Saturday 31 December 2022

Forthcoming Crime Books from Faber & Faber

January 2023

Other Half is by Charlotte Vassell. The night before Rupert's 30th is a black tie dinner at the Kentish Town McDonald's - catered with cocaine and Veuve Clicquot. The morning after His girlfriend Clemmie is found murdered on Hampstead Heath. All the party-goers have alibis. Naturally. This investigation is going to be about Classics degrees and aristocrats, Instagram influencers and who knows who. Or is it whom? Detective Caius Beauchamp isn't sure. He's sharply dressed, smart, and as into self-improvement as Clemmie - but as he searches for the dark truth beneath the luxury, a wall of staggering wealth threatens to shut down his investigation before it's begun. Can he see through the tangled set of relationships in which the other half live, and die, before the case is taken out of his hands?

February 2023

He was locked inside an abandoned house. But he's not the only one . . . When a dead man is found locked in the basement of an abandoned house, deep in the woods, there is no evidence of what happened beyond his name - scratched into the wall before he died. The regional police can't find anyone who knew him. But no-one knows the locals like Detective Eira Sjoedin. When her expert knowledge of her home town is again called in, she knows one of them must have seen something. Then, a shock: before she can uncover the truth, someone close to her disappears. Has he fallen victim to the same criminal they've been chasing? And can Eira put the pieces together in time to save him? You will Never Be Found is by Tove Alsterdal.

She narrowly escaped disaster. Beth is desperate to return to normality. After a years-long ordeal, her daughter is finally home and safe. But Carmel has questions she can't ignore about the cult that kidnapped her, and about the preacher who gave her another girl's name. Found, she must survive a miracle. Digging into her past, Carmel uncovers secrets which suggest that she wasn't the only lost girl - and which puts her in danger all over again. While her mother struggles to salvage the safety they've only just found, Carmel tries to come to terms with who she has become. One question, a mystery at the heart of her disappearance as a child, haunts her: What happened to the other lost girls? The Lost Girls is by Kate Hamer.

March 2023

Old God's Time is by Sebastien Barry. 'Have you ever been the custodian of a story no one else believed?' 'Oh yes,' he said. 'You have?' 'Yes,' he said. 'Then I can tell you.' Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children. But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past. A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.

'Do you remember me?' she asked, after stepping into my office. When private detective and former teacher Henry Kimball is hired to investigate an ex-pupil's cheating husband, he senses all is not quite what it seems, and before he knows it he's gotten far too close to the other woman. As the case gets ever stranger, he turns to the only person he can trust, Lily Kintner, someone with dark secrets of her own... With its ingenious clockwork-like plot, and twists aplenty, The Kind Worth Saving is by Peter Swanson.

April 2023

Strafford and Quirke investigate the supposed suicide of a woman found in a lock-up where suspicions turn to foul play. 1950s Dublin, in a lock-up garage in the city, the body of a young woman is discovered, an apparent suicide. But pathologist Dr Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford soon suspect foul play. The victim's sister, a newspaper reporter from London, returns to Dublin to join the two men in their quest to uncover the truth. But, as they explore her links to a wealthy German family in County Wicklow, and to investigative work she may have been doing in Israel, they are confronted with an ever-deepening mystery. With relations between the two men increasingly strained, and their investigation taking them back to the final days of the Second World War, can they join the pieces of a hidden puzzle? The Lock-Up is by John Banville.

June 2023

Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin is reissued with a new introduction by Chris Simmons. (CrimeSquad). Another face, cool and smiling, framed against another rose arch, fifteen years ago. Cool in spite of the summer heat; smiling for the last time before the fearful discovery was made ... The holidays have begun. In a seaside caravan resort, Isabel and her sister Meg build sandcastles with the children, navigate deckchair politics, explore the pier's delights, gorge ice cream in the sun. But their half-sister Mildred has returned to a nearby coastal cottage where her husband - the mysterious Uncle Paul - was arrested for his first wife's attempted murder: and family skeletons emerge. Now, on his release from prison, is he returning for revenge, seeking who betrayed him? Or are all three women letting their nerves get the better of them? Though who really is Meg's new lover? And whose are those footsteps ...?




 

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