Books to look forward to from Random House - Cornerstone.

Everyone thinks Emma Dockery is crazy.  Obsessed with finding the link between hundreds of unsolved cases, Emma has taken leave from her job as an FBI researcher.  Now all she has are the newspaper clippings that wallpaper her bedroom, and her nightly recurring nightmares of an all-consuming fire.  Not even Emma's ex-boyfriend, field agent Harrison 'Books' Bookman, will believe her that hundreds of kidnappings, rapes, and murders are all connected.  That is, until Emma finds a piece of evidence he can't afford to ignore.  More murders are reported by the day - and they're all inexplicable.  No motives, no murder weapons,, no suspects.  Could one person really be responsible for these unthinkable crimes?  Invisible is by James Patterson and David Ellis and is due to be published in July 2014.

 A father returns home to find that his family has been kidnapped and the only way to save their lives is for him to kill another innocent person.  So begins a journey that will force Special Agent Marcus Williams of the Shepherd Organization to question all that he believes, unearth his family's dark legacy, and sacrifice everything to save those he loves.  In order to stop this brutal and deadly game, Williams must enlist the help of one of the world's most infamous and wanted men ...the serial killer Francis Ackerman Jr.  Darkest Fear is by Ethan Cross and is due to be published in October 2014.

Burn is by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge and is due to be published in September 2014.  Detective Michael Bennett finally returns to New York City - and to the most unsettling, horrific case of his career.  At last, Detective Michael Bennett and his family are coming home to New York City.  Thanks to Bennett, the ruthless crime lord whose vengeful mission forced the Bennett family into hiding has been brought down for good.  Back in the city that never sleeps, Bennett takes over a chaotic Outreach Squad in Harlem, where he receives an unusual call: a man claims to have seen a group of well-dressed men holding a bizarre party in a condemned building.  With no clear crime or evidence, Bennett dismisses the report.  But when a charred body is found in that very same building, he is forced to take the caller seriously - and is drawn into an underground criminal world of terrifying depravity.

 

The Weight of Blood is the debut psychological crime novel about family lies and dark secrets in an isolated community as a series of women go missing.  People still whisper about Lucy Dane's mother who vanished years ago from the town of Henbane, deep in the Ozark Mountains.  When one of Lucy's friends is found murdered, Lucy feels haunted by the two lost women: by the mother she never knew, and the friend she couldn't protect.  But her search for answers, in a place where secrets are easily concealed, leads her to a chilling discovery.  And with this revelation, she must grapple with the meaning of family, the secrets we keep, and the lengths we will go to protect the ones we love.  The Weight of Blood is by Laura McHugh and is due to be published in July 2014.

When Santosh Wagh isn't struggling out of a bottle of whisky he's head of Private India, the Mumbai branch of the world's finest PI agency.  In a city of over thirteen million he has his work cut out at the best of times.  But now someone is killing women - seemingly unconnected women murdered in a chilling ritual, with strange objects placed carefully at their death scenes.  As Santosh and his team race to find the killer, an even greater danger faces Private India - a danger that could threaten the lives of thousands of innocent Mumbai citizens.  Private India is by James Patterson and Ashwin Sanghi and is due to be published in August 2014.

When Ram and Tulsi fall in love, the young woman's parents are dead set against the union.  She's from a high-caste family; he's an Untouchable, from the lowest strata of Indian society.  Young Tulsi's father locks her up and promises to hunt down the "loverboy dog”.  Fortunately, India's Love Commandos, a group of volunteers dedicated to helping mixed-caste couples, come to the rescue.  But just after they liberate Tulsi, Ram is mysteriously snatched from his hiding place.  The task of finding him falls to India's "Most Private Investigator".  Unfortunately, Vish Puri is not having a good month.  He's failed to recover a cache of stolen jewels.  His wallet has been stolen and he's having to rely on his infuriating Mummy-ji to get it back.  And to top it all, his arch-rival, suave investigator Hari Kumar, is also trying to locate Ram.  To reunite the star-crossed lovers, Puri and his team of operatives must infiltrate Ram's village and navigate the caste politics shaped by millennia-old prejudices.  The Case of the Love Commandos is by Tarquin Hall and is due to be published in October 2014.

 

A match has obtained on DNA sample 7426 to Canadian national number 64899, identified as: Anique Pomerleau, White/Female DOB: 12/10/75 the subject is currently not in custody.  For a decade, Temperance Brennan has been haunted by the monster.  Anique Pomerleau.  Killer of young women.  The one who got away.  The one who has now come back.  Feeding on fear, grief, and rage.  Killing again.  Killing girls.  Getting closer.  Coming for Tempe.  Bones Never Lie is by Kathy Reichs and is due to be published in September 2014.

 

London, May 1665.  On a dark road outside London, a simple robbery goes horribly wrong - when the gentlemanly highwayman, William Coke, discovers that his intended victims have been brutally slaughtered.  Suspected of the murders, Coke is forced into an uneasy alliance with the man who pursues him - the relentless thief-taker, Pitman.  Together they seek the killer - and uncover a conspiracy that reaches from the glittering, debauched court of King Charles to the worst slum in the city, St Giles in the Fields.  But there's another murderer moving through the slums, the taverns, and palaces, slipping under the doorways of the rich.  A mass murderer.  Plague.  Plague is by C C Humphreys and is due to be published in July 2014.

Detective Alex Cross is being stalked by a psychotic genius, forced to play the deadliest game of his career.  Cross' family - his loving wife Bree, the wise and lively Nana Mama, and his precious children - have been ripped away.  Terrified and desperate, Cross must give this mad man what he wants if he has any chance of saving the most important people in his life.  The stakes have never been higher: What will Cross sacrifice to save the ones he loves?  Hope to Die is by James Patterson and is due to be published in November 2014.

DI Jack Delaney is trying to make a clean break.  Tormented by his troubled past, he has taken his young family out of London, swapping the mayhem of London for the tranquil calm of the north Norfolk coast.  Except it's not so tranquil.  After a terrible storm hits Sheringham, a body is discovered beneath the rubble of a collapsed cliff.  Natural disaster?  No, this looks like murder, and Jack is the only local resident qualified to investigate.  But when more disappearances follow and the local police step in, Jack finds himself plunged dangerously deep into the investigation - and in the sights of the killer on the loose.  The Killing Season is by Mark Pearson and is due to be published in August 2014.

Washington, DC.  Former soldier and elite CIA operative Ryan Drake is heading out for dinner when he witnesses a sniper attack on a crowded freeway.  A motorcade full of Russian Federal Security Force members - in Washington for a top level conference with their US counterparts - has been ambushed.  Many have been killed and worst of all, Drake discovers that the leader of the strike team was Anya - the dangerous and enigmatic woman he once risked everything to protect.  Drake cannot believe her capable of such an atrocity but with the Russians baying for blood and tensions rising, Drake and his depleted team head for Siberia to discover the truth.  And here he must confront the terrifying possibility that Anya's betrayal will unmask secrets greater and more devastating than he could ever have imagined.  Betrayal is by Will Jordan and is due to be published in September 2014.

Rea Carlisle has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew.  It doesn't take her long to clear out the dead man's remaining possessions, but one room remains stubbornly locked.  When Rea finally forces it open she discovers inside a chair, a table - and a leather-bound book.  Inside its pages are locks of hair, fingernails: a catalogue of victims.  Horrified, Rea wants to go straight to the police but when her family intervene, Rea turns to the only person she can think of: DI Jack Lennon.  But Lennon is facing his own problems.  Suspended from the force and hounded by DCI Serena Flanagan, the toughest cop he's ever faced, Lennon must unlock the secrets of a dead man's terrifying journal.  The Final Silence is by Stuart Neville and is due to be published in July 2014.

The Soul of Discretion is by Susan Hill and is due to be published in October 2014.The cathedral town of Lafferton seems idyllic, but in many ways it is just like any other place.  As part of the same rapidly changing world, it shares the same hopes and fears, and the same kinds of crime, as any number of towns up and down the land.  When one day DC Simon Serrailler is called in by Lafferton's new Chief Constable, Kieron Bright, he is met by four plainclothes officers.  He is asked to take the lead role in a complex, potentially dangerous undercover operation and must leave town immediately, without telling anyone - not even his girlfriend Rachel, who has only just moved in with him.  Meanwhile, Simon's sister Cat is facing difficult choices at work that will test her dedication to the NHS.  But an urgent call about her and Simon's father, Richard, soon presents her with a far greater challenge much closer to home.  To complete his special op, Simon must inhabit the mind of the worst kind of criminal.  As the op unfolds, Lafferton is dragged into the sort of case every town dreads.  And Simon faces the fight of his life.

Atlanta, 1974.  As a brutal killing and a furious manhunt rock the city, Kate Murphy wonders if her first day on the police force will also be her last.  For life is anything but easy in the male-dominated world of the Atlanta Police Department, where even the other female cops have little mercy for the new girl.  Kate isn't the only woman on the force who is finding things tough.  Maggie Lawson followed her uncle and brother into the ranks to prove her worth in their cynical eyes.  When Maggie and Kate become partners, and are side-lined in the search for the city's cop killer, their fury, pain, and pride finally reach boiling point.  With the killer poised to strike again, will Kate and Maggie have the courage to pursue their own line of investigation?  And are they prepared to risk everything as they venture into the city's darkest heart?  Cop Town is by Karin Slaughter and is due to be published in July 2014.

It is December 6, 1941, in Los Angeles.  World War II has raged for two years in Great Britain and Europe.  Japan has gone on a rampage in Asia and the Pacific - and America's entrance into the war is a widely accepted and utterly foregone conclusion.  Los Angeles is mainland America's gateway to the Pacific conflict, home to the largest Japanese community in the United States.  Bomber squadrons of the Imperial Japanese Air Corps will attack the U.S. fleet moored at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, within 24 hours.  That catastrophic moment in U.S. history will be preceded by the murders or ritual suicides of a Japanese family in L.A., a scant dozen hours earlier.  Massive roundups of suspected Japanese subversives will soon begin; racial hysteria will overtake L.A.  The stage has been set for James Ellroy's largest, most historically dense and factually detailed novel - and the first book in his 'Second L.A. Quartet' - Perfidia.  Perfidia is an epic-length novel that will transpire within only 24 days - December 6, 1941 through to New Year's Eve.  A crime novel, a war novel and a historic romance, it will unfold in real time as two police officers, a Japanese-American forensic chemist and a young woman coerced into a cabal of Hollywood leftists work around the clock, while Los Angeles comports under night time blackouts, war fever and escalating racial tension spawned by the Pearl Harbour bombings.  Characters from Ellroy's previous seven novels - including arch villain Dudley Smith, anti-hero of The Big Nowhere, White Jazz and L.A. Confidential - will be joined by new characters - both real-life and fictional - in this grand drama of Los Angeles during the first month of America's entry into the war.  Perfidia is due to be published in September 2014.

When the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, an investigation into a long buried crime of passion begins.  And a group of friends, who played together as children, begin to question their past.  'For Woody, anger was cold.  Cold and slow.  But once it had started it mounted gradually and he could think of nothing else.  He knew he couldn't stay alive while those two were alive.  Instead of sleeping, he lay awake in the dark and saw those hands.  Anita's narrow white hand with the long nails painted pastel pink, the man's brown hand equally shapely, the fingers slightly splayed.’  Before the advent of the Second World War, beneath the green meadows of Loughton, Essex, a dark network of tunnels has been dug.  A group of children discover them.  They play there.  It becomes their secret place.  Seventy years on, the world has changed.  Developers have altered the rural landscape.  Friends from a half-remembered world have married, died, grown sick, moved on or disappeared.  Work on a new house called Warlock uncovers a grisly secret, buried a lifetime ago, and a weary detective, more preoccupied with current crimes, must investigate a possible case of murder. Ruth Rendell digs deep beneath the surface to investigate the secrets of the human psyche.  The interconnecting tunnels of Loughton in The Girl Next Door lead to no single destination.  But the relationships formed there, the incidents that occurred, exert a profound influence - not only on the survivors but in unearthing the true nature of the mysterious past. The Girl Next Door is due to be published in August 2014.

Grandville Noel is by Bryan Talbot and is due to be published in November 2014.  With his trusty adjunct, Detective Sergeant Ratzi, away for Christmas, there's no holiday for Detective Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard as he embarks on an investigation into the disappearance of his housekeeper's niece, Bunty Spall.  The trail leads to a growing religious cult, where a charismatic unicorn messiah and his con men cronies, already responsible for mass murder in the United States, are about to lead a crusade for the ethnic cleansing of the French Empire's doughfaces - the derogatory nickname for humans used by the majority, animal-headed population.  Teaming up with Chance Lucas, a gun-slinging operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and reigniting his steamy love affair with the voluptuous Parisian badger prostitute Billie, LeBrock clashes with both cult fanatics and doughface terrorists, uncovering in the process a centuries-old religious conspiracy that threatens to plunge the world into bloody civil war.  With Paris in the grip of the mysterious crime lord, Tiberius Koenig, and an increasingly violent backlash by human extremists, can LeBrock stop the seemingly inevitable slide into fascism?  What is the secret of the legendary True Gospels?  Can he rescue Bunty Spall from the clutches of the strangely hypnotic unicorn named Apollo?  But does Bunty want to be saved?  And will LeBrock be back in time for Christmas dinner?  No badger does it better!

The loner Erlendur has recently joined the police force as a young officer.  The beat on the streets in Reykjavik is busy: traffic accidents, theft, domestic violence, and contraband...  And an unexplained death.  When a tramp he met regularly on the night shift is found drowned in a ditch no one seems to care.  But his fate haunts Erlendur and drags him inexorably into the strange and dark underworld of the city.  Reykjavik Nights  is by Arnaldur Indridason and is due to be published in September 2014.

The hands were warm.  Soft fingers, but flesh inflected with iron.  Squeezing.  The tongue lolled and protruded from the mouth.  Vertebrae fragmented, one, two, three, until finally the hands relaxed and the limp body slid from their embrace.  Blood turned to ice and sealed the nostrils.  It's the week before Christmas.  Catherine Berlin sits alone gazing at a bank of monitors, each capturing a slice of a vast industrial estate.  A van appears: two men delivering crates, moving quickly.  Her boss tells her to ignore them, but she can't.  Berlin's scars have faded, but she still walks with a limp.  She's broke and working nights as a relief CCTV operator, and looking for something more substantial.  Her heroin habit is under control - only just.  The night shifts end, but now Berlin herself is being watched.  When an old friend offers her a job in Russia, she quickly agrees.  The details are vague: a mysterious businessman with money to spend, a UK company offering a high fee for Berlin to investigate.  Easy enough.  But Berlin arrives in Moscow to find that her problems are only just beginning.  She is soon forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about her past, and her present.  A body is found at the airport: a man clutching a sign with her name on it.  Her pursuers reappear, and her guide, a Brit named Charlie, has secrets to hide.  When Berlin's businessman goes missing, she realises that she cannot trust anyone or anything, if she is to survive.  A Morbid Habit is by Annie Hauxwell and is due to be published in July 2014.

DCI Billy McCartney has gone to ground, disillusioned with his job.  When a runaway turns up on his doorstep, her story plunges Mac back to the summer of 1990, and one of his most traumatic cases.  Ibiza - a joint venture with the Spanish serious crime agency.  McCartney and his partner DS Millie Baker have been detailed to infiltrate the Liverpool-based drug gang responsible for a wave of ecstasy-related deaths.  But their stakeout takes both Mac and Millie to the heart of a dark empire whose tentacles stretch from Ireland to Morocco, and whose activities include industrial-scale drug production - and terrorism.  They're close to their big bust when Millie is abducted by the gang, and killed.  McCartney never quite recovers from it.  The waif who knocks on Mac's door twenty-four years later has escaped from those same captors; a dynasty of international dope dealers based high in the Moroccan Rif.  What she tells McCartney blasts his apathy away, and sends him on a mission that goes far beyond law and order.  This is his chance for redemption.  The House on the Hill is by Kevin Sampson and is due to be published in August 2014.

Charlo Torp has problems.  He's grieving for his late wife, he's lost his job, and gambling debts have alienated him from his teenage daughter.  Desperate, his solution is to rob an elderly woman of her money and silverware.  But Harriet Krohn fights back, and Charlo loses control.  Wracked with guilt, Charlo attempts to rebuild his life.  But the police are catching up with him, and Inspector Konrad Sejer has never lost a case yet.  Told through the eyes of a killer, The Murder of Harriet Krohn poses the question: how far would you go to turn your life around, and could you live with yourself afterwards?  The Murder of Harriet Krohn is by Karin Fossum and is due to be published in June 2014.

Some cases aren't as cold as you'd think Kurt Wallander's life looks like it has taken a turn for the better when his offer on a new house is accepted, only for him to uncover something unexpected in the garden - the skeleton of a middle-aged woman.  As police officers comb the property, Wallander attempts to get his new life back on course by finding the woman's killer with the aid of his daughter, Linda.  But when another discovery is made in the garden, Wallander is forced to delve further back into the area's past.  This is a never before published Kurt Wallander novella.  An Event in Autumn is by Henning Mankell and is due to be published in September 2014.

Morris Duckworth has a dark past.  Having married and murdered his way into a wealthy Italian family he has long left aside the paperweight and the pillow to become a respected member of Veronese business life.  But it's not enough.  Never satisfied with being anything short of the best, he comes up with a plan to put on the most exciting art exhibition of the decade, based on a subject close to his heart: killing.  All the great slaughters of scripture and classical times will be on show, from Cain and Abel, to Brutus and Caesar.  But as Morris meet stiff resistance from the Neapolitan director of Verona's Castelvecchio museum, everything starts to unravel around him.  His children are rebelling, his mistress is asking for more than he wants to give, his wife is increasingly attached to her ageing confessor, and worst of all it's getting harder and harder to ignore the ghosts that swirl around him, and the skeletons rattling in every cupboard.  The shame of it is that Morris Arthur Duckworth really did not want to have to kill again.  Painting Death is by Tim Parks and is due to be published in July 2014. 

Books to Look forward to from Vintage and Harvill Secker

Trouble Man is by Tom Benn and is due to be published in January 2014.  It's Manchester, at the close of the millennium, and Henry Bane is now manager of an exclusive nightclub.  He has a beautiful mistress, a teenage son, and is making moves in a violent underworld to which he is increasingly numbed.  When a young girl is found tortured and unwilling to go to the police, Bane offers to help, and finds horror in a feral community with a respectable veneer.  But, by meddling, he ends up endangering those he wants to protect.  Not only that, he also manages to incur the wrath of an ailing ganglord, and soon finds himself tangled in a penthouse robbery and an underground boxing match.  From the casual sexism of Bane's clubland, to the savage misogyny of a killer targeting the young and dispossessed, Trouble Man takes Bane through a hell, perhaps of his own making, where he is pushed to his limit – and the trouble only gets closer to home.

Dog Will Have his Day is the second instalment in the Three Evangelist series by Fred Vargas and is due to be published in April 2014.  How do you solve a murder without a body?  Keeping watch under the windows of the Paris flat belonging to a politician's nephew, ex-cop Louis Kehlweiler catches sight of something odd on the pavement.  A small white object, surrounded by the excrement of local dogs.  A piece of bone.  Human bone, in fact.  Naturally, when Kehlweiler takes his find to the nearest police station, he faces ridicule.  But the tiny fragment obsesses him so much that he stops shadowing suspicious characters in Paris and follows the trail to the tiny Breton fishing village of Port-Nicolas.  Because someone there owns a pit bull terrier.  A dog that would take a bite out of anything.  Even the foot of a corpse.

  

The Murder of Harriet Krohn is by Karin Fossum and is due to be published in July 2014.  A man is walking through the darkness.  Nobody turns to look.  How little people know.  I'm moving in the midst of them and they walk the streets immersed in their own affairs.  Charles Olav Torp has problems.  He’s grieving for his late wife, he’s lost his job, and gambling debts have alienated him from his teenage daughter.  Desperate, his solution is to rob an elderly woman of her money and silverware.  But Harriet Krohn fights back, and Charlo loses control.  Wracked with guilt, Charlo attempts to rebuild his life and regain his dignity.  However, the police are catching up with him, and Inspector Konrad Sejer has never lost a case yet.  Through the eyes of a killer, The Murder of Harriet Krohn poses the question: how far would you go to turn your life around, and could you live with yourself afterwards?

 

London is steaming under a summer of filthy heat and sudden storms - and Detective Nick Belsey, of Hampstead CID, is trying to stay out of trouble.  But then somebody sets him a riddle.  How does a man walk into a dead-end alley and never come out?  How does he disappear?  And then reappear - to snatch a girl, to dump a body beneath a London skyscraper, to send Belsey a package of human hair.  The answer lies underground, where the secrets degenerating beneath the city's sickly glitter are about to see the light of day. Deep Shelter is by Oliver Harris and is due to be published in February 2014.

  

The Soul of Discretion is by Susan Hill and is due to be published in September 2014.  From the outside, the cathedral town of Lafferton seems idyllic, but in many ways, it just like any other place.  It suffers from the same kinds of crime, is subject to the same pressures from a rapidly changing world, has the same hopes and fears as any number of towns up and down the land.  When one day DC Simon Serrailler is called in by Lafferton’s new Chief Constable, Kieran Bright, he is met by two plainclothes officers.  He is asked to take the principal role in a difficult, potentially dangerous undercover operation and must leave town immediately, without telling anyone – not even his girlfriend Rachel, who has only just moved in with him.  Meanwhile, Simon’s sister Cat is facing difficult choices at work, as Lafferton’s hospice closes its bedded units; and at home, as her daughter is presented with a glittering opportunity that they would struggle afford.  Moreover, all is not well with Simon and Cat’s stepmother, Judith, either.  To complete his special op, Simon must inhabit the mind of the worst kind of criminal.  This takes its toll on Simon and, as the op unfolds, also on the town and some of its most respected citizens.

The Spy with 29 Names is a gripping account of the exploits of Juan Pujol, the most extraordinary double agent of the Second World War, who was awarded both an Iron Cross by Germany and an MBE by Britain.  After the Spanish Civil War, determined to fight the spread of totalitarianism, Pujol moved to Lisbon with his wife, persuading the German intelligence services to take him on.  But in fact, he was determined all along to work for the British, whom he saw as the exemplar of democracy and freedom.  Seeing the impact of the disinformation this Quixotic freelance agent was feeding to the Germans, MI5 brought him to London, where he created a bizarre fictional network of spies - 29 of them - that misled the entire German high command, including Hitler himself.  Above all, in Operation Fortitude he diverted German Panzer divisions away from Normandy, playing a crucial role in safeguarding D-Day and ending the war, and securing his reputation as the greatest double agent in history.  With his intimate knowledge of Spain, Jason Webster looks in new depth at the character who captured the imagination in Ben Macintyre's Double Cross.  He sheds light on Pujol's charismatic personality, interweaving his bizarre picaresque tale with vivid insights into the shady worlds of Bletchley and MI5, and the British and German soldiers whose lives his fantasies would touch so dramatically.  Meticulously researched, yet told with a novelist's verve, The Spy with 29 Names uncovers the reality - far, far stranger than any fiction - of one of recent history's most important and dramatic events and is due to be published in April 2014.

To the Top of the Mountain is by Arne Dahl and is due to be published in June 2014.  After the disastrous end to their last case, the Intercrime team - a specialist unit created to investigate violent, international crime - has been disbanded, their leader forced into early retirement.  The six officers have been scattered throughout the country.  Detectives Paul Hjelm and Kerstin Holm are investigating the senseless murder of a young footballer supporter in a pub in Stockholm, Arto Soderstedt and Viggo Norlander are working on mundane cases, Gunnar Nyber is tackling child pornography while Jorge Chavez is immersed in research.  However, when a man is blown up in a high-security prison, a major drugs baron comes under attack and a massacre takes place in a dark suburb, the Intercrime team are urgently reconvened.  There is something dangerous approaching Sweden, and they are the only people who can do anything to stop it.

 A man is burnt alive in a suburban garden shed.  DI Zigic and DS Ferreira are called in from

the Peterborough Hate Crimes Unit to investigate the murder.  Their victim is quickly identified as a migrant worker and a man several people might have had good reason to see dead.  A convicted arsonist and member of a far-right movement has just been released from prison, while witnesses claim to have seen the dead man fighting with one of the town's most prominent slum landlords.  Zigic and Ferreira know all too well the problems that come with dealing with a community that has more reason than most not to trust the police, but when another migrant worker is attacked, tensions rapidly begin to rise as they search for their killer.  Long Way Home is the debut novel by Eva Dolan and is due to be published in January 2014.

The Son is by Jo Nesbø and is due to be published in April 2014.  Sonny is a model prisoner.  He listens to the confessions of other inmates at Oslo jail, and absolves them of their sins.  Some people even whisper that Sonny is serving time for someone else: that he doesn't just listen, he confesses to their crimes.  Inspector Simon Kefas is a dedicated police officer Simon has worked for the Oslo police force for years.  He's just been assigned a new murder investigation and a new partner, all on the same day.  Both of them knew Sonny's father To Sonny he was the man he idolised, to Simon he was his best friend.  Both were left devastated when his corruption was revealed.  But neither of them knew the truth.

Rea Carlisle has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew.  It doesn’t take her long to clear out the dead man’s remaining possessions, but one room remains stubbornly locked.  When Rea finally forces it open, she discovers inside a chair, a table – and a leather-bound book.  Inside its pages are locks of hair, fingernails: a catalogue of victims.  Horrified, Rea wants to go straight to the police but when her family intervene, Rea turns to the only person she can think of: DI Jack Lennon.  However, Lennon is facing his own problems, not least of all his suspension from the police force.  The Final Silence is by Stuart Neville and is due to be published in July 2014.

Blood Med is by Jason Webster and is due to be published in June 2014.  After months away in Madrid, Chief Inspector Max Camara is back in Valencia, with his partner Alicia and his anarchist, marijuana-growing grandfather Hilario.  In the old police headquarters, the mood is tense, as the chief hunts for cuts - who will go, Camara or his friend Torres?  The two men are flung into action on seemingly separate cases, the suicide of an ex bank-clerk and the brutal murder of a young American woman.  Around them, the city is erupting into demonstrations and near riots.  The king is ill, banks are closing, hospitals are in chaos, homes are lost, demonstrators riot and right wing thugs patrol the street.  The tunnels beneath the streets are at once a refuge and a source of anger.  And as the blood flows Camara roars on his motorbike straight into the heart of trouble.

Dear Daughter is the debut novel by Elizabeth Little and is due to be published in July 2014.  LA It girl Jane Jenkins has it all.  The looks, the brains and the connections.  The criminal record.  Ten years ago, in a trial that transfixed America, Jane was convicted of murdering her mother.  Now she’s been released on a technicality, she’s determined to unravel the mystery of her mother’s last words.  Words that send her to a tiny town in the back of beyond.  But with the whole of America’s media on her tail, convince that she literally got away with murder, she has to do everything she can to throw her pursuers off the scent.  She knows she really didn’t like her mother, but could she have killed her?  And if not, who did?

Some cases aren’t as cold as you’d think.  Kurt Wallander’s life looks like it has taken a turn for the better when his offer on a new house is accepted, only for him to uncover something unexpected in the garden – the skeleton of a middle-aged woman.  As police officers comb the property, Wallander attempts to get his new life back on course by finding the woman’s killer with the aid of his daughter, Linda.  But when another discovery is made in the garden, Wallander is forced to delve further back into the area's past.  An Event in Autumn is by Henning Mankell and is due to be published in September 2014.

Also due to be published in August 2014 is Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indridason.

The Woman in Black is Back!

Today's guest blog is by Martyn Waites.  Martyn is a former stand up comic and actor.  He has written a number of crime novels including  The Mercy Seat which was nominated for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. His short story "Love" which can be found in the London Noir anthology was shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger. He has also been shortlisted for the CWA Dagger in the Library for his body of work. He also writes under the name of Tania Carver.  Today he talks about writing the sequel to The Woman in Black

As you may or may not be aware, there’s a sequel to Susan Hill’s ‘The Woman in Black’. It’s out now from Hammer Books, and very handsome (and handsomely affordable) it looks too. And it’s by me.

 Now, some of you may be asking why a writer best known for crime and thrillers (in fact only known for crime and thrillers) should be asked to write it. Well, I was asked and I said yes. No hesitation, no argument. My agent said it was the shortest call she’d ever made.

 Ah but, you’re probably saying, aren’t there any horror/ghost/supernatural/writers who could have done it better? My answer to that? I don’t know. Maybe.  Probably. But just as probably not. Hammer Books have built a solid reputation in a short space of time for publishing books by writers not normally associated with the supernatural. Julie Myerson. Sophie Hannah. Melvin Burgess. Jeanette Winterson. And plenty more to follow. And they’ve all interesting, they’ve all succeeded in what they set out to achieve and are all well worth reading. So looked at from that perspective it’s not such a daft idea.

Crossover seems to be the name of the game for writers at the moment. And that, I think, can only be a healthy thing. Writers known primarily for horror, such as Sarah Pinborough and Ramsey Campbell, are now writing or have written crime and thrillers. Susan Hill herself has written both.  Writers such as John Connolly, Chuck Wendig and Chris Holm combine the two. And of course there’s Lauren Beukes, whose ‘The Shining Girls’ looks like being this year’s ‘Gone Girl’.

And that’s a good thing. Because I think there’s a very thin line between horror and crime.

What’s ‘The Silence Of The Lambs’, a horror novel or a thriller? Or both? The film certainly works being just as much one genre as the other. The aforementioned Ramsey Campbell has fully exploited this seam too. And I think it’s only natural that some thriller should err on the side of horror. My own novels as Tania Carver have developed an increasingly Gothic flavour to them. There’s no element of the supernatural to them – and there never will be – but they’re certainly macabre and twisted, dancing on the edge of horror.

But it’s that word – supernatural – that, I think, really sets crime and horror apart. As I said, some writers are good at working that borderline. I’m not. As a reader I like books to be one thing or another. But that’s just me. I’m old fashioned that way. Having said that, we, as writers, shouldn’t have to be hidebound by strictures and rules of genre. We should be free to play around and write the kinds of stories we want to in whatever genre or form best suits them. Even if they overlap. However I’m not good at that. I have a very compartmentalised imagination.

And there’s something else on that borderline that I really hate: using it as an excuse to not play fair with the reader. For instance, the thing that the reader has been led to believe is a ghost turns out to have a boringly rational explanation. I feel cheated at that. If you’re writing a supernatural story, then have the balls to say so. And do it. And as a writer I’m the same. I couldn’t put a supernatural element in a Joe Donovan novel or a Phil Brennan and Marina Esposito novel. Just couldn’t. I feel I would be letting both myself down and the readers. That’s not what they’re expecting. And it doesn’t fit with the worldview already established in those books. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do that in another novel. And I have done.

‘The Woman in Black: Angel of Death’, to give it its full title, is just such a book. It’s a ghost story. A full on, supernatural, haunted house ghost story. Written by a crime writer. Except I wasn’t for the course of writing this. I was a horror writer. Or at least a writer of the supernatural. And, once I’d discovered and developed my rhythm, I found it very liberating. In a crime novel, particularly a police procedural, you have to follow the rules. The body is found. The detectives are told not to touch it. Forensics are called to the scene. The body goes for a post mortem. A history is discovered. Suspects are questioned. Forensics and pathology yields up their findings. The detectives, armed with this information, go about finding the killer. The killer, when discovered, must also be believable. Their motives psychologically sound. Yeah. We get it. But writing a ghost story is just so liberating. You don’t need any of that.  Why? Because GHOSTS. That’s all you need to know.   
  

So there it is. I, like Hammer, consider ‘Angel of Death’ to be not the sequel to ‘The Woman in Black’ but the next instalment. Just as ‘Live And Let Die’ was the next installment in the James Bond series of books after ‘Casino Royale’. Does that mean she will return after this? I don’t know. Perhaps she has a long death ahead of her . . .

You can find more information about Martyn and his work on his website or you can follow him on Twitter @MartynWaites

Top British Festivals: Harrogate International Festival Portfolio

When you come to compiling your Top British Festivals/ Top Literary Festivals/ Best Boutique Festivals etc. kindly consider the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate – celebrating a DECADE OF CRIME this year. It’s the BIGGEST event of its kind in Europe and considered by the crime writing fraternity as their AGM! (albeit over the bar).

Harrogate is a top festival destination (and will be the star backdrop of the Tour De France). See some killer facts (no pun intended with the crime writing festival) about the town and festivals below.

WHEN: 18 - 21 July 2013

WHAT: THEAKSTONS OLD PECULIER CRIME WRITING FESTIVAL

WHERE: The Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate.

 IT WOULD BE A CRIME NOT TO!

Harrogate: restorative spas, tranquil gardens, quaint tea shops. Believe us, you’ll need them. Brace yourselves. Cordon off the flower beds, lock your valuables in the hotel safe, and steady the old nerves with a pint of Theakstons finest ale…

Europe’s largest celebration of crime writing reveals a strong female line-up of Special Guest Authors as over 80 authors gather for a long summer weekend.

Val McDermid, who chaired the first ever festival in 2003, returns as Programming Chair of the 2013 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Harrogate, to mark a ‘Decade of Crime’.

Special Guest authors are Jackson Brodie creator Kate Atkinson, Chief Inspector Wexford author Ruth Rendell interviewed by Jeanette Winterson, Charlaine Harris – whose Southern Vampire Mysteries inspired TV’s True Blood and The Woman in Black’s Susan Hill. Men hold their corner with Inspector Rebus creator, Ian Rankin, award-winning crime novelist and poet, William McIlvanney and Lee Child, whose Jack Reacher novels got the big screen treatment starring Tom Cruise.

The 18^th July also sees the return of ‘Creative Thursday’ delivering creative writing and publishing courses and tips direct from acclaimed authors, editors and agents.

http://harrogateinternationalfestivals.com/crime/

Box Office: 01423 562 303

Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (there’s no apostrophe and it’s peculier with an ‘e’) is part of the Harrogate International Festivals. Harrogate features a range of festivals including the Summer Festival, Raworths Literature and Lecture Series, Children’s Festival and Fringe (details to be announced for all the above mid-April)

HARROGATE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS – KILLER FACTS!

• Heard of the book Going South: Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014? It’s time to GO NORTH! with the North of England’s leading arts festival. The only way is up with our northern soul – last year the Festivals DOUBLED the economic impact on the town to £8.2m despite less than 2% of its income is from the public sector.

• The Festivals is an UMBRELLA for the arts with a diverse programme delivering over 300 unique events. Come rain or shine, whatever the weather – there’s a Festival for Everyone’s temperament and taste.

•  The Festivals attract 90,000 visitors annually!

• With Dame Fanny Waterman as its Honorary President and Prince Charles as its patron in a spa town that was home to the Fox acting dynasty’s patriarch – with the once Mayor of Harrogate, Samson Fox – it’s a Festival rolling in heritage.

• The first Festival was in 1966 in answer to a call by Harold Hyde Walker, Chief Reporter on the Harrogate paper who, since the 1940s, had been urging Harrogate to establish a series of regular concerts and a festival.

•  It’s a platform for launching new talent – as well as giving the likes of Lesley Garrett and Julian Lloyd Webber a platform before they were famous, it also featured Amy Winehouse and cult legends Wynton Marsalis, Van Morrison, Youssou N’Dour, and BB King.

•  2013’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival will have a beer brewed in its honour called ‘A Shot in The Dark’.

• In 2012 the Harrogate International Festivals outreach and education programmes worked with over 6000 disadvantaged young people in communities across the region.

HARROGATE – A FESTIVAL TOWN – KILLER FACTS!

One of the things that make Harrogate such a boutique, beautiful festival destination is the town itself….

•  Charles Dickens described Harrogate after a visit in 1858 as, “The queerest place with the strangest people in it leading the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper reading and dining".

• Agatha Christie famously disappeared in 1926 (her abandoned car triggered the biggest manhunt known to the UK at the time).  She was found in Harrogate. Under a lot of stress she was no doubt swayed by its healing spas, luscious parks, and of course, dancing (she was found in the ballroom of the Old Swan Hotel which is now home to the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival). It’s been charmingly dubbed by a national travel journalist as ‘Doing an Agatha’ (escaping to Harrogate to de-stress!)

•   Mark Cavendish will have the chance to take the 2014 Tour de France leader's yellow jersey in the town where his mother lives (yep, Harrogate!) after it was announced the first stage of the race will finish in Harrogate.

• Don’t be fooled by the stereotyped retired ‘Blue Rinse’ little old lady! Harrogate was one of the major towns in the suffragette campaign. Their literature secretary, Agnes Wilson, of 4 Studley Road, Harrogate, travelled to London in March 1912, and took part in the window-smashing campaign, and as a result was sentenced to two months' hard labour, and went on hunger strike.

• Harrogate became known for its waters in 1571. By 1700 the town’s expansion was linked to the 88 springs discovered and the fashion of ‘taking the waters’. It’s said to have the highest concentration of different mineral springs than any other town in the world.

•  Visitors included Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill – a visit covered in the Harrogate Advertiser on 1 December 1900 noting the race down Parliament Street in bath chairs, which Churchill described as 'the charge of the Bath Chair Artillery’.

•  Members of every European royal family have visited Harrogate to take the waters in times gone. Princess Alix Hesse and her sister, Princess Victoria of Battenburg, were regular visitors and amused themselves by racing their bath chairs through the streets of Harrogate.

•  The notorious and great Victorian sex writer, Henry Havelock Ellis researched his taboo book on homosexuality in 1889 in Harrogate; today it a favourite destination of the Beaumont Society Transgender Events - the largest and longest established transgender support group in the UK.

• Harrogate is known as ‘The Jewel of the North’ and is the ‘Gateway to the Dales’ featuring some of Yorkshire’s top tourist destinations in its region including Fountain’s Abbey, Lightwater Valley, RHS Harlow Carr Gardens and Harewood House.

FOR MORE INFO OR IMAGES please contact Ann on 07534892715 or ann_chadwick@hotmail.com