Books to look forward to from Mulholland Books

Gun Machine is by Warren Ellis and is due to be published in January 2013.  This morning Detective John Tallow was bored with his job.  Then there was this naked guy with a shotgun, and his partner getting killed, and now Tallow has a real problem: an apartment full of guns.  Old guns.  Modified guns.  Arranged in rows and spirals on the floor and walls.  Hundreds of them.  Each weapon is tied to a single unsolved murder.  Which means Tallow has uncovered two decades' worth of homicides that no one knew to connect and a killer unlike anything that came before.  Tallow's bosses don't want him to solve the case.  The murderer just wants him to die.  But there's a pattern hiding behind the deaths, and if Tallow can figure it out he might even make it out alive.

 

 To escape her awful life, Luz plans carefully. She quits the drugs. She pretends everything is normal. She takes only the clothes on her back, a gun and the money in her husband's safe. The corpses in the hallway weren't part of the plan. Luz needs to find the daughter she left behind years ago, but she knows she may die trying. Her husband, El Principe, is a key player in a drug cartel, and betrayal will not go unpunished. In this powerful story of revenge and redemption, one woman's desperate break for freedom will change the lives of criminals and cops on both sides of the border.  Angel Baby is by Richard Lange and is due to be published in May 2013

Lexicon is by Max Barry and is due to be published in June 2013. Two years ago, something terrible was unleashed in an Australian mining town called Broken Hill. Thousands died. Few people know what really happened. Emily Rikkard is one of them. She belongs to an elite organisation of 'poets': masters of manipulation who use language to warp others to their will. She was one of their most promising recruits until she made a catastrophic mistake: she fell in love. Wil Jamieson knows the truth too, only he doesn't remember it. And he doesn't know why he's immune to the poets' powers. But he knows he needs to run. As their stories converge, the past is revealed, and the race is on for a deadly weapon: a word. Because the poets know that words can kill...

A series of attacks all over the globe are linked by a single, deadly intent: someone is gathering everything they need to make a dirty bomb.  The terrorists behind it are shadows; their targets unknown.  Navy SEAL Commander Thomas Crocker and his elite team need answers.  They need to go to the source: to track down the material the terrorists are searching for, and stop it falling into the wrong hands.  The hunt takes them through the Yemen, to a hijacked boat off the Somali coast, and into the chaos of post-revolutionary Libya...where their mission becomes terrifyingly personal.  Hunt the Scorpion is by Don Mann and Ralph Pezzullo and is due to be published in February 2013.  It combines his real-life insight with pulse-pounding action and non-stop thrills.

 

At Black Arts, everyone lives and breathes video games.  Including Douglas, who doesn't have much else to talk about.  Then he gets promoted to creative lead on Black Arts's flagship franchise, Realms of Gold, a convoluted fantasy game, and things start going wrong.  Is it corporate espionage?  Internal sabotage?  Can there really be a ghost in the machine?  Douglas has only ever had to worry about on screen danger before, but that is about to change.  You is by Austin Grossman and is due to be published in March 2013.

 This morning, I found a body.  Soon the police will arrest me for murder.  And after that, my life will fall apart.  Who can I trust? Who can I believe? How can I make them see I’m innocent?   Gaby Mortimer is the woman who has it all. But everything changes when she finds a body on the common near her home. Because the evidence keeps leading back to her. And the police seem sure she's guilty...Under Your Skin is an unpredictable, exquisitely twisty story, which proves that there are only three rules in life that mean anything: Assume nothing Believe no one Check everything. Under Your Skin is by Sabine Durrant and is due to be published in April 2013.

Murder As A Fine Art is by David Morrell and is due to be published in May 2013.  43 years after the Ratcliffe Highway murders brought London to a panic in 1811, Thomas De Quincey, the infamous author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, wrote a notorious essay about the murders.  That much is historical record.  In the brilliantly suspenseful Murder As A Fine Art De Quincey's essay becomes the blueprint for a new killer's "masterpiece.”  Newly arrived in London, the author becomes the prime suspect.  Soon, however, it becomes clear that De Quincey himself is the murderer's ultimate target.  Aided by his daughter and a young Scotland Yard detective, De Quincey must learn the killer's identity to save them all from a horrible fate.

Killer Ambition is by Marcia Clark and is due to be published in June 2013.  Would you kill to protect your career? Los Angeles DA Rachel Knight is about to find out just how far - and how deadly - Hollywood ambition will go in her latest harrowing case. When the daughter of big-time producer Russell Antonovich is kidnapped and later killed, Rachel is pitted against Hollywood's biggest power players as well as her own boss, who is desperate to stay on the industry's good side. Killer Ambition takes us on a thrilling ride through the darker side of Hollywood and into a court case that could make or break Rachel's career.

The Saint is back! Between January and August 2013 Mulholland Books will be republishing all thirty-five books starring the debonair outlaw.  Simon Templar is the Saint – daring, dazzling, and just a little bit disreputable.  On the side of the law, buts standing just outside it, he dispenses his own brand of justice one criminal at a time, standing up against crooks, swindlers, arms dealers and anyone he considers a worthy opponent…… The Saint books will come with new introductions and extra content.

Crimefest Day 1 Part 3

L-R Caroline Todd, Peter Guttridge, Martin Edwards, Adrian Magson & Sarah Rayne
(Picture Ayo Onatade)

Day one of Crimefest hasn't finished yet. The final panel that I attended was the one on Forgotten Authors which as I pointed out in my previous post was moderated by Martin Edwards. The panelists on Forgotten Authors in addition to Martin who was a participating moderator were Peter Guttridge, Sarah Rayne, Adrian Magson and Caroline Todd (who writes books with her son as Charles Todd). Each of the panelists spoke about two authors that were in their opinion forgotten authors. Some of them were in fact rather obscure but it was interesting to learn about them and understand why the panelists consider them to be forgotten authors.

Each of the authors after talking a bit about themselves spoke briefly about the authors that they considered to be forgotten. Peter Guttridge spoke about John Franklin Bardin a British author whose book The Last of Phillip Banter was made into a film in 1986 and featured Tony Curtis. Peter's second author was Adam Hall who is best known for the book The Quiller Memorandum. Caroline Todd spoke about George Shipway whose book The Chilian Club (aka The Yellow Room in the US) was seen not only as a political satire but considered to be too close and real to what was happening in the world at the time. The second author that she considered to be "forgotten" was William Barrett an American author whose second book The Edge of Things (1938) drew her to the author. His 1951 novel The Left Hand of God was made into a movie featuring Humphrey Bogart and was set in Chile, whilst Sidney Poitier featured in 1962 novel Lillies of the Field which was also turned into a film. Sarah Rayne's first forgotten author was Peter Van Greenway who is best known for the 1973 novel The Medusa Touch which featured Inspector Cherry and was filmed in 1978 staring Richard Burton. Her second author was Patricia Wentworth is is best known for the Miss Maud Silver series.

Adrian Magson's two authors were Adam Diment and one of my favourites Leslie Charteris who is best known as the author of the Staint novels. As Adrian explained, it was because of Adam Diment he wrote spy novels. Diment did not write many spy novels and as a result of this there is a rather mythical status about him. He wrote his first novel in 1967 - The Dolly, Dolly Spy and his last novel Think, Inc in 1971. Adrian indicated that he felt that the main protagonist in the Adam Diment novels were in fact better than Ian Fleming's James Bond. He also felt that he was ahead of his times. Not much could be said about the Saint books. As Adrian indicated, "he spent his life biffing the baddies".

Martin Edwards two authors were Charles Warren Adam also known as Charles Felix and Canon Victor L Whitechurch. Canon Whitechurch was the author of a series of railway detective novels featuring a character known as Thorpe Hazell. It was an interesting discussion and if anything it made me want to go back home and hunt down all my Saint books to re-read!

So what happened at the quiz! The quiz once again took place in The Greenhouse the pub opposite the conference hotel! Peter Guttridge who was once again quiz master produced his usual set of esoteric questions. The team I was in consisted of Maxim Jakubowski and his lovely wife Dolores, Paul Johnston, Lauren Henderson, Andrew Taylor and a lovely lady called Sarah whose surname I did not catch. The Shots team consisted of Ali Karim, Mike Stotter, Kirstie Long and Ilaria Meliconi from the independent publishers of Italian Crime novels Hersilia Press. The name of our team was The Beauty and the Beasts and we did not do too badly. We actually came second with 33 points. The winners were the International Bloggers who won with 37 1/2. I am certain that what did us in were the anagrams. But such is life. It was good fun.

More people have started to arrive and these include Matt Hilton, Priscilla Masters and Sheila Quigley. More tomorrow! The first panel is at 9:00am so I need to get my beauty sleep!