Forthcoming Books from Atlantic Books (Incl Corvus and Grove Press)

 January 2024

Three Little Birds is by Sam Blake. Two decades of secrets. One shocking discovery... When a skull is found in Lough Coyne, facial reconstruction expert Dr Carla Steele is drawn into a fourteen-year-old case - but not all cases are cold, as Carla discovers when she and DS Jack Maguire find the brutally murdered body of a local woman close to the water's edge. Together with Carla's partner, criminal psychologist Grace Franciosi, Carla and Jack uncover a tragic story with very dangerous and current implications. Since the disappearance of her best friend, Carla has dedicated her career to bringing the dead home, but this time it's the living who are counting on her. In a race to save another woman, will they be able to stop the killer in time?

Murder Book is by Thomas Perry When a sudden crime wave hits several small midwestern towns, the U.S. Attorney for the region calls on Harry Duncan to investigate. An ex-cop known for his unorthodox methods, Duncan is reluctant to go up against a widespread criminal organization - but the attorney in question is Ellen Leicester, the wife who left him fifteen years earlier, and to her, he can't say no. Initially brought in as a consultant to determine if the racketeering is severe enough to require an all-out investigation by the FBI, Duncan quickly finds himself in conflict with a syndicate far more violent than first suspected. As the investigation develops, he begins compiling a 'murder book,' the notebook in which a detective keeps records, interviews, photos - everything he needs to build his case. But his scrutiny of the gang soon makes Duncan a target. And Ellen, too.

February 2024

Hazard Light is by Laura Vaughan. Cleeve College is not for everyone... When Eve's husband is appointed housemaster at his old boarding school, Cleeve College, she gives up her life in London to join him. But the isolation and loss of autonomy threaten both her happiness and her marriage. The arrival of Fen, an enigmatic artist and wife of the new Classics teacher, is a welcome distraction. Fen doesn't play by the rules, and she and Eve enter into a game of escalating dares, disrupting the delicate balance of school life. Then, the morning after Hazard Night, a tradition that allows the students to run wild and play pranks for one day, a body is found. Someone has been murdered. And it seems everyone has something to hide...

May 2024

A detective duo with a difference... Professional medium turned detective Claire, her best friend Sophie (a 17-year-old ghost) and their pals are enjoying a much-needed cheap holiday in an unfinished hotel on Spike Island off the West Coast of Ireland. Claire is flattered to be asked by the local ghost of a pirate captain to investigate the theft of treasure from the shipwreck that stranded him there several hundred years ago. But just when she thinks she is closing in on the culprit, a murder takes place, and Claire and her friends quickly become the chief suspects. Can they recover the treasure, solve the murder and clear their names before all is lost? Displeasure Island is by Alice Bell.

June 2024

Welcome to Samsara, a world-class spa nestled in the Indian Himalayas where all your wishes are just a gilded notecard away. Ro Krishna has just checked in. With his rakish charm, Oxford education, perfect hair, he has it all - well, until he loses his job at the hands of a white woman with a vendetta. It's stressful, and Ro decides it's time for some much-needed R&R. At Samsara, he's free to explore the wealth of yoga classes, wellness treatments and guided meditation sessions on offer among the rest of his exclusive, kurta pyjama-clad guests. It's the pinnacle of relaxation. Until, that is, Amrita - gorgeous, charismatic, well-connected - is found dead among the trees. As the guests and Mrs. B, Samsara's all-seeing matriarch, scramble to figure out what happened, Ro is pulled into an investigation that endangers them all and threatens to spiral beyond the hotel walls. Because it turns out it's not just heiresses and Bollywood stars-to-be that have checked in: cocktail hour is over, and death is on its way... Bursting with wit, glamour and smarts, Death in the Air is by Ram Murali and is a murder mystery like no other: at once a love letter to Agatha Christie and a razor-sharp exploration of colonialism and class.

John Lawton on What Sparked The Storyline

In which I persuade John Lawton to reveal what was the idea that sparked the storyline.

Ayo — that’s a difficult question but only a literary gonif would refuse to attempt an answer.

I have always known where my Troy character came from.

Firstly a job tending an orange grove in Spain about forty years ago — there were not many English language books around, but one of them was Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park (1981). Still unbeatable, my favourite detective story bar none. It led to a rush of Russia-set thrillers … but I wasn’t tempted. I needed an elliptical relationship to Gorky Park not a slavishly literal one.

Secondly, seeking to avoid an Eng Lit degree that might have left me drowning in Jane Austen. Marooned in a BBC costume drama, the like of which I cannot watch — ‘La, Mr D’Oily, the foxhound just farted’ — I signed up for the only undergraduate course in the UK in ‘American Literature’. Tennessee, Twain, Vonnegut, Vidal … Myra Breckinridge not Emma Woodhouse! … alas this was the sixties — the home decade of ‘bad’ behaviour. I got slung out. ‘Slung out’ is posh for rusticated.

John Lawton circa 1968

By the time I had worked my psych ticket (Thank you, Corporal Klinger) all the courses had changed and rather than revert to the drawing room and the farting hounds I opted for pre-Soviet Russian Lit, with a year’s Russian language thrown in for good measure. And I emerged steeped in axe-wielding Russian maniacs sometime in the seventies. I’m not wholly sure what the seventies were — I was looking the other way when they happened.

Out of this unholy combination — Russia X 2 — came Frederick Troy.

Joe Wilderness. 

Oh hell.

I am not a Londoner. I’m not even a southerner. London was a place I passed though without stopping. But, ’round about 1980 I was teaching in a London University college — ‘Othello and the Incredible Hulk’ and ‘Robert Browning at the Hotel California’ being my most notable lectures. You may imagine I did not last long … but I lived in Stepney. In 1980 Stepney was old London, ungentrified. The Indian settling of Brick Lane was under way, but the presence and influence of the previous wave of immigrants could still be felt — the Jews. I found the East End, the descendants of the pogrommed refugees, fascinating. I could walk into my local pub and overhear conversations in Yiddish. Also, the presence of the East End’s most notorious villains could still be felt. The Krays had been in prison about ten years at this point.

Sooner or later a Stepney kid was going to surface as the central character in a novel. That became Joe Wilderness — of no particular ethnicity, but born to a family of thieves, rogues and hookers. I housed him in what is probably the East End’s most famous street, Sidney Street, where a young(ish) Winston Churchill personally supervised an armed raid on a bunch of Russian anarchists circa 1910, and where Peter the Painter met his end, or not … depending in which version you believe.

The plot matter was ‘how to get Joe out of Sidney Street?’

I could not leave him there. I had no wish to write an East End gangster novel — quite enough of those around as it is.

Russia came to my aid once more.

Sgt.Maj Loudbutthick: “Right, you useless fuckers! You can spend the next six months square-bashin’ or you can go to Cambridge and learn Russian! Nah, wossit gonna be?”

Some choice … so they both became ‘spies’ … monitoring Russian broadcasting and communiqués.

That was Joe’s route out of the East End, my storyline — or perhaps that should be plural — a highly intelligent Cockney drafted into the RAF (the only branch of UK Armed Forces that had an IQ test for draftees), who becomes fluent in Russian, a valuable asset to MI6 … but … but inside he remains the East End rogue of his youth …. a thoroughly likeable, deeply dishonest spook who cannot get by without ‘something on the side.’

Two of my tutors in Russian Government, being too young for WW2 had been drafted into the RAF about the time of the Korean War.

My first Wilderness novel, Then We Take Berlin, sees him as a smuggler of coffee, as valuable a commodity as cigarettes in the late 1940s, from West Berlin to East Berlin. But, as a reviewer helpfully pointed out (I had not noticed) Joe never really profits, money runs though his fingers like grains of sand.

In the second, The Unfortunate Englishman, it is truckload of vintage Claret.

And in my current novel, Hammer to Fall, illegally-distilled Finnish vodka, which he smuggles into a thirsty Soviet Union, via a ‘hole-in-the-fence’ in Murmansk.

Every time I write a novel, it is an end in itself. Reviewers said of Then We Take Berlin ‘weird ending. He must be planning a sequel.’ I wasn’t. That really was where Wilderness ended.

Then, the home team … agents, publishers, girlfriends, say … ‘Well would it kill you to write a sequel?’

So, I do.

And The Unfortunate Englishman was also the last of Wilderness. One of the few happy endings I have ever written. (‘Happiness is for losers.’ F. Nietzsche 1897).

Cue home team. Repeat the process. Offer me money.

And … I was not at all sure I could write a third Wilderness. Could he not just stay happy in Hampstead with his wife and daughters?


No, he bloody well couldn’t.

What changed?

For one thing I had started isolating myself to write at the bottom of a deep valley in Southern Tuscany — a fourteenth century watermill, surrounded in mist, bollock-freezing cold and beautiful.

One of the neighbours — well, not that isolated after all — is the Finnish musician Anna-Riikka Santapukki. So, I learnt something of Finland just in the course of conversation, and pursued it in research, in particular its struggle to stay neutral during the Cold War and its thousand-mile, heavily-defended frontier with the USSR — not a country anyone would choose as a neighbour. And I learnt that in an effort to remain neutral it had, sometime in the early sixties, both kicked out the CIA and denied Russia use of military bases. This country, population under five million, had balls, and in the absence of the CIA I saw a role and a plot for Joe Wilderness. And, of course, Finland distils hooch in greater quantities than the backwoods of Kentucky. ’Nuff said.

I could not and did not leave Joe in Finland. The needs of plot called for more action … and a the next ‘big thing’ in the Cold War loomed ominous and obvious — the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

Any more would be what I believe is termed a ‘spoiler.’ 

Hammer To Fall by John Lawton (Published by Grove Press)
It's London, the swinging sixties, and by rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, in the wake of an embarrassing disaster for MI6, Wilderness has been posted to remote northern Finland in a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad. Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness finds another way to make money: smuggling vodka across the border into the USSR. He strikes a deal with old KGB pal Kostya, who explains to him there is a vodka shortage in the Soviet Union - but there is something fishy about Kostya's sudden appearance in Finland and intelligence from London points to a connection to cobalt mining in the region, a critical component in the casing of an atomic bomb. Wilderness's posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too. Moving from the no-man's-land of Cold War Finland to the wild days of the Prague Spring, and populated by old friends (including Inspector Troy) and old enemies alike, Hammer to Fall is a gripping tale of deception and skulduggery, of art and politics, a page-turning story of the always riveting life of the British spy.