Books to look forward to from Point Blank (Oneworld Publishers)

January 2018

SEE NO EVIL.  Eyes missing, two bodies lie deep in the forest near a small Swedish town.  HEAR NO EVIL.  Tuva Moodyson, a deaf reporter on a small-time local paper, is looking for the story that could make her career.  SPEAK NO EVIL.  A web of secrets. And an unsolved murder from twenty years ago.  Can Tuva outwit the killer before she becomes the final victim? She'd like to think so. But first she must face her demons and venture far into the deep, dark woods if she wants to stand any chance of getting the hell out of small-time Gavrik.  Dark Pines is by Will Dean

February 2018

Back Up is by Paul Colize.  Berlin, 1967: four members of the British rock band Pearl Harbour die at the same time but in separate locations. Inexplicably, the police conclude natural causes are to blame.  Brussels, 2010: A homeless man is hit by a car outside the Gare du Midi, leaving him with locked-in syndrome, able to communicate (sometimes) by blinking.  An Irish journalist's interest is piqued. How did the members of Pearl Harbour die, and how is this linked to the homeless man in Brussels?

March 2018

When a helicopter explodes, leaving behind a dead client and colleague, Tom Winter, head of security for an elite Swiss bank, teams up with the mysterious Egyptian businesswoman Fatima to follow the money trail through Switzerland and from there on a whistle-stop chase around the world.  With the NSA watching their every move, it's not long before Winter, a former special forces commander, and Fatima realise that in fact they are the hunted, not the hunters, and that their very survival depends on Tom's coolness and quick thinking.  Damnation is by Peter Beck.

Chief Inspector Domenic Jejeune hopes an overseas birding trip will hold some clues to

solving his fugitive brother's manslaughter case. Meanwhile, in Jejeune's absence his long-time nemesis has been drafted in as cover to investigate an accountant's murder. And unfortunately Marvin Laraby proves just a bit too effective in showing how an investigation should be handled.  With the manslaughter case poised to claim another victim, Jejeune learns an accident back home in Britain involving his girlfriend, Lindy, is much more than it seems. Lindy is in grave danger, and she needs Jejeune. Soon, he is faced with a further dilemma. He can speak up on a secret he has discovered relating to Laraby's case, knowing it will cost his job on the north Norfolk coast he loves. Or he can stay silent, and let a killer escape justice. Turns out that sometimes the wrong choice is the only one there is.  A Shimmer of Hummingbirds is by Steve Burrows

The Parentations is by Kate Mayfield.  Eighteenth-century London and the lives of the sisters Fitzgerald, Constance and Verity, become entwined with the nearby Fowler household. For Clovis Fowler, whose unearthly Nordic beauty belies a ruthless thirst for power, and husband Finn, a Limehouse thief, have agreed to provide safe harbour to a mysterious baby.  The puzzling phenomenon binding them close arose unexpectedly from deep within the savage but beautiful landscape of Iceland, where a hidden pool of water grants those who drink from it endless life. But those who sip from the waterfall discover all too quickly that immortality is no gift.  To preserve the life of this strange baby from those who wish him harm means that all concerned must remain undiscovered for more than two hundred years. And, as the centuries creep thither, one in their enclave proves more menacing than those who pursue them. Worse, the life-giving pool that sustains them all, runs dry...

May 2018

It's summer in Adders Fork. The sun is out, the sky is blue and things are going swimmingly for Rosie Strange, thank you very much. The Essex Witch Museum has been re-launched with a new Ursula Cadence wing and picnic grounds.  Then developers roll into the sleepy village to widen the road. When the centuries-old Blackly Be boulder, said to mark the grave of a notorious witch but now in the car park of the Seven Stars, is moved, all hell breaks out. Within hours a slew of peculiar phenomena descends and, when a severed head is discovered atop the boulder, the locals can take no more and storm the Museum to demand someone take action.  Can Rosie and Sam unravel the mystery? And what of the ancient treasure that could drastically change someone's fortunes and offer a motive for murder?  Strange Fascination is by Syd Moore

Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru is by Karen Lee Street.  Philadelphia, early 1844. As

violent tensions escalate between `nativists' and recent Irish immigrants, Edgar Allan Poe's fears for the safety of his wife Virginia and mother-in-law Muddy are compounded when he receives a parcel of mummified bird parts. Could his nemesis have returned to settle an old score?  Just as odd is the arrival of Helena Loddiges, a young heiress who demands Poe's help to discover why her lover died at the city's docks on his return from an expedition to Peru. Poe is sceptical of her claims to receive messages from birds and visitations from her lover's ghost. But when Miss Loddiges is kidnapped, he and his friend C. Auguste Dupin must unravel a mystery involving old enemies, lost soulmates, ornithomancy, and the legendary jewel of Peru

June 2018

If secrets could be taken to the grave many, of us would have an ear to the ground. But as Alexander, Earl of Greengrass, discovers one clear Sunday morning late in November, death is a most efficient way of revealing the cavern of cover-ups in a guilty conscience. Caught with his trousers down in Spire village graveyard whilst his faithful wife was playing the organ inside the church, this wealthy landowner meets a gruesome end.  Luckily pet portraitist Susie Mahl is on hand to sort things out, as she's been recently commissioned to paint Situp, the aristocratic ash-grey deerhound at the village's Glebe House. Susie discovers an unexpected zest for truth and an awesome nosey parker instinct, and soon the newly appointed Pet Detective is digging out the truth with a dogged determination.  A Brush with Death is by Ali Carter.

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The Smell of Blue Light

Nighttime is the best time to write if you have a day job.

One of those nights I was sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop and a cup of strong black coffee looking for a way I could manipulate the brain of the agent in the story I was writing. I was roaming the home pages of neuroscience departments of universities until I found the jackpot: a study by Klemens F. Störtkuhl and André Fiala. Their study was named “The Smell of Blue Light - A New Approach toward Understanding an Olfactory Neuronal Network.”

Basically these scientists took a blind fly larvae, put a light sensitive material on its brain neurons in charge of smell and by doing so ‘cheated’ the brain to smell light. This manipulation made the neurons of the larvae’s brain interpret the light as smell and as a result the larvae crawled towards a light beam, even though it is blind. I took this study and stretched it a bit. In my book I am projecting the light through the eyes into a human brain, while simultaneously playing sound to create ‘brain programming’.

Writing about an agent who is a mix of a genius and a psychopath required a lot of research. I needed to check the science parts to make sure they made sense.  I spent a lot of time Googling and Wikipeding things like OCD symptoms, nightmares categorisation, psychometric tests, water pressure calculations and irrigation systems standards. Dealing with facts verification made me want to play a little and place in the story a couple of ‘facts’ that are completely false. For example - every time we sneeze we lose 14 minutes of our life span because of the pressure that causes corrosion to capillaries in our brain. After the book was published in Israel this false fact was one of the things that got most attention from readers who were asking where the hell I found this fact. They googled the hell out of “life span reduction when sneezing” and found nothing.

Science and technology in the book are used to change behaviour to a precise pattern dictated by an organisation. This fact alone raises a moral question – is this a legitimate manipulation if the cause is important enough?  In my story the organisation deliberately kills innocent people to save a much larger number of others. Does this make it right? What is the equation? What kind of manipulation is needed to make one execute the organisation’s missions?

Nir Hezroni’s thriller THREE ENVELOPES is published by Point Blank on 6 April, paperback original £12.99.

Agent 10483 carried out his missions perfectly. Too perfectly. When Avner, a top agent in The Organisation, receives a notebook written by the enigmatic 10483 – ten years after his supposed death - Avner realizes he might still be alive. The notebook not only reveals the truth about 10483’s missions, which include some of Israel’s most shockingly violent outrages, but also suggests that he is desperate to take revenge against The Organisation.  Was 10483 a psychopath who outwitted his handlers for years? Why was he the only agent to receive three envelopes with the names of targets on a special hit list? Was he responsible for locking up his victims and staging their deaths in a basement of horrors? Or was he merely the victim of a brilliant scientist who found a way to manipulate his brain?

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Author Nir Hezroni was born in Jerusalem. After several years of service in military intelligence, he retired to study economics and business management and to build a career in high tech. THREE ENVELOPES is his first novel. An Israeli bestseller, film rights have already been optioned. He lives near Tel Aviv. You can find more information on his website and you can follow him on Twitter @nirhezroni and also find him on Facebook.

The origins of By Gaslight by Steven Price

I suppose, on one level, By Gaslight is a detective novel, a Victorian noir. It tells the story of two Americans, in London in 1885, each seeking the truth of the elusive thief Edward Shade; there is a dead woman, buried histories, early crime technology, fog, and shadow.

But on another level, it is a little bit stranger than that.

One of the origins of the novel came when I realized - perhaps obtusely, but with a kind of visceral shock all the same - that the American wild west, the west of the outlaws and railroad hold-up men, was simultaneous with Jack the Ripper's gaslit London. Who - if any - were the people who moved back and forth between such worlds? In nearly every western movie or television series there is the 'citified' character, usually a shopkeeper or clerk, wearing a dusty, hot, unsuitable three-piece suit and clearly not belonging in the frontier. But rarely - if ever - do we see the western cowboy walking the streets of the great Eastern cities. Why is that? Did no one in the west go east, ever, did no one from the west ever cross the Atlantic? I'd not thought of it in such terms.

It turns out such men did exist. The private detective William Pinkerton, eldest son of the Pinkerton Agency's founder, rode down outlaws and thieves throughout the western territories. He was tough, physical, iron-willed, and a very good shot. But he also walked the great cities of Europe, Vienna, Paris, London, and wore fine suits and elegant top hats and ate in expensive clubs. He straddled both worlds. And I found in him the perfect character, a man with the talents of the outlaw, a man for whom the ends justified the means, but who worked on the right side of the law. He seemed to carry the violence and roughness of the western territories with him, even in Chicago, or New York, or, yes, London.

The outlaws of the American west were born in the fires of the American Civil War. By Gaslight, though set in London, casts itself back across the western frontier, chronicling some of William Pinkerton's pursuits of famous real-life outlaws, such as the Reno gang, or the monstrous bear-like Farrington Brothers, all the way back to the Civil War, and the savagery of that time. I wanted to cast London, as it existed in 1885, through the lens of men who had known that western world firsthand, who had experience of some of the horrors of industrialized warfare, and lawlessness, and open skies.

What I was doing in the writing, though I could not have described it so at the time, was viewing the underbelly of the great nineteenth century British Empire from my own North American perspective. Many people today think of 19th Century London as a largely homogenous place; in fact, it was the first great modern world-city, a city teeming with people from all corners of the empire and beyond, and on its streets one could hear dozens of languages being spoken. The world arrived on London's doorstep and brought its multiplicities with it. I wanted to approach that city from a perspective that was 'other,' that was in its way foreign and strange. There is something very Canadian in this, I think now, both in the multicultural interest, and in the ways By Gaslight's characters and loyalties are torn between differing pressures.

In the end By Gaslight became a novel about a detective, rather than a detective novel, although it plays with and employs many of the common tropes. For instance, a dead body animates the story in the opening pages, but it is not the body of Charlotte Reckitt (who has leaped to her death into the Thames), but rather the body of William Pinkerton's father, who died some six months earlier, and whose unfinished business William is determined to put to rest. I set out to write a novel that kept a close eye on its characters, a novel whose central mystery was not one of incident - what happens, and how - but of character, that is, who it happens to. I wanted to write a novel about grief, and family, and the inheritance of loss that we all must live with, when a parent dies and we find ourselves abruptly alone with our memories. Which is, of course, a mystery of a different kind.

By Gaslight by Steven Price is published by Oneworld priced £18.99

London, 1885. A woman's body is discovered on Edgware Road; ten miles away, her head is dredged from the dark, muddy waters of the Thames. Famed detective William Pinkerton had one lead to the notorious thief Edward Shade, and now that lead is dead. Determined to drag Shade out of the shadows, Pinkerton descends into the seedy underworld of Victorian London, with its gas-lit streets, opium dens, sewers and séance halls, its underworld of spies, blackmailers, cultists, petty thieves and pitiless murderers.  Adam Foole is a gentleman without a past, haunted by a love affair ten years gone. Returning to London in search of his lost beloved, his journey brings him face-to-face with Pinkerton, and what he learns of his lover's fate will force him to confront a past - and a grief - he thought long buried.