Books to Look forward to from Head of Zeus

Some secrets destroy you.  Rob and Anna have only just met Owen and Kim.  Now they've boarded their handsome old boat to travel to a far off island in the Caribbean.  With only the four of them on board, it should be paradise: lazy afternoons spent snorkelling; long nights enjoying the silence and solitude of the sea. But why does Owen never sleep?  Why is he so secretive about his past?  And why does Kim keep a knife zipped into her money-belt?  Anna can usually get people to talk...but this time, does she want to?  After the Storm is by Jane Lythell and is due to be published in January 2015.

The Absolution is by John Holt and is due to be published in May 2015.  The Rendition - An Italian Muslim has been snatched by the CIA.  His crime: a plot to engulf Venice in flames.  The Gossip - Carnivia is awash with rumour and speculation.  Have the CIA extradited an innocent man?  The Evidence - Holly and Kat must find the powerful men who truly run Italy.  But time is running out to save their city.  The Atrocity - will destroy it all.

Jim says he's an undercover policeman.  His daughter Sam thinks he's a liar.  On holiday in

Orkney, beneath an endless midsummer sky, Sam spies on Jim as he runs secretive errands across the island.  What did he take from the old watchtower on the edge of a cliff?  Why is he so interested in Norse mythology?  And why does Sam have the eerie feeling that she too is being watched?  When Sam finally discovers the truth, it will draw her into a dangerous world of darkness and deception...  Orkney Twilight is by Clare Carson and is an original and haunting thriller about fathers, daughters, and the ghosts of the past.  It is due to be published in April 2015.

Paris Spring is by James Naughtie and is due to be published in March 2015.  Paris in 1968 - seething with revolutionaries and spies - sees Will Flemyng's world turned upside down, after a mysterious encounter on the metro and a chance revelation from a rival operative.  In a city alive with talk of revolution, Will finds himself in the thick of the action, a young spy whose first adventures behind the Iron Curtain have already given him a secret glamour.  But now he gets news that threatens the closest and most complicated relationship in his life, with his younger brother.  In the unforgettable weeks of a crisis that claims blood and tests his deepest loyalties, Flemyng lives and loves the tumult of a city in which his private fears teach him the secrets that lie beneath the raucous politics of the streets.  This is the making of the man whose journey leads to The Madness of July - Will Flemyng, trapped with his friends and enemies in The Paris Spring.

City players know they aren't well liked in Greece, but they never expected to face death on the football pitch.  Scott Manson and London City are in Athens battling for the UEFA Champion's League title.  The situation in Athens is tense, and some of City's players are so unpopular in Greece they've been assigned bodyguards.  Karaiskakis Stadium is packed to the rafters when tragedy strikes.  Christoph Bundchen collapses and dies mid-match.  Is it a heart attack?  Or something more sinister?  The team have a crucial match in England - but they can't go home until the investigation is complete.  The Greek authorities are dragging their heels...Can Scott Manson find the truth and get the team home in time? Hand of God is by Philip Kerr and is due to be published in June 2015.

Border Angels is by Anthony Quinn and is due to be published in January 2015.  A charred

corpse and a set of footprints in the snow lead Celcius Daly into the twilight world of people trafficking.  Inspector Celcius Daly is hunting for a missing woman, Lena Novak, who mysteriously disappeared one winter's night along the Irish border, leaving in her wake the corpses of two men.  Daly finds himself hooked together with a prostitute and a hit man in a life-or-death chase.  His investigation leads them deep into border country, a wild terrain of disappearing lanes and blown-up bridges, abandoned ghost-estates and thick forests - the ultimate refuge for anyone who does not want to be found.

Detective Inspector Hanlon is back.  She's been promoted and now she goes undercover in Oxford to find the sadomasochistic killer of two students.  Philosophy lecturer Dr Gideon Fuller, with his penchant for high-end sadistic sex, is in the frame, but Hanlon is not convinced.  From the specialist brothels in Oxford and Soho, to the inner sanctum of a Russian people trafficker with a taste for hurting women, the trail leads Hanlon deeper and deeper into danger - until she herself becomes the killer's next target.  Cold Revenge is by Alex Howard and is due to be published in March 2015.

The Exile by Mark Oldfield is the second instalment in a trilogy that unlocks the dark heart of Spain, weaving past and present together to portray a country still scarred by civil war, still riven by fear and hatred, still plagued by secrets that refuse to die.  1954: Comandante Guzman has been posted deep into the Basque country to confront a man known only as 'El Lobo'.  High in the mountains, Guzman will have to fight for his life, not only against El Lobo, but also against someone who has been searching for him for a very long time...2010, Madrid: Forensic Investigator Ana Maria Galindez has spent seven months in hospital recovering from the blast that nearly killed her.  Her obsession with Guzman's fate has disturbed long dormant forces.  Now she shall reap the consequences: she will be purposely humiliated, abandoned by colleagues and friends, accused of murder...and worse.  The Exile is due to be published in April 2015.

Taken for Dead is the fourth book in the Katie Maguire series by Graham Masterton and is

due to be published in February 2015.  It is a sunny Saturday in county Cork, and an Irish wedding is in full swing.  Drunk uncles are toasting the bride.  The Ceilidh band have played for hours.  But the cutting of the cake will bring the wedding to a horrifying end.  For there, grinning gruesomely up from the bottom tier is the severed head of the local baker.  Katie Maguire, of the Irish Garda, does not have any leads - until another local businessman goes missing in horrific circumstances.  The murders appear to link to The Kings of Erin, a terrifying gang of torturers and extortionists.  But these are dangerous men.  And they will stop at nothing to throw Katie off the trail...

Gower Street: 1883.  March Middleton is the niece of London's greatest (and most curmudgeonly) personal detective, Sidney Grice.  March has just discovered a wealthy long-lost relative she never knew she had.  When this newest family member meets with a horrible death, March is in the frame for murder - and only Sidney Grice can prove her innocence.  Grice agrees to investigate (for his usual fee) but warns that he is not entirely convinced of her innocence.  If he were in her position, he might have been tempted.  But the more he uncovers, the more all the clues point to Grice himself...  Death Descends on Saturn Villa is by M R C Kasasian and is due to be published in June 2015.

Joe Pickett has good reason to dislike Dallas Cates, rodeo champion.  Now he has even more reason - Joe's eighteen-year-old foster daughter April has run off with him.  And then comes even worse news: the body of a girl has been found in a ditch along the highway - alive, but just barely, the victim of blunt force trauma.  It is April, and the doctors don't know if she'll recover.  Cates denies having anything to do with it - says she ran off from him, too - but Joe knows in his gut who's responsible.  The problem is that there's no proof, and when Joe sets out to find some he faces terrifying opposition: the entire Cates clan, including two notoriously violent brothers and a mother like no one Joe has ever met.  But Joe's going to find out the truth, if it kills him.  And this time, it just might.  Endangered is by C J Box and is due to be published in March 2015.

She's only alive because he thinks she's already dead...Everyone in the quiet Jersey Shore town of Silver Bay knows the story: on a Sunday evening in September 1991, Ramsey Miller threw a block party, then murdered his beautiful wife and three-year-old daughter and disappeared...But everyone is wrong.  Ramsey's daughter got away.  Meg, now known as Melanie, has lived in isolation, protected by her adoptive aunt and uncle.  Now she is nearly eighteen and sick of hiding.  Melanie's determined to confront her father, but can she find him before he finds her?  Before He Finds Her is by Michael Kardos and is due to be published in February 2015.

 

The Detective’s Secret is by Lesley Thomson is due to be published in April 2015.  October 1987: as a hurricane sweeps through Britain, a man's body slowly rots, locked inside an old water tower in west London.  He carries no identification and fits no missing persons' description.  His corpse is never claimed.  October 2013: the month of the great storm of St Jude.  A man dies beneath a late night Piccadilly line train.  His brother insists he was murdered, but Jack, a train driver, is sure it was suicide.  Jack and Stella uncover the secrets of the case - but Jack is carrying a secret of his own...

Books to Look Forward to From House of Zeus

The Three Day Affair is by Michael Kardos and is due to be published in January 2013.  Will, Jeffrey, and Nolan have been friends since college.  Their lives are normal, even boring.  Until one shocking moment changes everything.  One night they stop at a convenience store for Jeffrey to pick up cigarettes.  Within moments, Jeffrey comes out of the store looking confused and terrified.  He is dragging a young woman towards Will’s car and shouting at him to drive.  In a moment of madness, he has robbed the store, and she is the only witness.  Suddenly three ordinary men find themselves in an agonizing moral nightmare, debating what to do with their hostage.  For these friends, three days will decide their fate — between freedom and prison, innocence and guilt, life and death.

It is AD 529 and Constantinople is a city simmering on the edge of chaos,  a maelstrom of creeds, cults and cultures.  at is heart lies the Great Palace  and the imperial court of the roman Empire, a seething knot of ambition,  competition, intrigue and treachery.  John the Eunuch, Lord Chamberlain to the Emperor Justinian,  is faced with a particularly byzantine problem: he must discover why three  of Constantinople’s holy stylites have burned to death as they stand  atop their pillars – just as a heretical preacher foretold they would.  The hand of God or mortal?  John must find out before hell is unleashed.  Two for Joy is by M E Mayer and is due to be published in  June 2013.

Cat DeLuca’s short, stormy marriage was a crash course in infidelity – his, not hers.  It taught her everything she needed to launch her own Detective agency.  Cat DeLuca, recently divorced, owner of the Pants On Fire Detective agency, and the only daughter in a family of Chicago’s finest, doesn’t have any pity for unfaithful spouses.  If they’re cheating, she’ll catch them.  But this time her client seems to have set her on the case of an innocent man.  In fact, the suave and handsome Chance Savino isn’t even married.  When Chance disappears after a bombing, Cat makes enquiries into her client.  It transpires that her client Rita Polansky is a journalist for the local paper, but when Cat tracks her to an apartment building, she finds Savino…  standing over Rita’s dead body.  Liar, Liar is the debut novel by KJ Larsen and is due to be published in March 2013.

What Comes Next is by John Katenbach and is due to be published in May 2013.  After receiving a diagnosis of degenerative dementia, a slow but sure death  sentence, Adrian Thomas, a retired professor, decides to go home and shoot himself, but fate intervenes when he witnesses a man and a woman in an  unmarked van kidnap 16-year-old runaway Jennifer Riggins.  Jennifer awakes blindfolded and gagged, strapped to a metal bed frame.  Her clothes have been removed.  The webcam above turns to ‘live feed’  as an email has goes out: Victim Number 4 lives today.  But what will  happen tomorrow?  Can the professor save Jennifer?

Edgar Award Winning author Dana Stabenow is the author of the Kate Shugak novels.  Alaskan investigator Kate Shugak becomes entangled in bitter tribal rivalries in her twentieth murder case and first UK hardback outing.  One hundred years of bad blood between two Alaskan villages, come to a boil when the body of a young Kushtaka man is found wedged in a fish wheel.  Sergeant Jim Chopin’s prime suspect is a Kuskulana man who is already in trouble in both villages for falling in love across the river.  But when he disappears, both tribes refuse to speak to Jim – so when there’s a second murder which looks suspiciously like payback, Jim calls on Kate Shugak for help.  Now Kate must untangle the village tales of tragedy and revenge if she is to find the truth before it’s too late...  Bad Blood is due to be published in February 2013.

Traitor’s Gate is a nerve-shredding thriller based around the first plot to kill Hitler, 

the story of a secret conflict ignited on the eve of World War Two.  Conrad de Lancey is a young, upper-class man who, disillusioned by his  experiences fighting with the International Brigade in Spain, moves to Berlin  to write an exposé on what’s really happening in Hitler’s Germany.  Following the death of his cousin Joachim at the hands of the SS, Conrad  meets up with Theo von Hertenberg, a university friend from their years  together at Oxford.  Conrad and Theo become involved in the beginning of  the German army’s resistance to Hitler’s increasingly aggressive stance towards the rest of Europe.  as the stakes grow, allegiances are questioned and both  men find they stand to lose everything — and everyone — they hold dear.  Traitor’s Gate is by Michael Ridpath and is due to be published in June 2013.

The Abomination is a dazzling, multi-layered thriller set in modern-day Venice and is the first in the Carnivia Trilogy.

 THE VICTIM: a body has washed up from the Grand Canal.  a woman,  wearing the robes of a priest – a desecration known as The abomination.  THE INVESTIGATOR: The trail leads Captain Kat Tapo from the backstreets of Venice to an abandoned Catholic asylum.  Then the case is shut down.  Why?  THE MASKED CITY: In an encrypted online simulation of Venice, secrets are shared, and anonymity guaranteed.  It’s the only place Kat can seek the truth.  THE CONSPIRACY: In the dark depths of post-war politics, Europe’s history was re-written in blood.  Now powerful people want the past to stay buried…  The Abomination is the debut novel by Jonathan Holt and is due to be published in May 2013.

The Boyfriend is by Thomas Perry and is due to be published in March 2013 Private investigator Jack Till is an ex-LaPD homicide detective.  When the parents of a recently murdered young girl ask for his help after the police come up empty, Till reluctantly takes the case.  The victim had been working as a high-class prostitute, and as Till digs deeper he finds that she was one of several young female escorts killed in different cities in the same manner – all had strawberry blonde hair and all were shot with a 9mm in their home.  As the body count rises, Till must risk his life to find a seductive and ruthless killer whose murderous spree masks a far deadlier agenda.

Tyrant Mind is a chilling mystery series: greed, lust, violence and murder  disrupt monastic life in 13th Century Britain.  In the winter of 1271, Death stalks the corridors of Wynethorpe Castle on  the Welsh border.  When the Grim reaper touches the beloved grandson of the  castle lord, Baron Adam sends for his daughter, Prioress Eleanor of Tyndal,  and her sub-infirmarian, Sister Anne, to save the child with prayers and  healing talents.  Soon after the trio arrives, an important guest is murdered.  The prioress’ brother Robert, bloody dagger in hand, stands over the corpse.  all others may believe in his guilt, but Eleanor is convinced her brother is innocent.  Tyrant Mind is by Priscilla Royal and is due to be published in May 2013.

Breaking Point is the latest book in the Joe Picket series by C J Box.  Lyle Pendergast was a hard-working, upright local business owner.  But two men have been murdered.  and all signs point to Pendergast as the killer.  The problem is, he’s just disappeared.  Game warden Joe Pickett is organising the manhunt, but as he investigates, he begins to wonder: was Lyle’s family really torn apart by debt?  Did he really crack because his land was under threat?  As Pickett gets closer to the truth, he realises powerful forces want Lyle not just caught, but dead and the same goes for anyone who stands in their way.  Breaking Point is due to be published in April 2013.

Last Snow is the second book in the Jack McClure series by Eric Van Lustbader and is due to be published in April 2013.  An American senator, supposedly on a political trip to the Ukraine, turns up dead on the island of Capri.  When the President asks him to find out how and why, Jack McClure sets out from Moscow across Eastern Europe, following a perilous trail of diplomats, criminals and corrupt politicians.  As he struggles to unearth the answers he seeks, hunted by everyone from the Russian mafia to the Ukrainian police to his own NSA, McClure learns just how far up the American and Russian political ladders corruption and treachery has reached.  and though Jack’s abilities are as good as it gets, there is much more to gain – and lose – on this journey than the truth about the Senator.

The Detective’s Daughter is by Lesley Thomson and is due to be published in May 2013.  A woman reconnects with her dead father by solving the murder case  that obsessed him in life.  Summer, 1981: the body of Kate Rokesmith is found by the river Thames in London.  Her four-year-old son is wandering nearby, traumatised and mute.  Detective Inspector Darnell cancels yet another trip he had promised his daughter and heads for the scene of the crime.  The murder is never solved.  Winter, 2011: Stella Darnell is annoyed to have her routine interrupted by the news that her father has died of a heart attack.  Dutifully sorting his belongings, she finds the case papers for the Kate Rokesmith murder gathering dust in his attic.  Stella cannot resist the lure of bringing order to chaos.  red pen in hand, she determines to find the killer.

Stealing The Dragon Introduces the San Francisco Noir series, starring a wisecracking  ex-detective and a beautiful, deadly Chinese assassin. When a container ship of illegal Chinese immigrants runs aground on Alcatraz Island, the authorities find the crew have been slaughtered like cattle. Private Investigator Cape Weathers is afraid that his friend and sometime partner Sally Mei, a fugitive Triad assassin, might have been the killer.  But Sally has disappeared, and Weathers is terrified that the past she has tried so desperately to elude has finally caught up with her.  Stealing The Dragon is by Tim Maleeny and is due to be published in June 2013.