explosion that will propel Rena, Wolfie, and Lucia down a strange path, each woman running from their demons, no matter what the cost. A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself is by William Boyle.

 

Iconic, tough-but-tender Boston PI Spenser delves into the black market art scene to investigate a decades-long unsolved crime of dangerous proportions.  The heist was legendary, still talked about twenty years after the priceless paintings disappeared from one of Boston's premier art museums. Most thought the art was lost forever, buried deep, sold off overseas, or, worse, destroyed as incriminating evidence. But when paint chips from the most valuable piece stolen, Gentlemen in Black by a Spanish master, arrives at the desk of a Boston journalist, the museum finds hope and enlists Spenser's help.  Soon the cold art case thrusts Spenser into the shady world of black market art dealers, aged Mafia bosses, and old vendettas. A five-million-dollar-reward by the museum's top benefactor, an aged, unlikable Boston socialite, sets Spenser and pals Vinnie Morris and Hawk onto a trail of hidden secrets, jailhouse confessions, murder, and double crosses.  Robert B Parker’s Old Black Magic is by Ace Atkins.

May 2019

Ungentlemanly Warfare is by Howard Linskey. A soldier and a spy, an officer but not quite a gentleman, Captain Harry Walsh is SOE’s secret weapon.  Loathed by his own commanding officer, haunted by the death of his closest friend and trapped in a loveless marriage, Harry Walsh is close to burn out when he is ordered to assassinate the man behind the ME 163 Komet, Hitler’s miracle jet fighter. If Walsh fails, there is no prospect of allied victory in Europe.  Harry Walsh is ruthless, unorthodox and ungentlemanly. He is about to wreak havoc.