Forthcoming books from Profile Books (Incl Serpent's Tail and Viper Books)

 July 2023

Sanderson's Isle is by James Clarke. 1969. Thomas Speake comes to London to look for his father but finds Sanderson instead, a larger-than-life TV presenter who hosts 'midweek madness' parties where the punch is spiked with acid. There Speake meets Marnie and promises to help her find her adoptive child, who has been taken by her birth mother to live off-grid in a hippie commune in the Lake District. Forced to lie low after a violent accident, Speake joins Sanderson on a tour of the Lake District, where he's researching a book to accompany his popular TV series, Sanderson's Isle. Fascinated by local rumours about the hippies, Sanderson joins the search for their whereabouts. Amid the fierce beauty of the mountains, the cult is forming the kind of community that Speake - a drifter who belongs nowhere - is desperate to find but has been sent to betray.

Elliott has never thought of himself as a hero. Until one dark night he meets Rebecca, a scared and vulnerable young woman who needs his help. There's a man harassing her, following her; would he mind pretending to be her boyfriend, just while she walks home, to put him off? And that is that - just a favour for a stranger - until there is a knock at Elliott's door. It's the man who was following Rebecca. He claims he's her ex-boyfriend, but it's clear that he's been stalking her. He's obsessed, dangerously so. He wants Rebecca, and will do anything to have her. When Elliott eventually tries to tell him the truth, the man doesn't believe him. The only way to save himself is to get Rebecca to explain. There's just one problem: Rebecca is nowhere to be found. And now it looks like one good deed will cost Elliott everything. One Good Deed is by David Jackson.

August 2023

When hate runs deep the innocent suffer. Constable Paul Hirschausen's rural beat in the low hills of South Australia is wide. Daybreak to day's end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. But now, just as Hirsch has begun to feel he knows the fragile communities under his care, the isolation and fear of the pandemic have warped them into something angry and unrecognisable. Hirsch is seeing stresses heightened and social divisions cracking wide open. His own tolerance under strain; people getting close to the edge. Today he's driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They're checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don't quite add up. Then a call comes in: a roadside fire. Nothing much - a suitcase soaked in diesel and set alight - but two noteworthy facts emerge. Janne knows more than Hirsch about forensic evidence. And the body in the suitcase is not her son's. Day's End is by Garry Disher.

I have a gift. I see people as ghosts before they die. Of course, it helps that I'm the one killing them. The night after her father's funeral, Claire meets Lucas in a bar. Lucas doesn't know it, but it's not a chance meeting. One thoughtless mistyped email has put him in the crosshairs of an extremely put-out serial killer. But before they make eye contact, before Claire lets him buy her a drink, even before she takes him home and carves him up into little pieces, something about that night is very wrong. Because someone is watching Claire. Someone who is about to discover her murderous little hobby. The thing is, it's not sensible to tangle with a part-time serial killer, even one who is distracted by attending a weekly bereavement support group and trying to get her art career off the ground. Let the games begin... You'd Look Better as a Ghost is by Joanna Wallace. 

October 2023

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carre, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. The Secret Life of John le Carre by Adam Sisman reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. 'Now that he is dead,' Sisman writes, 'we can know him better.'

Scarlet Town is by Leonora Nattrass. A rigged election. A feuding Cornish town. A suspicious death. And a perspicacious pig. Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer the journalist William Philpott have escaped America - and Philpott's many creditors - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's home town of Helston in Cornwall in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another's throats. Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's political patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. Then the second elector is poisoned and suspicion turns on the town doctor, the gentle Pythagoras Jago, Laurence's own cousin. Suddenly Laurence finds himself ensnared in generations of bad blood and petty rivalries, with his cousin's fate in his hands... 

One dead Santa. A town full of suspects. Will you discover the truth? Christmas in Lower Lockwood, and the Fairway Players are busy rehearsing their festive pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk, to raise money for the church roof appeal. But despite the season, goodwill is distinctly lacking amongst the amateur dramatics enthusiasts. Sarah-Jane is fending off threats to her new position as Chair, the fibreglass beanstalk might be full of asbestos, and a someone is intent on ruining the panto even before the curtain goes up. Of course there's also the matter of the dead body. Who could possibly have had the victim on their naughty list? Join lawyers Femi and Charlotte as they read the round robins, examine the emails and pore over the police transcripts. Will the show go on? The Christmas Appeal is by Janice Hallett.

November 2023

No Exit is by Simon Lewis. Inspector Jian and his daughter Weiwei just want to go back to their home in China: but Jian is facing a corruption charge in his absence and risks arrest. Instead he tries to scrape a living on London's meanest streets as an illegal immigrant, reduced to hustling Mah Jiang for cash. A bleak future looks to be growing bleaker still when a triad gang blackmail him into tracking down an unlikely young robber. In No Exit Jian and Weiwei scramble between London's grimiest bedsits and its swankiest penthouses as they penetrate the glittering world of 'princelings' - the rich children of the Chinese elite, who treat the city as their playground. Locked in a desperate struggle, with no way out in sight, It will take all their wiles, as well as some lucky gambles, to come out of this latest venture alive.

Before the Ruins by Victoria Gosling - reviewed by Gwen Moffat

 

Serpent’s Tail. £12.99. Published June 06 2021

This story is skewed from the start. It’s a confusion of the prosaic and the odd, at times even suggesting a fantasy as told by Andy: a woman who hears images. Intelligent and inquisitive, she is burdened with a distressing legacy of abuse, and the current task of caring for her violent and alcoholic mother. 

But Andy is a survivor and she has close friends. Four of them break into an unoccupied manor to smoke and drink and play childish games. Hackles rise when one realises that these children are eighteen and over: tinder waiting for a spark.

It arrives in the person of David, supposedly a friend of the manor’s owners: a school drop-out and petty criminal; clever and seductive, he is the catalyst that one way or another forces the four friends to grow up.

David has a story of fabulous diamonds stolen in the manor’s heyday, the thief tracked down but dying of a heart attack before revealing where he had cached his haul. The gems were never found and must be hidden somewhere in the grounds. David proposes they buy an imitation necklace and play a game of hiding and finding it, the motivation being that during an otherwise pointless exercise the real diamonds will be discovered. One is asked to suspend disbelief that intelligent young men and women should agree to an infantile game of Hunt the Thimble in pursuit of treasure that may be no more than the idle invention of a rogue.

Much of the first half of this story is repetitive and nebulous; you don’t know where you are in time and space and you don’t much care. Things start to jell and turn nasty as shadows are identified and innuendos fleshed out. The grim secret in Andy’s childhood is exposed but neatly balanced by the kindness of Uncle Darren – qualified by the suspicion that even cosy Uncle Darren may have a hidden agenda.

This is a novel imbued with sex but it’s cerebral rather than graphic: nothing to scare the horses. The friends mature: Em has a secret affair with Marcus but Marcus endures a loveless marriage with Andy who has a sudden flare of lust for David while all the time she has adored Peter who is gay and himself obsessed with David.

Such convoluted relationships form the bulk of the book, eventually enlivened with one mysterious death and a murder that is precise and curiously ingenuous. Yet none of this seems to relate to the stated theme of the novel which opens with the disappearance of Peter and his return without fanfare before the end.

Here we have five people: initially bonded, then separating, to coalesce eventually: their several journeys recorded by one of their number in a highly subjective narrative that’s further distorted by her imagination. Symbolism is all so it’s a nice touch that resolution should be achieved in a secret cavern where prehistoric man recorded his own prowess in hunting magnificent aurochs across the limestone walls. 

VICTORIA GOSLING is the founder of The Reader Berlin and The Berlin Writing Prize. Her debut novel is BEFORE THE RUINS. Alongside directing The Reader’s day-to-day activities, Victoria works as a freelance editor, writer and consultant and is a former contributing editor of Berlin Stories for NPR. Offering manuscript assessments, mentoring, expert feedback and guidance, she has worked with hundreds of writers and consulted on a wide range of publications currently available in print and online.

Gwen Moffat is a British mountaineer and writer, whose novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. 

Books to Look Forward to from Profile Books (Incl Serpent's Tail, & Viper Books)

October 2020

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley a new edition of this seminal novel is being published. 'I need to find somebody and I might need a little help looking...' It's the summer of '48 in the city of Angels and there's heat on the streets when Daphne Monet hits the sidewalk. Heat when she disappears with a trunkload of somebody else's cash. Easy Rawlins is a war veteran just fired from his job. Drinking in a friend's bar, he wonders how to meet his mortgage when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will locate Miss Monet, a blonde with a reputation. It's a simple decision, but for one thing. Nobody warned him - better the devil you know... In the sleazy, fearful city, Easy must rely on his instincts, not just to solve the case, but to save his own life.

January 2021

Dear Reader, Enclosed are documents relating to the events surrounding the Fairway Players' staging of All My Sons, and the tragic death of one of its members. Another member is currently in prison for the crime. We have reason to suspect that they are innocent, and that there were far darker secrets that have yet to be revealed. We believe that the killer has given themselves away. It's there in writing, hidden in the emails, texts, and letters. In the events surrounding the charity appeal for little Poppy Reswick, and the question of whether that money was truly being used to fund her life-saving cancer treatment. Will you accept the challenge? Can you uncover the truth? Do you dare? The Appeal is by Janice Hallett.

The Rosary Garden is by Nicola White. It was Ali who found the body of a murdered newborn baby, hidden in the garden of her convent school. In an Ireland riven by battles of religion and reproduction, the case becomes a media sensation, even as the church tries to suppress it. But this is not the first dead baby Ali has found. For Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine, the pressure to discover the identity of the dead child is little help against a community with secrets to protect. Gina knows all too well how many of Ireland's girls are forced to make difficult decisions in terrible circumstances, silenced by shame. Is Ali one of those girls? Because what evidence there is, points to Ali herself...

February 2021

This mother's day you will call her mummy. Glamorous, beautiful Mummy has everything a woman could want... except for a daughter of her very own. So when she sees Kim - heavily pregnant, glued to her phone and ignoring her eldest child in a busy shop - she does what anyone would do. She takes her. But little foul-mouthed Tonya is not the daughter that Mummy was hoping for. Meanwhile Kim is demonised by the media as a 'scummy mummy', who deserved to lose Tonya and ought to have her other children taken too. Haunted by memories of her own childhood and refusing to play by the media's rules, she begins to spiral, turning on those who love her. Though they are worlds apart, Mummy and Kim have more in common than they could possibly imagine. But it is five-year-old Tonya who is caught in the middle... Call me mummy it'll be better if you do. Call Me Mummy is by Tina Baker.

March 2021

The Last House on Needless Street is by Catriona Ward. This is the story of a serial killer. A stolen child. Revenge. Death. And an ordinary house at the end of an ordinary street. All these things are true. And yet they are all lies... You think you know what's inside the last house on Needless Street. You think you've read this story before. That's where you're wrong. In the dark forest at the end of Needless Street, lies something buried. But it's not what you think...

April 2021

The Plague Letters is by V L Valentine. What is one more corpse, when all around you are dying... London, 1665. Hidden within a growing pile of corpses, one victim of the pestilence stands out: a young woman with a shorn head and pieces of twine delicately tied around each ankle. Symon Patrick, rector of St. Paul's Covent Garden, cannot say exactly why this corpse amongst the many in his churchyard should give him pause. Longing to do good, he joins a group of medical men who have gathered to find a cure for the plague, each man more peculiar and splenetic than the next. But there is another - unknown to The Society for the Prevention and Cure of Plague - who is performing his own terrible experiments upon unwilling plague-ridden subjects. It is Penelope - Symon's unwanted yet unremovable addition to his household - who may yet shed light on the matter. Far more than what she appears, she is already on the hunt. But the dark presence that enters the houses of the sick will not stop, and has no mercy... This hugely atmospheric and entertaining historical thriller will transport readers to the palaces and alleyways of seventeenth-century London.

May 2021

It’s the summer solstice weekend, and 150,000 people descend on a farm in the northeast of England for an open-air music festival. At first, a spot of rain seems to be the only thing dampening the fun – until a mystery bug appears. Before long, the illness is spreading at an electrifying speed and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Can journalist Zoe Meadows track the outbreak to its source, and will a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic? A heart-racing thriller, Resistance imagines a nightmare pandemic that seems only too credible in the wake of Covid-19. Resistance is a graphic novel by Val McDermid and Illustrated by Kathryn Briggs. 

Murder Takes a Holiday is edited by Cecily Gayford. For most of us, a summer holiday is an

opportunity to escape from it all: to lounge on warm sands or sip a cool drink in the shade of a city square. But, as the characters in this murderously good collection of classic crime stories discover to their cost ... trouble has a nasty habit of finding you out. From a body found on a beach without a single footprint, to a lemonade stand whose wares appear to have been poisoned and a Wimbledon final ruined by the mysterious disappearance of the championship player, these tales of murder and malice will take you on the trip of a lifetime. So pour that glass of Pimms, grab your sunhat and indulge your dark side: these stories will chill you to your very core, even in a heatwave …

Would you save the man who destroyed your life. When paramedic Megan Lowe is called to the scene of an attempted murder, all she can do is try to save the victim. But as the man is lifted onto a stretcher, she realises she knows this man. She hates him. Why should she save his life when he did everything in his power to ruin hers? Jess Foster is on her way home when she receives a text from Megan. Someone else must hate him as much as we do. The two women haven't spoken in years, not since the night when they were just the teenage girls who no-one believed. And yet this man will bring them together once again. But what terrible secrets are they hiding, and who is telling the truth? You Had It Coming is by B M Carroll.

School Reunions: Love Them or Hate Them by B M Carroll

Our high-school years are such an intense, formative period in our lives. Some people thrive at school while others are utterly miserable. Some are sad to leave while others can’t wait for those final exams … and freedom. I’ve always been fascinated with school reunions which – like school itself – elicit extreme reactions. Excitement. Nostalgia. Competitiveness. Curiosity. Bitterness. Distress. 

Disappointingly, I have never been to a reunion myself. I left Cork, my hometown, at age 23, and kept in touch with a few close friends but lost contact with the vast majority. I now live in Sydney’s northern beaches, a beautiful part of the world where people tend to stay put and raise families of their own. Many of my northern beaches’ friends know each other from high school. My ears have perked up at mentions of their twenty-year and thirty-year reunions. Some stories have found their way back to me. A grown man who sought out a friend’s husband at twenty-year get-together. ‘I want to thank you,’ he said, offering his hand to shake. ‘I was planning to kill myself when I got home. If you hadn’t said “leave him alone”, I wouldn’t be here today.’ The man had been relentlessly bullied at school. My friend’s husband had been unaware of the profound impact of his actions … he couldn’t even remember saying ‘leave him alone’. He’d saved a life … and didn’t find out until twenty years after the fact. Then there was the sophisticated perfectly nice woman who smiled an apology to another friend of mine. ‘Sorry I was such a bitch to you at school ... I have no idea why I was so horrible.’ It seems that school reunions are as much an opportunity to apologise as to reconnect.

Transformation is another prominent theme, with certain individuals keen to show off how much they’ve changed, seeking approval they didn’t attain at school. In my new novel, Who We Were, Katy transforms from a non-descript student into a confident woman and passionate science teacher. She is full of good advice for her graduating students. She wants them to know that as soon as they walk out the school doors into the world, everything can change.  They can reinvent themselves, just like she did. They can leave behind the fact that they were the quiet one, or the socially awkward one, or the silly one. 

But while transformation and being seen in a new light is motivation for some, others want to prove the opposite: that they’ve remained the same. Their high-school group of friends is the same tight circle of people today: no new admissions, thank you very much. Their loyalties and biases are exactly the same, as is their hard-fought place in the pecking order. In their eyes, there is no such thing as transformation. 

Of course, complex romantic feelings are also at play. Our high school years can coincide with the rush of first love, and first heart-break too. At the time, feelings can be blithely dismissed as crushes or puppy love or something temporary and inconsequential. The truth is some people never love as intensely and trustingly again. This is certainly the case for Melissa, in Who We Were.

Hand in hand with those suppressed romantic feelings, are age-old jealousies and betrayals. Annabel is a mother of three with a thousand things on her mind, but that doesn’t stop her irrational jealousy every time she so much as thinks about Melissa Andrews. It was never an ordinary jealousy; it was obsessive, powerful, insanely out of proportion.

And what about the sad cases? Lives that have been lost to car accidents and illnesses. Students who failed to launch into self-functioning adulthood, who never managed to get off their feet in terms of their career or personal lives. The people who are ‘missing’ and can’t be tracked down, not even by their families. Have they deliberately cut ties? Does the idea of a school reunion fill them with bad memories, lingering grudges, horror?

In Who We Were, some of the characters who were self-absorbed and cruel have evolved into devoted parents, responsible citizens, and kinder human beings. Other characters present with all their old prejudices intact; it’s evident that they’re just as nasty or annoying as before. Watch out for the quiet ones, who blossomed away from the herd environment and found their backbone. The ‘popular’ kids, the nerds, the bullies and the downtrodden are back in contact. What could possibly go wrong?

School reunions: love them or hate them? As an author, I’ve got to love them. 

Who We Were by Ber Carroll (Viper Books) Out now

If you looked the other way, should you be punished?  Twenty years after they went their separate ways, friends and enemies are coming together for their school reunion. Katy, who is desperate to show that she's no longer the shy wallflower. Annabel, who ruled the school until a spectacular fall from grace. Zach, popular and cruel, but who says he's a changed man. And Robbie, always the victim, who never stood a chance.  As the reunion nears, a terrible event that binds the group together will resurface. Because someone is still holding a grudge, and will stop at nothing to reveal their darkest secrets...

Garry Disher on The Role of Home in Outback Noir

I say to my friends every year, ‘I’m going home for Christmas.’  Last year someone pulled me up on that: ‘Why do you call it home?’  And she was right, I left there when I was 17.  I lived in inner Melbourne for 20 years.  I’ve lived on the Mornington Peninsula for 26 years.

Perhaps home is where the heart is.  In this case, the mid-north of South Australia, wheat and wool country three hours north of Adelaide and three hours south of the Flinders Ranges.  I grew up on a farm there.  Family members still live there.  I went to school in Burra, where Breaker Morant was filmed and in fact one of my cousins played a Boer War horseman in the film.  A cottage row in the town is named after my mother’s family.  The region continues to exert such a pull on my imagination that I keep returning to it in fiction—mostly recently in the Hirsch (Constable Paul Hirschhausen) crime novels Bitter Wash Road and Peace.

All writing is driven by a question.  Even our shopping lists: What do we need for dinner tonight?  A common question driving crime fiction is: Whodunit (who committed the crime)?  Because in some of my crime novels we know from the start whodunit, other questions prevail: What manner of person done it, and why, and how will he or she be caught?  The question driving my Wyatt caper novels is: Will he get away with it?  If there’s no question nudging us, we only get as far as writing ‘Chapter One’ at the head of the first page.

But a theme may pose a question and therefore drive a book.  We don’t generally think of crime novels as having a theme.  You read one at the beach and leave it behind in the holiday house, fingerprinted with sunblock.

I think crime novels can tell us more about human frailty and the world we live in than literary novels.  What more profound theme than crime and punishment?  But one of fiction’s enduring themes is the search for a true home—a place; the arms of a lover; peace of mind.

When I wrote the first Hirsch novel, Bitter Wash Road, I asked myself: Who is going to filter the story to the reader?  An insider?  Most urban-based investigators are insiders: Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus in Edinburgh, for example.  We readers might find Edinburgh unfamiliar or unsettling but can rest assured that Rebus, our guide, has always lived there and possesses wide-ranging and penetrating insider knowledge.

But in a cluster of recent Australian crime novels, termed ‘outback noir’, the investigations are carried out from scratch by figures who are outsiders or newcomers to varying degrees.  They lack experience and full or recent local knowledge.  

My character Hirsch is a city boy, a disgraced Adelaide detective who’s been ‘busted’ down to uniform and sent to a little one-officer police station in the outback.  He’s no V. I. Warshawski, familiar with every Chicago alleyway.  In Chris Hammer’s Scrublands we have a big city journalist writing an investigative piece about a mass shooting in an outback town he finds baffling.  In Jane Harper’s The Dry a federal policeman, returning to investigate a family annihilation in his childhood hometown, finds that he must learn the place all over again.

These investigators never feel quite at home, in other words—reinforced by the fact that their actual homes are circumscribed.  Hirsch lives in three cramped rooms at the back of the police station—which is itself the front room of a little house on a rural highway—when he’s not spending all day in his other ‘home’, his police SUV.  In Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore the main character resides mostly in two rooms of a house in need of repair (indeed, owing to injuries, he spends long periods in an armchair by an open fire).  Home for Chris Hammer’s Scarsden in a motel room, and for Jane Harper’s Falk a room above the bar of the town pub, a space he shares with a huntsman spider.  Makeshift, unloved, unlovely homes that underscore their outsider/newcomer status.

And so we have a double investigation in these novels, one tied to the other: a character trying simultaneously to decipher a crime and a place.  This imparts an extra layer of energy and suspense to outback noir and helps to account for its current popularity.

Bitter Wash Road by Garry Disher. (published by Viper Books) Out now.

One dead-end posting.  One dead body, a tragic accident?  That’s what they want you to think... Constable Paul 'Hirsch' Hirschhausen is a whistle-blower. Formerly a promising metropolitan detective, now hated and despised, he's been exiled to a one-cop station in South Australia's wheatbelt. So when he heads up Bitter Wash Road to investigate gunfire and finds himself cut off without backup, there are two possibilities. Either he's found the fugitive killers thought to be in the area. Or his 'backup' is about to put a bullet in him.  He's wrong on both counts. But Tiverton - with its stagnant economy, entrenched racism and rural isolation - has more crime than one constable can handle. And when the next call-out takes him to the body of a sixteen-year-old girl, it's clear that whether or not Hirsch finds her killer, his past may well catch up with him.

Books to Look forward to from Serpent's Tail and Viper

July 2020

Resident is by David Jackson.  Thomas Brogan is a serial killer. Having left a trail of bodies in his wake, and with the police hot on his heels, it seems like Thomas has nowhere left to hide. That is until he breaks into an abandoned house at the end of a terrace on a quiet street. And when he climbs up into the loft, he realises that the can drop down into all the other houses on the street through the shared attic space. That's when the real fun begins. Because the one thing that Thomas enjoys even more than killing, is playing games with his victims. And his new neighbours have more than enough dark secrets to make this game his best one yet... Do you fear The Resident? Soon you'll be dying to meet him. '

August 2020

Two boys loved her. But which one buried her? Two years ago, teenagers Rob and Paige broke into the house of Paige's school counsellor and stole only a necklace, but traumatised their victims in the process. No one knows why. And Paige hasn't been seen since that night. Having spent her life in children's homes and the foster system, no one cared enough to look for her. Now Rob is out of prison, and probation officer Wren Reynolds has been tasked with his rehabilitation. But Wren has her own reasons for taking on Rob as a client. Convinced that Rob knows what happened to Paige, and hiding a lifetime of secrets from her heavily pregnant wife, Wren's obsession with finding a missing girl may tear her family apart...  The Knocks is by Kate Simants

October 2020

Constable Paul Hirschhausen runs a one-cop station in the dry farming country south of the Flinders Ranges. He’s still new in town but his community work – welfare checks and a light touch – is starting to pay off. Now Christmas is here and, apart from a grass fire, two boys stealing a vehicle and Brenda Flann entering the front bar of the pub without exiting her car, Hirsch’s life has been peaceful. Until he’s called to an incident on Kitchener Street, a strange and vicious attack that sickens the community. And when the Sydney police ask him to look in on a family living on a forgotten back road, it doesn’t look like a season of goodwill at all ...   Peace is by Garry Disher.

Forthcoming Books from Profile Books (Incl Serpent's Tail and Viper)

February 2020

A Famished Heart is by Nicola White.  Her head was bowed, and the hands braced on the chair arms were not like hands at all, but the dry dark claws of a bird... The Macnamara sisters hadn't been seen for months before anyone noticed. It was Father Timoney who finally broke down the door, who saw what had become of them. Berenice was sitting in her armchair, surrounded by religious tracts. Rosaleen had crawled under her own bed, her face frozen in terror. Both had starved themselves to death. Francesca Macnamara returns to Dublin after decades in the US, to find her family in ruins. Meanwhile, Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are convinced that there is more to the deaths than suicide. Because what little evidence there is, shows that someone was watching the sisters die...

March 2020

The Broken Ones is by Ren Richards.  When her child was taken what did she really see? A bestselling true crime writer, Nell Way tells other people's stories. But there is one story Nell won't tell. Ten years ago and with a different name, she was a teenage mother with a four-year-old she found desperately hard to love. Then the little girl disappeared, and Nell has never shaken off the shadow of suspicion. As she begins to interview the subject of her next book - a woman convicted of murdering her twin sister - it becomes clear that someone has uncovered her true identity. And they know that Nell didn't tell the truth about the day her daughter disappeared...

April 2020

Bitter Wash Road is by Garry Disher.  Hirsch is a whistle-blower. Formerly a promising metropolitan detective, now hated and despised, he's been exiled to a one-cop station in South Australia's wheatbelt. Threats. Pistol cartridge in the mailbox. So when he heads up Bitter Wash Road to investigate gunfire and finds himself cut off without backup, there are two possibilities. Either he's found the fugitive killers thought to be in the area. Or his 'backup' is about to put a bullet in him. He's wrong on both counts. But Tiverton when the next call-out takes him to the body of a sixteen-year-old girl, his investigation has disturbing echoes of the past he's trying to leave behind...

May 2020

It's been twenty years but all is not forgiven. Katy is not the shy schoolgirl she once was, and she's looking forward to showing her classmates who she's become. Annabel was the queen bee. But her fall from grace changed her life forever. Zach was cruel, but he thinks he's changed. Robbie was a target. And he never stood a chance. The reunion will bring together friends and enemies, many for the first time in decades. But someone is still holding a grudge... Who We Were is by B M Carroll.

Books to Look Forward to From Serpent's Tail

September 2019

Heaven, My Home is by Attica Locke. When the young son of an Aryan Brotherhood of Texas gang captain goes missing, Ranger Darren Matthews has no choice but to investigate the crime. Following the election of Donald Trump, a new wave of racial violence has swept the state. Dark, swampy and filled with skeletal trees, Caddo Lake is so large it crosses into Lousiana. This is deep country and the rule of law doesn't mean much to the Brotherhood, beyond what it can do for them. A further complication is that Brotherhood is squatting on the land of a former Freedmen's community, and one of the last descendants of these former slaves is actually a suspect in the possible murder of the missing boy. Instructed by his lieutenant to use the investigation to gather more evidence that might help to take down the Texas chapter of the Brotherhood, Darren is playing very dangerous game indeed.

October 2019

This Little Dark Place is by A S Hatch.  How well do you know your girlfriend? How well do you know your lover? How well do you know yourself? Daniel and Victoria are together. They're trying for a baby. Ruby is in prison, convicted of assault on an abusive partner. But when Daniel joins a pen pal program for prisoners, he and Ruby make contact. At first the messages are polite, neutral - but soon they find themselves revealing more and more about themselves. Their deepest fears, their darkest desires. And then, one day, Ruby comes to find Daniel. And now he must decide who to choose - and who to trust.

Crime books to look forward to from Serpent's Tail

Northern Ireland’s most charismatic detective inspector returns in the latest instalment of Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy Thrillers It’s just the same things over and again for Sean Duffy. Riot duty. Heartbreak. Cases he can solve but never get to court. But what detective gets two locked room mysteries in one career? When journalist Lily Bigelow is found dead in the courtyard of Carrickfergus castle, it looks like a suicide. But there are just a few things that bother Duffy enough to keep the case file open. Which is how he finds out that she was working on a devastating investigation of corruption and abuse at the highest levels of power in the UK and beyond. And so Duffy has two impossible problems on his desk: who killed Lily Bigelow? And what were they trying to hide?  Rain Dogs is by Adrian McKinty and is due to be published in January 2016.

She Died Young is by Elizabeth Wilson and is due to be published in March 2016.  The Cold War is in full swing but DCI McGovern has more domestic concerns London, 1956. A young woman has been found dead in a hotel in King’s Cross. Looks like an accident, and Scotland Yard’s not interested in accidents. But Fleet Street journalist Gerry Blackstone thinks there’s more to it than that. Meanwhile, Oxford is filling with Hungarian émigrés fleeing the failed revolution. With the memories of Burgess and Maclean’s defection still raw, Special Branch is concerned that there could be Soviet spies among the genuine refugees and wants Jack McGovern on hand to keep an eye out. As McGovern carries out his casework in Oxford and Blackstone investigates the King’s Cross death in London, clues start to emerge that, somehow, the two cases might be linked. And underneath everything, there might be something even more sinister going on …

Talking Pleasantville and Empire with Attica Locke

Attica Locke © Ayo Onatade April 2015

Attica Locke is the author of three novels.  Her first novel Black Water Rising was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, nominated for an Edgar Award, a NAACP Image Award and a Strand Magazine Critics Award. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Award.  It also introduced readers to lawyer Jay Porter.  Her second novel The Cutting Season won the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence was long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.  Her latest book is Pleasantville and sees the return of Jay Porter now and environmental lawyer. In this interview she talks about the new book and being a writer on the hit series Empire!

Ayo:   For those who have not yet read Pleasantville – could you give a brief       explanation of what it is about?

Attica: In 1996, during a contentious mayoral race in Houston, Texas, a block-walker – the people who leave fliers for candidates at your doorstep – goes missing in the tiny hamlet of Pleasantville, in northeast Houston.  Jay Porter, who has become an environmental lawyer, represents the neighbourhood in a lawsuit against a chemical company, gets sucked into the case when the relative of a prominent Pleasantville family is accused of having something to do with the crime.  Jay eventually defends the man in court, a case that inadvertently dissects a crooked election.

Ayo:   What made you decide to go back to the character of Jay Porter in what is in essence a sequel to your brilliant debut novel Black Water Rising?

Attica: In truth, I resisted writing a “sequel.”  I thought Jay’s story was done.  But then my father ran for mayor of Houston in 2009, and I got to see a part of the political process that not many get to see up close, and I was fascinated by the ugliness of politics and devastated at the same time.  I knew I wanted to write about an election in Houston.  Still, I was going to write that book from another character’s point of view.  But the more I realized that the book would be looking in some ways deal with the on-going contradictions around race in America, post-civil rights movement, the more I realized that Jay was the right character through which to tell the story.

Ayo:   In Pleasantville Jay Porter of course finds himself back in court.  He really didn’t want to be there as he is dealing with lots of other issues. Was this deliberate?

Attica: Yes.  One of the things that made me wary of writing a “sequel” was the fear that readers would want an experience identical to Black Water Rising.  I wanted it to be a different book and Jay to be a different man.  But I also had to give him real challenges to overcome.  The changes in his personal life are a part of that.  And they mirror changes in my own life.  I wanted Jay to again have to force himself to stand up and speak for what’s right.

Ayo:   There is a lot of history about Pleasantville in Houston.  Is there a specific reason why you decided to write about it?

Attica: I grew up in Houston, but didn’t know the neighbourhood of Pleasantville until my father ran for mayor in 2009.  I went to a candidate forum there – in what at the time was a middle class neighbourhood a little worse for the wear.  I didn’t understand why every candidate was coming to Pleasantville figuratively on their knees begging for votes.  What was so special about this place?  When I learned the history of the place, then I understood.  Pleasantville was founded in 1949 as a planned community for Negro families of means, one of the first its kind in the United States.  Doctors, teachers, engineers, and lawyers moved in, some able to own their own homes for the first time.  The building of the neighbourhood also created a brand new voting district in the middle of the state.  Pleasantville since its inception has had a rich history of civic engagement.  In fact their precinct has been nicknamed “the might 259^th” by politicians who come courting for their votes every election cycle.  There’s a quote that opens the book that appeared in the Houston Chronicle, “Every politician worth his salt knows the road to elected office goes through Pleasantville.”

Ayo:   Politics plays a huge part in this novel, do you have any strong political views and if so did any of them manage to find their way into your novel?

Attica: I think anyone who reads the book – or any of my books for that matter – will know my politics swing hard to the left.  Politics are in everything I do, naturally.  I am interested in the distribution of power, in every way.  And it comes out naturally in what I write.

Ayo:   Was there any specific reason you decided to set it in 1996?

Attica: 1996 was right after The Houston Post folded, and the city became the first major

metropolis in America to have only one newspaper.  I strongly feel that my father’s election was affected by the fact that there was only one newspaper in the city.  They got to control the narrative of the election and there was never a counter view.

Ayo:   Do you enjoy writing about your home town Houston and do you think Jay Porter would make of Houston now?

Attica: I love writing about Houston.  As for how Jay would feel about the city now, I may have to write a book to find out.

Attica Locke and Ayo Onatade © Ayo Onatade April 2015

Ayo:   You have been heavily involved in Empire as co-producer and writer.  How did this come about and how pleased are you about the huge success it has been?

Attica: I was a Hollywood screenwriter for years before I wrote a novel.  I was very good at getting paid well to write movies that never got made.  The difficulty of making movies is part of the reason I started writing books.  During that time, I watched as TV has consistently gotten more and more interesting, and the kind of movies I wanted to make – grown-up dramas, political thrillers, great character studies – those stories have all moved to TV.  That’s where some of the most interesting work in Hollywood is right now.  I told my agents, “I want to play to.”  I went on a lot of meetings and read a lot of scripts, and Empire was a standout from the first page of the pilot script.  I went to lots of meetings with the executive producers and the studio and then I got the job.  It has been one of the most fun experiences of my life.

Ayo:   What is the best thing for you being a writer on this show?

Attica: The writers’ room.  Everyone makes me laugh.  I’ve made friends for life.

Ayo:   You have managed to have several cameos from a number of really well known musical artists.  How have you managed the challenges when it comes to the music and how have you decided which artists to have cameos?  You have had for example Mary J Blige and Jennifer Hudson on the show.

Attica: In the beginning, Timbaland and Lee Daniels called in a lot of favours.  No one knew the show would blow up like it has.  So no one was necessarily knocking down our doors. But I think once people heard the music that was being produced and word got around, artists were calling us to be on the show.  The music is one of the bigger challenges on the show.  It’s all original and the actors have to record while also shooting the show.  It’s to the credit of Timbaland and Jim Beanz that working under incredible time constraints they created such incredible music.

Ayo:   Timbaland and Jim Beanz are heavily involved with the music for Empire and the soundtrack for season 1 has just been released. Does the music encompass all that you think it should and do you have any favourite tracks.

Attica: I love the music.  I listen to it at the gym.  I am incredibly impressed with Timbaland and Jim Beanz’s ability to take a few sentences, snippet of an idea, from the writers and create music that adds another emotional layer to the storytelling.  They are geniuses, pure and simple.  Favourite songs: Conqueror, Remember the Music, Drip Drop and Keep it Movin’.

Ayo:   One of things about Empire which some people might miss is the social issues that it also deals with like homophobia and abuse.  Was this intentional?

Attica: That was in the pilot script and dealt with in a way I had never seen before in the pilot episode.  It’s in the DNA of the show.  Lee Daniels has said that some of the storyline about young Jamal and his father’s rejection of him is taken from his own life.

Ayo:   Any hints that you can reveal about season 2 of Empire?

Attica: My lips are sealed.

Ayo:   Aside from Empire, what are you working on next?

Attica: Being a mom and a dreaming up my next book.

Pleasantville –

Fifteen years after the events in Black Water Rising, Jay Porter is struggling to cope with catastrophic changes in his personal life and the disintegration for his environmental law practice. His victory against Cole Oil is still the crown jewel of his career, even if he hasn’t yet seen a dime, thanks to appeals. But time has taken its toll. Tired and restless, he’s ready to quit.

When a girl goes missing on election night, 1996, in the neighbourhood of Pleasantville – a hamlet for upwardly mobile blacks on the north side of Houston – single father Jay is deeply disturbed. He’s been representing Pleasantville in the wake of a chemical fire, and the case is dragging on, raising doubts about his ability.

The missing girl was a volunteer for one of the local mayoral candidates, and her disappearance complicates an already heated campaign. When the nephew of a candidate, a Pleasantville local, is arrested, Jay reluctantly finds himself serving as a defense attorney. With a man’s life and his own reputation on the line, Jay is about to try his first murder in a case that will also put the electoral process on trial, exposing the dark side of power and those determined to keep it

More information about Attica Locke and her books can be found on her website.  You can also follow her on Twitter @atticalocke and find her on Facebook.  

A review of Pleasantville can be found here.

Pleasantville by Attica Locke is out on 16^th April 2015 £14.99 (Serpent’s Tail)

Interview ©Ayo Onatade/ Shots April 2015