Books to Look Forward to from Atlantic Books and Corvus Press

July 2020

The Girl from Widow Hills is by Meghan Miranda. Everyone knows the story of the girl from Widow Hills. When Arden Maynor was six years old, she was swept away in terrifying storm and went missing for days. Against all odds, she was found alive, clinging to a storm drain. A living miracle. Arden's mother wrote a book, and fame followed. But so did fans, creeps and stalkers. It was all too much, and as soon as she was old enough, Arden changed her name and left Widow Hills behind. Now, a young woman living hundreds of miles away, Arden is known as Olivia. With the twentieth anniversary of her rescue looming, media interest in the girl who survived is increasing. Where is she now? The stress brings back the night terrors of Olivia's youth. Often, she finds herself out of bed in the middle of the night, sometimes outside her home, even streets away. Then one evening she jolts awake in her yard, with the corpse of a man at her feet.  The girl from Widow Hills is about to become the centre of the story, once again.

August 2020

The Viper is by Christobel Kent.  Forty years have passed since Sandro Cellini last set foot in La Vipera. But when two bodies are discovered on a hillside just south of Florence, he must come out of retirement to unravel the mystery. La Vipera, a strange, derelict farm house, was once home to a free-living commune, but nobody knows what shady activities took place there.  Now, Cellini hopes his investigation of the recent murders will shed light on the past. But in order to reach the truth, he must face traumatic memories of his own as he sifts through the chaos and lies.

The Nothing Man is by Catherine Ryan Howard.  I was the girl who survived the Nothing Man.  Now I am the woman who is going to catch him...  You've just read the opening pages of The Nothing Man, the true crime memoir Eve Black has written about her obsessive search for the man who killed her family nearly two decades ago. Supermarket security guard Jim Doyle is reading it too, and with each turn of the page his rage grows. Because Jim was - is - the Nothing Man. The more Jim reads, the more he realises how dangerously close Eve is getting to the truth. He knows she won't give up until she finds him. He has no choice but to stop her first...

Clean Hands is by Patrick Hoffman.  Corporate Lawyer Elizabeth Carlyle is under pressure. Her prestigious New York law firm is working on a high-stakes case, defending a prominent bank that's been accused of fraud. When Elizabeth gets the news that one of her junior associates has lost his phone - and the secret documents that were on it - she needs help.

Badly.  Enter ex-CIA officer Valencia Walker, a high-priced fixer who gets called in when wealthy corporations, people and governments need their problems solved discreetly. But things get complicated when the missing phone is retrieved: somebody has already copied the documents, and now they're blackmailing the firm. The situation gets murkier still when stories about the documents start appearing in the press and a tragic suicide appears staged, hinting that darker forces may be churning below the surface. With billions of dollars on the line, Elizabeth and Valencia must outmanoeuvre their tormentors, all the while keeping their hands clean.  In a world of private security, private diplomacy and private justice, a sharply-drawn cast of characters - including dirty lawyers, black-market traders and Russian criminals - take part in this breakneck tour through New York. Authentic, tense and impossible to put down, Clean Hands offers a vivid perspective on the connections between corporations, government and the underworld.

October 2020

The Scarlet Code is by C S Quinn.  1789. The Bastille has fallen...  As Parisians pick souvenirs from the rubble, a killer stalks the lawless streets. His victims are female aristocrats. His executions use the most terrible methods of the ancient regime.  English spy Attica Morgan is laying low in Paris, helping nobles escape. When her next charge falls victim to the killer's twisted machinations, Attica realises she alone can unmask him. But now it seems his deadly sights are set on her.  As the city prisons empty, and a mob mobilises to storm Versailles, finding a dangerous criminal is never going to be easy. Attica's only hope is to enlist her old ally, reformed pirate Jemmy Avery, to track the killer though his revolutionary haunts. But even with a pirate and her fast knife, it seems Attica might not manage to stay alive.

November 2020

When a homeless man dies in a fire in London, film location scout Rachael Lambert is determined to find out his story.  Following the trail to country house hotel Hare’s Land in in West Cork, she uncovers a girl’s body.  But someone is trying to frighten her and fellow guest Caroline Kelly, away.  Then Hare’s Landing is set alight.  Will Rachael and Caroline discover the truth before one of them is killed?  The Dark Room is by Sam Blake.

After Twenty years of living on the straight and narrow, Will finds himself ensnared in a plot to counterfeit the rarest book in American literature: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Tamerlane’.  Facing threats to his life and family, Will must rely on the skills of his daughter to create a flawless forgery of the publication regarded as the Holy Grail of American letters.  Part mystery, part case study of the book trader’s seamy side and part homage to the writer who invented the detective tale, The Forger’s Daughter by Bradford Morrow portrays the world of literary forgery as diabolically clever, genuinely dangerous and inescapable to those who have ever embraced it.

Life Before is by Carmel Reilly.  She knew she should talk to him. But what could she say?
Once there had been blame to apportion, rage to hurl. Now she no longer had a sense of that. Who knew what the facts of them being here together like this meant. What was she to make of the situation? Scott lying unconscious here in this bed, unknown to her in almost every way. She a wife, a mother, but in her mind no longer a sister. Not a sister for a very long time now.  Lori Spyker is taking her kids to school one unremarkable day when a policeman delivers the news that her brother, Scott Green, has been injured and hospitalised following a hit and run.  Lori hasn't seen Scott in decades. She appears to be his only contact. Should she take responsibility for him? Can she? And, if she does, how will she tell her own family about her hidden history, kept secret for so long?  Twenty years before, when she and Scott were teenagers, their lives and futures, and those of their family, had been torn to shreds. Now, as Lori tries to piece together her brother's present, she is forced to confront their shared past-and the terrible and devastating truth buried there that had been driven them so far apart.

The Promised Land is by Barry Maitland.  Newly promoted Detective Chief Inspector Kathy Kolla investigates a series of brutal murders on Hampstead Heath. Under intense pressure to find answers, she arrests the unlikely figure of Charles Pettigrew, a failing London publisher who lives alone on the edge of the Heath. Pettigrew's lawyer calls on recently retired David Brock for advice, and soon, unable to resist the pull of investigation, the old colleagues, Brock and Kolla, are at loggerheads. At the heart of the gripping mystery of the Hampstead murders lies a manuscript of an unknown novel by one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century. Brock believes that its story will unlock the puzzle, but how?