Books to Look Forward to from Orion

July 2016

British detective Fiona Griffiths, one of the most engaging female protagonists in crime thrillers, is back with her toughest case yet. When the body of a young woman is found in an old 'dead house' - the annexe where the dead were stored before burial in medieval times - of a tiny church in a small town in Wales, it seems that past and present have come together in a bizarre and horrifying way. For DC Fiona Griffiths, the girl - a murder victim whose corpse was laid out with obvious tenderness - represents an irresistibly intriguing puzzle, given Fiona's unusual empathy for the dead. And when her investigations lead her to an obscure and secretive monastery hidden in a remote valley, she finds that the murder victim is far from the only victim of a dark and disturbing melding of modern crime and medieval religious practices. Only Fiona is capable of solving this brilliantly crafted mystery.  The Dead House is by Harry Bingham.

September 2016

The Twenty-Three is by Linwood Barclay.  A dark cloud of suspicion and fear continues to hang over the town of Promise Falls. A series of bizarre, ominously threatening incidents suggests someone is plotting to take revenge on the town. But who is the perpetrator, and revenge for what? Now the time for threats is over. And the inhabitants are about to discover the truth, with devastating consequences.

Growing up in a difficult household and in a crumbling mansion with two elder sisters (who are both, in their own way, horrible to her), a father who seems perennially lost in contemplation of the past and haunted by fleeting memories of her mother, who died mysteriously in the Himalayas when Flavia was a baby, her refuge has always been an obsession with chemistry; an interest that has proved very useful whenever unexplained

death has come to the otherwise sleepy village of Bishop's Lacey, which is surprisingly often.  But now Flavia is presented with her strangest mystery yet: a dead man found hanging upside down, a beloved children’s book concealing a shocking secret and strange pagan rites in the village…. But the latest mystery to puzzle Bishop's Lacey's eccentric inhabitants is perhaps the strangest and darkest yet, and it will test Flavia's budding investigative skills to the limit - not to mention put her in terrible danger ... Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d is by Alan Bradley.

October 2016

The Wrong Side of Goodbye is by Michael Connelly. 'What do you want me to do?' Bosch

asked again. 'I want you to find someone for me,' Vance said. 'Someone who might not have ever existed.' Harry Bosch is working as a part-time detective in the town of San Fernando outside of Los Angeles, when he gets the invitation to meet with the ageing aviation billionaire Whitney Vance. When he was eighteen Vance had a relationship with a Mexican girl called Vibiana Duarte, but soon after becoming pregnant she disappeared. Now, as he reaches the end of his life, Vance wants to know what happened to Vibiana and whether there is an heir to his vast fortune. And Bosch is the only person he trusts to undertake the assignment. Harry's aware that with such sums of money involved, this could be a dangerous undertaking - not just for himself, but for the person he's looking for - but as he begins to uncover Vibiana's tragic story, and finds uncanny links to his own past, he knows he cannot rest until he finds the truth.

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life. She's worked with the revered crime writer for years and his detective, Atticus Pund, is renowned for solving crimes in the sleepy English villages of the 1950s. As Susan knows only too well, vintage crime sells handsomely. It's just a shame that it means dealing with an author like Alan Conway...But Conway's latest tale of murder at Pye Hall is not quite what it seems. Yes, there are dead bodies and a host of intriguing suspects, but hidden in the pages of the manuscript there lies another story: a tale written between the very words on the page, telling of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition and murder.  Magpie Murders is by Anthony Horowitz.

November 2016

Fleeing to America following a terrible crime, Irish-born fighter, Danny McCabe, throws in his lot with Nicolas and Lucia Mariani, siblings who have emigrated from Corsica in search of their fortunes. Adrift in the tough and unforgiving world of 1930s New York, they rely on Danny's bareknuckle fighting skills to survive. While Nicolas is tempted ever deeper into the underworld, Lucia can think of little but her obsessive drive to succeed in Hollywood. When Danny McCabe's dreams of boxing stardom become a terrifying nightmare, fate compels them to escape westwards to Los Angeles. On the run, the trio are bound together by blood, by shared secrets, and finally by love, as Danny and Lucia embark upon an affair that is as profound as it is dangerous. Nicolas, driven by greed, soon finds a welcome home in the dark world of corruption and vice that lies behind the glitzy facade of America's city of dreams. Danny McCabe is desperate to bury the dark secret of his past, while Lucia is caught in the crossfire between her brother and the man she loves.  Kings of America is by R J Ellory

Rather be the Devil is by Ian Rankin. John Rebus, now a couple of years into his retirement finds himself drawn into a cold case from the 1970s involving a female socialite, found dead in a bedroom in one of Edinburgh's most luxurious hotels. It's a crime over forty years old, but no one was ever found guilty. Now, Rebus has his own reasons to investigate ...but it is going to set him against some very dangerous people.

Lovemurder is by Saul Black.  Troubled San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart is planning a rare weekend away from the job when she gets the call. A body has been found. A woman, brutally murdered. And the cryptic note left by the body is addressed to Valerie. The victim is unknown to her, but as Valerie analyses the scene, the clues begin to point in a deeply disturbing direction: to a maximum security prison where a woman called Katherine Glass is awaiting execution for a series of gruesome killings. And Valerie was the cop who put her there. The last thing Valerie wants to do is re-enter Katherine's twisted world, but when a second body is discovered, with another puzzling clue, she realises she has no choice. Katherine Glass holds the key to the killings, and Valerie needs to find out what she knows before the murders come even closer to home. Even if it means playing a deadly game where once again, the psychopathic killer holds all the cards.

Frankie James is a young man with a lot on his shoulders. His mother disappeared when he was fifteen; his father's in jail for armed robbery; and he owes rent on the SoHo snooker club he inherited to one of London's toughest gangsters. Things, you'd think, can only get better. Actually, they're about to get a whole lot worse. He always swore to his mum he'd keep his younger, wilder brother out of trouble, but when Jack turns up at the club early in the morning, covered in someone else's blood, with no memory of the night before, and with the cops hard on his heels, it seems there's no way Frankie can make good on his promise. With Jack banged up, awaiting trial for the vicious murder of a bride-to-be - a murder that's sparked an even more vicious gang war between London's two foremost crime families - Frankie knows a conviction could quickly turn into a death sentence. To prevent that from happening, he needs to find out who framed Jack and why, but that means entering the sordid world of bent coppers, ruthless mobsters and twisted killers that he's tried all his life to avoid getting sucked into. Now, however, he no longer has any choice. But in the dog-eat-dog underworld of 1980s SoHo, is he tough enough, and smart enough to come out on top?  Framed is by Ronnie O’Sullivan.

January 2017

A Twist in the Knife is by Becky Masterman.   Brigid Quinn is a former Fed trying to live a normal life after years in the most twisted of company - but still entangled in the guilt, violence and rage inevitable after a career spent tracking killers. Now Brigid is drawn into the case of a man on Death Row, awaiting execution for the murder of his wife and three children. Something tells Brigid that an injustice is about to be done, but when she investigates the circumstances behind the convictions, she finds the truth is even more shocking.

On its surface, life in Houston is as you would expect: drive-in restaurants, souped-up cars, jukeboxes, teenagers discovering their sexuality. But beneath the glitz and superficial normalcy, a class war has begun, and it is nothing like the conventional portrayal of the decade. Against this backdrop Aaron Holland Broussard discovers the poignancy of first love and a world of violence he did not know existed.  When Aaron spots the beautiful and gifted Valerie Epstein fighting with her boyfriend, Grady Harrelson, at a Galveston drive-in, he inadvertently challenges the power of the Mob and one of the richest families in Texas. He also discovers he must find the courage his father had found as an American soldier in the Great War.  The Jealous Kind is by James Lee Burke.

SAUL BLACK: Serial Killers and Why we Love Them

Today's guest blog is the pen name of the acclaimed novelist Glen Duncan.

In a brilliant essay ‘Princes of Darkness’, published in the BFI’s companion volume to its Gothic film season in 2013 (Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film), screenwriter and novelist David Pirie makes a simple but invaluable observation: Count Dracula is a serial killer. A further observation, no less revelatory, follows: Hannibal Lecter is one of his direct fictional descendants.

What Dracula and Lecter have in common is that they’re presented to us as finished psychologies. Although Thomas Harris would later get into the dear doctor’s background, the definitive version is the one we find in Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. In these two novels Lecter’s character, like his Gothic forebear’s, does not invite therapeutic questions. We’re not remotely interested in putting him on the analyst’s couch. He’s a terminal personality rendered so convincingly and thrillingly that it’s enough just to hang out with him and watch him in action, never mind the antecedents, never mind the Why? He’s a done deal. He’s his own brutally perfected Last Word.

This is one way of imagining serial killers, and it does much to explain our fascination with them. To read them, to watch them on screen, is to indulge in the same cathartic escapism provided by watching the antics of wild animals or boisterous plants: these are organisms doing what they do sans any of the moral or existential paraphernalia with which the rest of us are so annoyingly saddled. It’s liberating. It’s a blast. I have the impulse to kill people very often: tail-gaters, queue-jumpers, over-users of the word ‘basically’, anyone whose phone is set to emit that currently ubiquitous five note whistle (designed, presumably, by Lucifer); the problem is I lack the psychology. My cowardly frontal lobes are fine. If our pleasure in fictional sociopaths is vicarious wish-fulfilment, it raises the ticklish (if familiar) question: Without them to get us off imaginatively, would more of us be serial killers?

I repeat: This is one way of imagining the bad boys (and occasionally bad girls). It’s no coincidence that these ‘apex predators’ are so often presented as charming, erudite and classy, as likely to hum Bartók or quote Milton as to whack you in the face with a claw hammer. If they represent our latent or repressed selves, if they’re fantasies, then why not make them articulate culture vultures while we’re at it? No one wants to be a psycho with a comb-over and shell suit.

Psychiatric medicine and investigative journalism have, between them, debunked this myth and replaced it with a much less titillating truth: that by and large the people who do these things are dull and damaged, bereft of insight and driven by dreary compulsions, imaginatively and emotionally dead, cognitively impaired and not infrequently sexually impotent without the Viagra of psychotic violence. In short, they’re boring. More boring still, if the so called ‘psychopathic gene’ is admitted to the party. Granted it’s neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for serial murder, but still, it’s hard not to feel a bit short-changed if the great monsters reduce to nothing more snazzy than lousy DNA.

But even assuming the shrinks are right and the journos’ interviews genuine, our fascination lingers.

My optimist believes this is because we want to understand the puzzles - redundant in the cases of Lecter and the Count - of How and Why. My ludicrous optimist goes further: the better we understand the root causes, the more likely we’ll be to put time and energy into eliminating them.

My pessimist, on the other hand, says it’s because in spite of all evidence to the contrary we can’t shake the suspicion that there’s something serial killers know that we don’t. We think of them as beings who’ve been out beyond the moral boundaries - to visit God or the Devil or Nothingness - and returned bearing the experience’s inscrutable imprimatur. Our imaginative habit insists they’re the possessors of forbidden knowledge, even though our reason has long since identified the majority of them as morons - albeit lethal ones.

Either way - in our fictions, fantasies and fears - the serial killer is here to stay.

Reference: ‘Princes of Darkness’ by David Pirie in Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film, ed. James Bell, (BFI, London, 2013)

The Killing Lessons

When the two strangers turn up at Rowena Cooper's isolated Colorado farmhouse, she knows instantly that it's the end of everything. For the two haunted and driven men, on the other hand, it's just another stop on a long and bloody journey. And they still have many miles to go, and victims to sacrifice, before their work is done.  For San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart, their trail of corpses - women abducted, tortured and left with a seemingly random series of objects inside them - has brought her from obsession to the edge of physical and psychological destruction. And she's losing hope of making a breakthrough before that happens.  But the slaughter at the Cooper farmhouse didn't quite go according to plan. There was a survivor, Rowena's 10-year-old daughter Nell, who now holds the key to the killings. Injured, half-frozen, terrified, Nell has only one place to go. And that place could be even more terrifying than what she's running from.

The Killing Lessons by Saul Black (Orion) is out now price £12.99 

Books to look forward to from Orion Publishing

On the night of 22 December 1980 a plane crashes on the Franco-Swiss border and is engulfed in flames.  168 out of 169 passengers are killed instantly.  The miraculous sole survivor is a newborn baby girl.  Two families, one rich, the other poor, step forward to claim her, sparking a private investigation that will last for almost two decades.  Is she Lyse-Rose or Emilie?  On the eve of the girl’s eighteenth birthday, Detective Credule Grand-Duc plans to take his own life, but not before placing his account of the investigation in the girl’s hands.  But as he sits at his desk about to pull the trigger, he uncovers a secret that changes everything – then is killed before he can breathe a word of it to anyone. . . After the Crash is by Michel Bussi and is due to be published in March 2015.

Dana Nolan was a promising young TV reporter until she was kidnapped by a notorious serial killer. A year has passed since she survived the ordeal, but Dana is still physically, emotionally, and psychologically scarred, racked with bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder and memory loss. In an attempt to put herself back together after surviving the unthinkable, Dana returns to her hometown. But it doesn't provide the comfort she expects: she struggles to recognise family and childhood friends and begins experiencing dark flashbacks. But she's not sure if they're truly memories or side effects of her brain injury. Dana decides to use her investigative skills to piece together her past and learns of the event that made her become a reporter in the first place: the disappearance of her best friend, Casey Grant, the summer after high school graduation. Looking at her past and the unsolved mystery through the dark filter of her shattered psyche, old friends seem to be suspects, authority figures part of a cover-up. Dana begins to question everything she knows. What is real? What is imagined? Are we defined by what happens to us? And is the truth really something too terrible to be believed?  Cold, Cold Heart is by Tami Hoag and is due to be published in January 2015.

Woman of the Dead is by Bernhard Aichner and is due to be published in April 2015.  Blum seems to have it all: the perfect husband, police detective Mark, two daughters, and a thriving undertaking business. But when Mark is killed in a hit and run, Blum stumbles across one of his investigations and realises there is far more to his death than meets the eye. And, as she discovers, the line between investigating and avenging is an easy one to cross.

London, January 2014. In the space of 32 hours, in a well-planned and highly organized operation, six billionaires' children are taken off the streets of London in a series of slickly well-executed kidnaps. The gang demands GBP25 million per hostage for 'expenses' - not ransom. And when your child goes missing, you need Charles Boxer: a man with little left to lose who'll stop at nothing to save families suffering what he has. The wealthy parents of the missing children know that Boxer will do more than police can - but that doesn't mean the law will leave it to him. Intelligence agencies are all interested in the kidnaps because in each case the parents are related to people in power in the various countries involved. Soon the investigation goes beyond the corridors of power and the boardrooms of big corporations - and to far darker corners. Even more worryingly for Boxer, and his ex-wife Mercy, it threatens to lead back to their own lives, too. But still nobody knows what this mysterious kidnap gang ultimately want and, if they have a cause, what the hell is it?  Stealing People is by Robert Wilson and is due to be published in February 2015.

When the two strangers turn up at Rowena Cooper's isolated Colorado farmhouse, she knows instantly that it's the end of everything. For the two haunted and driven men, on the other hand, it's just another stop on a long and bloody journey. And they still have many miles to go, and victims to sacrifice, before their work is done. For San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart, their trail of corpses - women abducted, tortured and left with a seemingly random series of objects inside them - has brought her from obsession to the edge of physical and psychological destruction. And she's losing hope of making a breakthrough before that happens. But the slaughter at the Cooper farmhouse didn't quite go according to plan. There was a survivor, Rowena's 10-year-old daughter Nell, who now holds the key to the killings. Injured, half-frozen, terrified, Nell has only one place to go. And that place could be even more terrifying than what she's running from.  The Killing Lessons is the debut novel by Saul Black and is due to be published in May 2015.

Ashleigh and Danny Orchard are twins, not that you'd ever tell by looking at them - Danny distant and shy, Ash beautiful and accomplished. But there's a secret in the Orchard house: Ash is a monster, a psychopath who can feel only through bringing others pain. When Ash and Danny are caught in a fire on their 16th birthday, both of them die. But only Danny comes back. Since then, Ash has haunted Danny, denying him any form of normal life ...or love. When Danny meets Willa and her son Eddie he glimpses the life he could have without Ash. To stop her from ruining his new-found happiness, Danny must venture into the frightening underworld of Detroit, where he will unearth the mystery of the night his and Ash's fates changed for ever. Dark and compelling, The Damned is by Andrew Pyper and is a story of how heaven and hell aren't about death, but about the decisions we make in life.  The Damned is due to be published in March 2015.

A collection of stories, mostly gritty low-level crime stories set on Washington DC's mean streets. The Martini Shot itself is set in the world of TV, featuring a scriptwriter on a popular cop show. When a member of the crew is murdered, the screenwriter decides to track down the perpetrators himself, to see if as a writer he can do more than just talk the talk. The Martini Shot and Other Stories is by George Pelecanos and is due to be published in January 2015.

Fear the Darkness is by Becky Masterman and is due to be published in February 21015. Ex-FBI Agent Brigid Quinn thinks she has a second chance at life. After too many years spent in the company of evil, she's quit the Feds and is working out what normal is meant to feel like. She's swapped serial killers, stakeouts and interrogation for a husband, friends and free time. But when you've walked in darkness for so long, can you stand the light? When a local teenager dies in a tragic drowning accident, the community thinks Brigid might be able to help comfort the family. But when she does so, something doesn't add up. And it's no easier at home: after a bereavement in the family, Brigid has reluctantly taken in her niece to give her a break before she starts college. Brigid's ever-patient husband Carlo tells her they must go easy on Gemma-Kate, the grieving youngster. Which is fine, until she starts taking an unhealthy interest in dissecting the local wildlife. For Brigid, death still seems to be wherever she turns. But as she herself starts to feel unwell, it's her own mortality that is the most troubling. And as she tries to get to the bottom of a series of allegedly accidental deaths and increasingly gruesome occurrences at home, she slowly realises that maybe this time, she's let the darkness inside the only place she ever felt safe. Sometimes, death is closer than you think.

Mockingbird is by R J Ellory and is due to be published in May 2015.  Prison changes a man. Sometimes in ways you can see. Usually in ways you can't. The only reason Henry Quinn survived three years inside was because of Evan Riggs, a one-time country singer, one-time killer, now serving a life sentence. No parole. On the day he gets out, Henry promises Evan he will find his daughter, the daughter he never met, and deliver a letter. A free man, Henry heads to the small Texan town where Evan grew up and where his brother Carson now resides as sheriff. There's no sign of the girl and her uncle claims to know nothing of her whereabouts. But Henry isn't about to give up. He made a promise and, no matter what, he's going to find Evan's daughter. As Carson's behaviour towards him becomes ever more threatening, Henry realises that there are dark secrets buried at the heart of this quiet town. What terrible thing drove the brothers apart and what happened to the missing girl?

Robert Ludlum’s The Geneva Strategy is by Jamie Freveletti and is due to be published in March 2015.  One evening in Washington, DC, several high-ranking members of government disappear in a mass kidnapping. Among the kidnapped is Nick Rendel, a computer software coding expert in charge of drone programming and strategy. He is the victim with the most dangerous knowledge, including confidential passwords and codes that are used to program the drones. If revealed, his kidnappers could reprogram the drones to strike targets within the United States. Jon Smith and the Covert-One team begin a worldwide search to recover the officials, but as the first kidnapping victims are rescued, they show disturbing signs of brainwashing or mind-altering drugs. Smith's investigation leads him to Fort Detrick, where a researcher, Dr Laura Taylor, had been attempting to create a drug to wipe memory from soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. But Dr Taylor's research was suspended almost a year ago, when she was placed in a mental institution. Now, if Smith doesn't figure out the brainwashing drug, and track down the kidnapped Nick Rendel, the kidnappers will soon have the power to carry out drone strikes anywhere in the world..

The Samaritan is by Mason Cross and is due to be published in June 2015. When the mutilated body of a young woman is discovered in the Santa Monica Mountains, LAPD Detective Jessica Allen knows this isn't the work of a first-time killer. She's seen this MO before - two and a half years ago on the other side of the country. Allen begins to dig deeper and soon uncovers a terrifying truth. A sadistic serial killer has been operating undetected for the past decade, preying on lone female drivers who have broken down. The press dub the killer 'the Samaritan', but with no leads and a killer who leaves no traces, the police investigation quickly grinds to a halt. That's when Carter Blake shows up to volunteer his services. He's a skilled manhunter with an uncanny ability to predict the Samaritan's next moves. At first, Allen and her colleagues are suspicious. After all, their new ally shares some uncomfortable similarities to the man they're tracking. But as the Samaritan takes his slaughter to the next level, Blake is forced to reveal that the similarities between the two men are closer than even Allen suspects. With time running out and an opponent who knows all of his tricks, Blake must find a way to stop the Samaritan ...even if it means bringing his own past crashing down on top of him.

Following the death of Duke Cadogan, talented young rider Duncan Claymore inherits his large estate. Duncan is finally riding high. He's put his demons behind him and is well on his way to achieving his dream of becoming Champion Jockey. However, Cadogan's wealth proves to be illusory, with a manor house and grounds mortgaged to the hilt and a list of creditors who include the formidable George Pleasance. And Duncan's rival on the field, Sandy Sanderson, looks set to shatter his ambitions. Events take a dark turn when it appears someone has been sabotaging the horses on Duncan's trainer's yard. Down on his luck, out of favour and broke, Duncan has to try to engineer a return to good fortune, restore his reputation and bring down his father's enemy of old, William Osborne.  Narrowing the Field is by A P McCoy and is due to be published in February 2015.

The truth has no place in a courtroom.  The truth doesn't matter in a trial.  The only thing that matters is what the prosecution can prove.  Eddie Flynn used to be a con artist.  Then he became a lawyer.  Turned out the two weren't that different.  It's been over a year since Eddie vowed never to set foot in a courtroom again.  But now he doesn't have a choice.  Olek Volchek, the infamous head of the Russian mafia in New York, has strapped a bomb to Eddie's back and kidnapped his ten-year-old daughter Amy.  Eddie only has 48 hours to defend Volchek in an impossible murder trial - and win - if wants to save his daughter.  Under the scrutiny of the media and the FBI, Eddie must use his razor-sharp wit and every con-artist trick in the book to defend his 'client' and ensure Amy's safety.  With the timer on his back ticking away, can Eddie convince the jury of the impossible?  Lose this case and he loses everything.  The Defence is by Steve Cavanagh and is due to be published in March 2015.

As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust is by Alan Bradley and it is due to be published in April 2015.  It all began with that awful business about my mother, Harriet...Following the dramatic events at the conclusion of The Dead In Their Vaulted Arches and the shocking revelations about her mother, Flavia de Luce finds herself expelled from the familiar confines of Bishop's Lacey and her beloved family home, Buckshaw, and 'packed off', as she puts it, to Miss Bodycote's Female Academy in Canada. With its forbidding headmistress and bizarre rules, adapting to Miss Bodycote's is quite a challenge. But Flavia is soon on familiar ground, when, on her first night, a mummified body is dislodged from a chimney, and she is presented with a gruesome puzzle to solve. And the mystery of the withered corpse is only the beginning. Girls have been disappearing from Miss Bodycote's with alarming regularity, leading Flavia to wonder not only how and why, but what exactly is the academy's true purpose, and why were they so keen that she enrol? If Flavia is to avoid the same fate as the missing girls, she must enter a shadowy world where truth and lies seem interchangeable and no one can be trusted. And ultimately she must discover what it means to be her mother's daughter.

The Great Zoo of China is by Matthew Reilly and is due to be published in February 2015.  It is a secret the Chinese government has been keeping for 40 years.  They have found a species of animal no one believed even existed.  It will amaze the world.  Now the Chinese are ready to unveil their astonishing discovery within the greatest zoo ever constructed.  A small group of VIPs and journalists has been brought to the zoo deep within China to see its fabulous creatures for the first time.  Among them is Dr Cassandra Jane 'CJ' Cameron, a writer for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and an expert on reptiles.  The visitors are assured by their Chinese hosts that they will be struck with wonder at these beasts, that they are perfectly safe, and that nothing can go wrong...

This Thing of Darkness is by Harry Bingham and is due to be published in July 2015.  A marine engineer who tumbles off a cliff path on a windy night. A burglary where everything taken was returned by the thief. The suicide of a man in love with life. An accident, a mystery, an unexplained tragedy. And nothing at all to connect them. Until, that is, Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, searching for something - anything - to take her mind off the tedious job of evidence-cataloguing she's been assigned to, starts to wonder if all three incidents are not quite what they seem. It could just be her imagination. After all, she'd be the first to admit that she isn't exactly in the prime of psychological health right now, the darkness she's held at bay ever since she joined the police force now lapping dangerously at her door. But something tells her there are invisible threads linking the crimes, and as she investigates further, she starts to see the outlines of a conspiracy so unlikely and on such a vast scale, that it takes her breath away. And that's when they come for her.

Blood, Salt, Water is by Denise Mina and is due to be published in April 2015. DI Alex Morrow and her team have been shadowing a woman suspected of being involved in a large drug-smuggling and money-laundering operation. Roxanna Fuentecilla recently moved from London to Glasgow in suspicious circumstances and Morrow's bosses want all the glory when she's finally arrested. But then Roxanna disappears. She's left her partner and her two children and something about the situation, and the children's evasive attitude, leads Morrow to question what's really going on. In the nearby picturesque town of Helensburgh, Iain Fraser is struggling to live with his overwhelming guilt. Under orders from the infamous Mark Barratt he's just killed a woman and now he's left with blood on his hands. Meanwhile Miss Grierson, a former scout leader who left the sleepy seaside town decades ago, has returned. Allegedly she's here to sort out her recently deceased mother's estate, but Iain knows her mother died over two years ago and suspects she has an ulterior motive.

Strange things happen in the countryside. And for bisexual private detective Duffy, this is his strangest case yet. Summoned to a country mansion following an unusual murder, Duffy finds the house awash with potential suspects. Does Vic Crowther, the man who called on Duffy in the first place, have a far more sinister motive up his sleeve? Or perhaps his wife, the ex-page three model, knows more than she's letting on ...  Going to the Dogs is by Dan Kavanagh and is due to be published in May 2015.

The Stranger walked into the bar and, with just a few words, shattered Adam’s entire life. His wife’s pregnancy three years ago – the one that saved their marriage but ended in a tragic miscarriage . . . it never existed. The whole thing was faked using a website set up for just that purpose. Hannah lied to him, and has been lying ever since. Thus begins Harlan Coben’s shocking new thriller. Someone out there knows all your secrets, all your affairs, all those lies that, thanks to the Internet, are so easy to create. And now he wants the truth to come out. But for Adam, the chaos this causes is only the beginning. When Hannah disappears, things go to a whole other level. What’s really going on here, and just who is pulling the strings? The Stranger will change your life for ever.  The Stranger is due to be published in April 2015.

Charlie Matheson died two years ago in a car accident. Now a woman who bears a startling resemblance to her claims to be back from the dead. Detective Mark Nelson is called in to investigate her account of what she endured in the ‘afterlife’.  Detective David Groves is determined to bring his son’s killers to justice. But the search will mean facing someone with a more ruthless approach to right and wrong.  Former Detective John Mercer is slowly recovering from the case that nearly destroyed his life, but deep down he knows that he still has demons to face.  At the centre of it all: two brothers with a macabre secret. They’ve been  waiting, they’ve been planning, they’ve been killing. And for Nelson, Groves and Mercer they’re about to release hell on earth.  The currently untitled Steve Mosby novel is due to be published in June 2015.

Also due to be published in June 2015 is The Ice House by John Connor and in July 2015 The Echoes of Their Passing by Michael Marshall.