Norwegian by Night is the debut novel by Derek B Miller and is
due to be published in February 2013. He will not admit it to Rhea and Lars –
never, of course not – but Sheldon can’t help but wonder what it is he’s doing
here . . .Eighty-two years old, and recently widowed, Sheldon Horowitz has grudgingly
moved to Oslo, with his grand-daughter and her Norwegian husband. An ex-Marine, he talks often to the ghosts of
his past – the friends he lost in the Pacific and the son who followed him into
the US Army, and to his death in Vietnam.
When Sheldon witnesses the murder of a woman in his apartment complex, he
rescues her six-year-old son and decides to run. Pursued by both the Balkan gang responsible
for the murder, and the Norwegian police, he has to rely on training from over half
a century before to try and keep the boy safe.
Against a strange and foreign landscape, this unlikely couple, who can’t
speak the same language; start to form a bond that may just save them
both. An extraordinary debut, featuring a
memorable hero, Norwegian by Night is
the last adventure of a man still trying to come to terms with the tragedies of
his life.
A beautiful teenage girl,
Simona Biondi, has gone missing from her home in the Italian capital. Castagnetti, the private detective hired by
her parents, trawls the streets of Rome, finding himself drawn into the dark,
erotic world of a TV empire belonging to a media mogul turned politician called
Mario Di Angelo. He unearths a murky
world in which nubile young women, desperate for stardom, are prepared to do
anything to get a break; in which powerful men are happy to exploit that
desperation in order to make money and make love. Castagnetti discovers that Anna Sartori, a
young woman on the fringes of the Di Angelo empire, went missing almost twenty
years ago. Anna Sartori’s best friend,
he finds out, was Simona Biondi’s sister.
This is a world, Castagnetti realises, where secrets are like fireworks:
you don’t see them until they explode. Death of a Showgirl is by Tobias Jones and
is due to be published in April 2013
Eleven Days
is the second in his acclaimed Carrigan and Miller police procedural series and
is due to be published in June 2013. In Eleven Days Stav Sherez conjures up a terrifying
mystery. A fire rages through a sleepy
West London square, engulfing a small convent hidden away among the residential
houses. When DI Jack Carrigan and DS
Geneva Miller arrive at the scene they discover eleven bodies, yet there were
only supposed to be ten nuns in residence.
It’s eleven days before Christmas, and despite their superiors wanting the
case solved before the holidays, Carrigan and Miller start to suspect that the
nuns were not who they were made out to be.
Why did they make no move to escape the fire? Who is the eleventh victim, whose body was found
separate to the others? And where is the
convent’s priest, the one man who can answer their questions? Fighting both internal politics and the church
hierarchy, Carrigan and Miller unravel the threads of a case, which reaches
back to the early 1970s, and the upsurge of radical Liberation Theology in
South America – with echoes of the Shining Path, and contemporary battles over
oil, land and welfare. Meanwhile, closer
to home, there’s a new threat in the air, one the police are entirely
unprepared for. Spanning four decades
and two continents, Eleven Days finds Carrigan and Miller up against time as
they face a new kind of criminal future.
Back from the Dead is by Peter Leonard and is due to be published in January 2013. Bahamas, 1971, and Ernst Hess, missing presumed
dead, regains consciousness to find himself stuck in a hospital bed on a strange
ward in a foreign country . . . The follow-up to the acclaimed Voices of the Dead, Back from the Dead pitches us and the gang – Harry, Cordell,
Colette and Joyce – back into a desperate fight to the death, which moves from
the Bahamas to Florida, and from Germany to the South of France, as their worst
fear comes back to haunt them. Whip-smart,
action packed and darkly funny, the second part of Peter Leonard’s glorious
two-hander packs some serious punch.
The summer of 1941. Russia has been invaded. As Hitler’s forces smash into Soviet territory,
annihilating the Red Army divisions in its path, a lone German scout plane is
forced down. Contained within the
briefcase of its passenger is a painting of a hyalophoria cecropia, otherwise known
as a red moth. Military Intelligence
dismisses the picture as insignificant, but Stalin suspects a German plot. He summons his old adversary, Inspector Pekkala
– the elusive Finn who was once Tsar Nicholas II’s personal detective – to
discover the real significance of the red moth.
As the storm gathers around him, Pekkala soon finds himself on the path
of the most formidable art thieves in history, whose real target is a secret
and prized possession of the Romanovs, once considered to be the eighth wonder
of the world. However, as the Soviet
Union crumbles in the face of the advancing cataclysm, Pekkala realizes that to
protect the Tsar’s treasure he must break through enemy lines in a desperate
mission to outfox the German invaders, or face the wrath of Stalin himself. The Red
Moth is the fourth book in the series to feature Inspector Pekkala by Sam
Eastland and is due to be published in February 2013.
‘It’s just to say that no-one has come to pick Nathan
up from school, and we were wondering if there was a problem of some kind?’ As Mark
Douglas photographs a pod of whales stranded in the waters off Edinburgh’s
Portobello Beach, he is called by his son’s school: his wife, Lauren, hasn’t
turned up to collect their son. Calm at
first, Mark collects Nathan and takes him home but as the hours slowly crawl by,
he increasingly starts to worry. With
brilliantly controlled reveals, we learn some of the painful secrets of the couple’s
shared past, not least that it isn’t the first time Lauren has disappeared. And as Mark struggles to care for his son and
shield him from the truth of what’s going on, the police seem dangerously short
of leads. That is, until a shocking discovery
. . . Gone Again is by Doug Johnstone
and is due to be published in March 2013.
