Books to look forward to from Atlantic and Corvus

One man.  On the hunt for the truth.  On the edge of London.  And way outside the law.  Daniel Connell is a disgraced ex-City lawyer now scraping a living in Essex, a man trying to escape the long shadows of his past.  When an old childhood friend visits him, asking for his help with a case of police brutality, Daniel wants nothing to do with it.  But obligations are obligations, and he soon finds himself on the wrong end of police attention, and dragged into the shady business of a local gangster.  But there is far more at stake than he could ever have anticipated - including the mystery of what happened to his mother, who disappeared months after he was born.  Daniel must keep ahead of his pursuers long enough to uncover the bloody mysteries of the past - and the fate of another young woman, too innocent to protect herself in the midst of a dangerous game.  Welcome to Essex.  East of Innocence is by David Thorne and is due to be published in January 2014.

The Templar Prophecy is by Mario Reading and is due to be published in February 2014.

  June 1190.  A Knight Templar, Johannes von Hartelius, rescues the Holy Lance from his drowning King during the Third Crusade.  April 1945.  A courier arrives at the Hitlerbunker with a parcel.  The Fuhrer calls for a vacuum canister to be brought, seals the documents he has received inside it, attaches the canister to a leather case containing the Holy Lance, and sends it away, guarded by a descendant of Johannes von Hartelius.  Present Day.  British photojournalist John Hart finds his father crucified, with the mark of a spear in his side.  Shattered and bewildered, Hart learns for the very first time of his family's destiny - to be the Guardians of the Lance.  As Hart begins to investigate, he discovers a German occult rightwing organization called the Brotherhood of the Lance.  Hart infiltrates the organization to investigate his father's murder - but the secret of the Lance is more terrifying than he could ever have imagined...

Sophie Kohl is living her worst nightmare.  Minutes after she confesses to her husband, a mid-level diplomat at the American embassy in Hungary, that she had an affair while they were in Cairo, he is shot in the head and killed.  Stan Bertolli, a Cairo-based CIA agent, has fielded his share of midnight calls.  But his heart skips a beat when he hears the voice of the only woman he ever truly loved, calling to ask why her husband has been assassinated.  Omar Halawi has worked in Egyptian intelligence for years, and he knows how to play the game.  Foreign agents pass him occasional information, he returns the favour, and everyone's happy.  But the murder of a diplomat in Hungary has ripples all the way to Cairo, and Omar must follow the fall-out wherever it leads.  American analyst Jibril Aziz knows more about Stumbler, a covert operation rejected by the CIA, than anyone.  So when it appears someone else has obtained a copy of the blueprints, Jibril alone knows the danger it represents.  As these players converge in Cairo in The Cairo Affair, Olen Steinhauer's masterful manipulations slowly unveil a portrait of a marriage, a jigsaw puzzle of loyalty and betrayal, against a dangerous world of political games where allegiances are never clear and outcomes are never guaranteed.  The Cairo Affair is due to be published in May 2014.

Rome’s Fallen Eagle is by Robert Fabbri and is due to be published in January 2014.  Rome, AD41.  Caligula has been assassinated and the Praetorian Guard have proclaimed Claudius Emperor - but his position is precarious.  His three freedmen, Narcissus, Pallas and Callistus, must find a way to manufacture a quick victory for Claudius - but how?  Pallas has the answer: retrieve the Eagle of the Seventeenth, lost in Germania nearly 40 years before.  Who but Vespasian could lead a dangerous mission into the gloomy forests of Germania?  Accompanied by a small band of cavalry, Vespasian and his brother try to pick up the trail of the Eagle.  But they are tailed by hunters who kill off men each night and leave the corpses in their path. Someone is determined to sabotage Vespasian's mission.  In search of the Eagle and the truth, while being pursued by barbarians, Vespasian must battle his way to the shores of Britannia.  Yet can he escape his own Emperor's wrath?

A house of dreams.  A place of nightmares.  Lacey has longed for a home of her own all her

life - a place where she can feel safe, where she and her new husband can raise their first, precious child.  When Lacey views the dilapidated Victorian clapboard property on an exquisite tree-lined street, she instantly falls in love.  She believes that soon its beautiful sunlit rooms will be filled with the joy of the new family she will build there.  But Lacey is mistaken.  The house doesn't want her.  It already has an occupant of its own - an angry little boy who hides terrors that Lacey cannot begin to understand.  Beneath the dark stairway, at the bottom of the shadowed hall, there lies a secret: for decades, no child has survived this house; no woman has emerged anything less than broken.  Lacey has made a mistake.  Now she must fight to survive it - and to save those she loves most.  The Starter House is the debut novel by Sonja Condit and is due to be published in February 2014.

The Gallowglass is by Gordon Ferris and is due to be published in April 2014.  He's dead.  So says his own newspaper, the Glasgow Gazette: Douglas Brodie, 25 January 1912-20 July 1947.  Just four weeks before, a senior banker was kidnapped.  Brodie delivered the ransom money on the instructions of the abducted man's

wife, but the drop went disastrously wrong.  Brodie was coshed in the kidnappers' den.  He woke with a gun in his hand next to a very dead banker with a bullet in his head.  The case against Brodie is watertight: the bullet comes from his own revolver, the banker's wife denies knowing him, and his pockets are stuffed with ransom notes.  In an apparent act of desperation, Brodie cheats justice by committing suicide in his prison cell.  Could this be the sordid end for a distinguished ex-copper, decorated soldier and man of parts?

Alexander the Great rests in Babylon as he decides which should be his next world to conquer.  A war elephant, Colossus, disturbs the peace of the camp when he is provoked to a killing rampage.  Only one young mahout has the courage to stop Colossus.  And when Alexander notices his bravery, Gajendra begins a meteoric climb through the ranks of the Macedonian army.  Gajendra is fiercely loyal to Alexander, the great General who plucked him from obscurity.  But as he rises to become Captain of the Elephants, Gajendra sees how Alexander is being corrupted by luxury and power.  Forced to choose between keeping faith with Alexander or with his comrades, Gajendra must find the strength to make the right decision as Alexander's army approaches the gates of Rome.  Colossus is by Alexander Cole and is due to be published in January 2014.

What She Saw is the second book in the DCI Rosen series by Mark Roberts and is due to be published in February 2014.  When a nine-year-old boy is left to die inside a burning car on a sink estate in Peckham, DCI David Rosen is drafted in to investigate.  The young boy has been severely burned, and is now fighting for his life.  As Rosen and his team begin to scour the crime scene for forensic evidence, they discover something chilling; a graffiti image of a sinister eye, drawn in exquisite detail above the site of the wreckage - and behind it, a series of mysterious markings, etched into the wall.  Could the markings represent a secret code left by the killer - a code that will hold the key to the investigation?

When you open up, who will you let in?  When Alex Morris loses her fiancé in dreadful circumstances, she moves from London to Edinburgh to make a break with the past.  Alex takes a job at a Pupil Referral Unit, which accepts the students excluded from other schools in the city.  These are troubled, difficult kids and Alex is terrified of what she's taken on.  There is one class - a group of five teenagers - who intimidate Alex and every other teacher on The Unit.  But with the help of the Greek tragedies she teaches, Alex gradually develops a rapport with them.  Finding them enthralled by tales of cruel fate and bloody revenge, she even begins to worry that they are taking her lessons to heart, and that a whole new tragedy is being performed, right in front of her...  The Amber Fury is by Natalie Haynes and is due to be published in March 2014.

The Return is by Michael Gruber and is due to be published in June 2014.  The real Richard Marder would shock his acquaintances, if they ever met him.  Even his wife, long dead, didn’t know the real man behind the calm, cultured mask he presents to the world.  Only an old army buddy from Vietnam, Patrick Skelly, knows what Marder is capable of.  Then a shattering piece of news awakens Marder’s buried desire for vengeance, and with nothing left to lose, he sets off to punish the people whose actions, years earlier, changed his life.  Uninvited, Skelly shows up and together the two of them raise the stakes far beyond anything Marder could have envisioned.

 Manhattan 62 is by Reggie Nadelson and is due to be published in January 2014.  During the stifling autumn of 1962, NYPD detective Pat Wynne catches the hardest case of his career.  A young Cuban man's body has been found on the High Line freight railroad, mutilated beyond recognition.  His is the second Cuban murder in New York that year - both bodies displaying the same tattoo of a worm and the words Cuba Libre.  Meanwhile, international tension is mounting and missiles are trained on America.  The city is terrified.  Pat is not only investigating a disturbing, politically sensitive case: there may be a spy on his own doorstep.  Are his instincts correct, or is he about to commit the ultimate act of betrayal?

Four friends, caught in a terrible job market, joke about turning to kidnapping to survive.  And then, suddenly, it's no joke.  For two years, the strategy they devise works like a charm - until they kidnap the wrong man.  Now two groups are after them - the law, in the form of veteran state investigator Kirk Stevens and hotshot young FBI agent Carla Windermere, and an organized crime outfit looking for payback.  As they crisscross the country in a series of increasingly explosive confrontations, each of them is ultimately forced to recognize the truth: the real professionals, cop or criminal, are those who are willing to sacrifice everything.  The Professionals is by Owen Laukkanen and is due to be published in April 2014.

  

No witnesses.  Twelve-year-old Josy has an inexplicable illness.  She vanishes without a trace from her doctor's office during treatment.  Four years later, Josy's father, psychiatrist Viktor Larenz, has withdrawn himself to an isolated North Sea island in order to deal with the tragedy.  No body.  Then he's paid a surprise visit by a beautiful stranger.  Anna Glass is a novelist who suffers from an unusual form of schizophrenia: all the characters she creates for her books become real to her.  In her last novel she has written about a young girl with an unknown illness who has disappeared without a trace.  Where is his daughter?  Can Anna's delusions describe Josy's last days?  Reluctantly, Viktor agrees to take on her therapy in a final attempt to uncover the truth behind his daughter's disappearance.  But very soon these sessions take a dramatic turn as the past is dragged back into the light - with terrifying consequences.  Therapy is by Sebastian Fitzek and is due to be published in January 2014.

Magnus and Oli Jonson have spent two decades trying to escape a past overshadowed by their grandfather’s burial violence.  When Constable Páll Gylfason gets a call to investigate a suspected homicide, he is surprised to find Detective Magnus Jonson already at the scene – the dead man is his estranged grandfather, and Magus’s version of events doesn’t add up.  Magnus is arrested on suspicion of murder.  But when it emerges that his younger brother, Oli, is in Iceland after twenty years in America, Páll begins to think that Magnus may not be the only family member in the frame.  Sea of Stone is the latest in the Fire & Ice series by Michael Ridpath and is due to be published in May 2014.

The Spider of Sarajevo is by Robert Wilton and is due to be published in June 2014.  Spring 1914 Europe is on the brink of war, and two master spies are at work.  – the Comptroller-General for Scrutiny and Survey and the man with whom he wages a personal war, an agent of manipulation known as The Spider.  Obsessed with the man he has been fighting for twenty years, the Comptroller-General sends four young agents into Europe, where they are surrounded by the manoeuvrings of the warring spies.  But these agents are more than mere pawns in a game.  They have a secret mission all of their own – to assassinate the heir to the Austrian Throne.