Forthcoming Crime Books from Orion Publishing

January 2023

She Had it Coming is by Carys Jones. 'Someone needs to bring her down a peg or two...' When Pippa's best friend goes missing on a school run, no one thinks twice. Heather is pretty, popular and more than a little wild. Most people think she ran away for the attention... Others say girls like her always get what's coming to them. Pippa's mother, Abbie, has never liked Heather. Or her mother Michelle, a successful doctor who thinks she's too good for the school mums' group. ut when Heather turns up dead, everything changes. Because Pippa was the last person to see her alive... and now Abbie's own house of cards is about to come tumbling down.

February 2023

Paris Requiem is by Chris Lloyd. 'You have a choice which way you go in this war...' Paris, September 1940. After three months under Nazi Occupation, not much can shock Detective Eddie Giral. That is, until he finds a murder victim who was supposed to be in prison. Eddie knows, because he put him there. The dead man is not the first or the last criminal being let loose onto the streets. But who is pulling the strings, and why? This question will take Eddie from jazz clubs to opera halls, from old flames to new friends, from the lights of Paris to the darkest countryside - pursued by a most troubling truth: sometimes to do the right thing, you have to join the wrong side...

The Only Child is by Kayte Nunn. 1949 - It is the coldest winter Orcades Island has ever known, when a pregnant sixteen-year-old arrives at Fairmile, a home for 'fallen women' run by the Catholic Church. She and her baby will disappear before the snow melts. 2013 Frankie Gray has come to the island for the summer, hoping for one last shot at reconnecting with her teenage daughter, Izzy, before starting a job as a deputy sheriff. They are staying with her mother, Diana, at The Fairmile Inn, soon to be a boutique hotel, but when an elderly nun is found dead in suspicious circumstances, and then a tiny skeleton is discovered in the grounds of the house, Frankie is desperate for answers.

March 2023

On the Savage Side is by Tiffany McDaniel. Six women - mothers, daughters, sisters - gone missing. Inspired by the unsolved murders of the Chillicothe Six, this is the story of two sisters, both of whom could be the next victims. Arcade and Daffodil are twin sisters born one minute apart. With their fiery red hair and thirst for an escape, they form an unbreakable bond nurtured by their grandmother's stories. Together they disappear into their imagination and forge a world where a patch of grass reveals an archaeologist's dig, the smoke emerging from the local paper mill becomes the dust rising from wild horses galloping deep beneath the earth, and an abandoned 1950s convertible transforms into a time machine that can take them anywhere. But no matter how hard they try, Arc and Daffy can't escape the generational ghosts that haunt their family. And so, left to fend for themselves in the shadow of their rural Ohio town, the two sisters cling tight to one another. Years later, as the sisters wrestle with the memories of their early life, a local woman is discovered dead in the river. Soon, more bodies are left floating in the water, and as the killer circles ever closer, Arc's promise to keep herself and her sister safe becomes increasingly desperate - and the powerful riptide of the savage side more difficult to survive.

All That Is Mine I Carry With Me is by William Landay.A mother vanished. A father presumed guilty. There is no proof. There are no witnesses. For the children, there is only doubt. One afternoon in November 1975, ten-year-old Miranda Larkin comes home from school to find the house eerily quiet. Her mother is missing. Nothing else is out of place. There is no sign of struggle. Her mom's pocketbook remains in the front hall, in its usual spot. So begins a mystery that will span a lifetime. What happened to Jane Larkin? Investigators suspect Jane's husband. A criminal defense attorney, surely Dan Larkin would be an expert in outfoxing the police. But no evidence is found linking him to a crime, and the case fades from the public's memory, a simmering, unresolved mystery. Jane's three children-Alex, Jeff, and Miranda-are left to be raised by a man who may have murdered their mother. Two decades later, the remains of Jane Larkin are found. The investigation is awakened. The children, now grown, are forced to choose sides. With their father or against him? Guilty or innocent? And what if they are wrong?

The Last Highway is by R J Ellory. A sheriff investigates his own brother's murder, deep in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains... Estranged after a devastating betrayal, brothers Victor and Frank Landis - sheriffs of neighbouring counties - hadn't spoken for years. In truth, Victor didn't care if Frank was alive or dead. Until the day somebody killed him. Crossing county lines in search of answers, Victor is soon on the trail of a sinister conspiracy that takes him deep into the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. From the poorest communities to the most powerful and corrupt organisations, he soon becomes ensnared in a dangerous web of drugs, trafficking and murder. For Victor, finding the truth will mean uncovering dark secrets he'd rather have left buried, and risking everything to protect the family his brother left behind...

April 2023

The House of Whispers is by Anna Mazzola. Sometimes the secrets of the past are more dangerous than the present... Rome, 1938. As the world teeters on the brink of war, talented pianist Eva Valenti enters the house of widower Dante Cavallera to become his new wife. On the outside, the forces of Fascism are accelerating, but in her new home, Eva fears that something else is at work, whispering in the walls and leaving mysterious marks on Dante's young daughter. Soon she starts to wonder whether the house itself is trying to give up the secrets of its mysterious past - secrets that Dante seems so determined to keep hidden. However, Eva must also conceal the truth of her own identity, for if she is discovered, she will be in greater danger than she could ever have imagined...

One last chance to become who we were supposed to be... The trip was supposed to be the perfect holiday. Six friends, reuniting after two decades, spending the weekend in a beautiful riad in Marrakesh. Only, these friends are linked by more than their university days. Together, they've kept a dark secret that changed the course of all their lives forever. And as the truth threatens to surface in the stifling Morrocan heat, they all begin to question what really happened that terrible night twenty years ago... The Trip is by Rebecca Ley.

May 2023

Broken Light is by Joanna Harris. A bold and timely novel that explores how women can feel invisible as they grow older- and what happens when they decide to take back control. Bernie Moon's ambitions and dreams have been forgotten by everyone else - including Bernie herself. At 19 she was full of promise, but now facing 50 and going through the menopause, she's a fading light. Until the murder of a woman in a local park unlocks a series of childhood memories, and with them, a talent that she has hidden all her adult life. What happens when the frustrations and power of an older woman are finally given their chance to be revealed?

Are you ready to save a life. Why her? Becca Palmer has just been fired from her job as assistant to Simon Jones - the Policing Minister at the House of Commons. But Becca claims Simon was more than her boss, that she is in love with him. Why here? So when a heartbroken Becca leaves Parliament for the final time, she decides to take matters into her own hands and head to Westminster Bridge to take her own life. Which is where hostage negotiator Alex Lewis meets her, to talk her down off the ledge. Why now? It's clear Becca knows something about the Policing Minister that she shouldn't. Something that could get him in serious trouble if it were to come out. But can Alex save Becca and get to the bottom of a conspiracy that goes deep inside the highest levels of government- before it's too late? The Fallen is by John Sutherland. 

June 2023

A Death in the Parish is by The Reverend Richard Coles. Canon Daniel Clement is back... It's been a few months since murder tore apart the community of Champton apart. As Canon Daniel Clement tries to steady his flock, the parish is joined with Upper and Lower Badsaddle, bringing a new tide of unwanted change. But church politics soon become the least of Daniel's problems. His mother - headstrong, fearless Audrey - is obviously up to something, something she is determined to keep from him. And she is not the only one.And then all hell breaks loose when murder returns to Champton in the form of a shocking ritualistic killing...

Was it an accident? Or was it murder? Marc Mercier appears to have it all - a successful business man with a loving family who has risen above his upbringing. So when he vanishes while on a hunting trip in the Atchafalaya Basin, the mystery appears to be nothing more than a tragic accident. But all is not what it seems in Marc Mercier's life. As detectives launch the investigation into his death, the picture of his perfect life begins to unravel. Family members begin to make accusations, his wife and best friend change their stories, and the police are left floundering as the secrets begin to pile up. The clock is ticking - can detectives Nick and Annie discover the truth before someone else ends up as a case number? Bad Liar is by Tami Hoag.

Black Fell is by Mari Hannah. The truth can be hidden . . . but secrets always surface.The peace of Kielder Water is shattered when tourists open a barrel they found floating in the reservoir at dawn. Detectives Stone and Oliver are called to examine the skeletal remains inside.The tourists are eliminated from the investigation, but that same day a second body is discovered - this one with skin. Have the police let the killer leave the scene? While Stone investigates the remains, Oliver travels to Iceland to gather evidence and track down the tourists who have fled. Someone will do anything to protect the secrets of the past...

Welcome to The Starlings... sun, sea and neighbours to die for. Security, a sparkling sea view and the best kind of neighbours - The Starlings gated community has it all. Here, doors are left open, children run free, and at the heart of it all is the entrepreneurial Gold Family, who first dreamed up this aspirational vision of 'Dorset's Safest Community'. To the outside world the popular family appears glitteringly blessed... until an idyllic party takes a dark turn and one of their number is found slumped at the foot of the clocktower. Who knows what really happened? And what answers are harboured within the old building, the former Highcap Mother and Baby Home? Homecoming is by Isabel Ashdown. 

July 2023

Paris, a misty night a few days before Christmas: a young woman is saved from the waters of the Seine. She is naked, doesn't remember her name or how she ended up in the river, but is still alive. The mysterious woman is taken to the hospital - and then disappears in thin air. DNA testing reveals her to be celebrated concert pianist Milena Bergman - but that cannot be: Milena died in a plane crash more than a year before. As police captain Roxane begins to investigate, his fate becomes intertwined with that of writer Raphael Batailley, Milena's former boyfriend, and the two men are plunged deep into an impossible enigma: is it possible to be alive and dead at the same time? The Stranger in the Seine is by Guillaume Musso.

Consumed is by Greg Buchanan. On a lonely farmstead, a seventy year old woman falls down outside and, unable to move, is consumed overnight by two of her pigs. It seems like a tragic accident , except the woman was well-known photographer Sophia Bertilak – and inside her house, someone has removed all her photos from their frames seemingly erasing her past. The first photo sophia ever took remains her most famous, a missing girl who was never seen again. Forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen is darfted in for the autopsy – and slowly becomes obsessed with the victim, her family and the crimes she brought to light decades ago.

The Dead Wife by Sharon Bolton is a suspense thriller that begins when a chance extra marital liason goes disastrously wrong and an injured woman is trapped in a crashed car amid heavy snow. As she waits for a rescue that might never come, we learn more about her diffcult marriage to a high profile MP, her struggles to live in the shadow of his late wife, and the sinsiter secrets that they are all keeping.

Three sisters find themselves lost in a storm at night, and seek safety at Moirthwaite Manor, where their mother once worked. They are shocked to find the isolated mansion that loomed so large through their troubled childhoods has long been abandoned. Drawing straws to decide who should get help, one sister heads back into the darkness. With the siblings separated, the deadly secrets hidden in the house finally make themselves known and we learn the unspeakable secret that binds the family together. The Short Straw is by Holly Seddon.

Award results!

The Strand Magazine Critics Awards were announced on Thursday 10 July 2013.

Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best Novel: 

Defending Jacob by William Landay.

Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best Debut Novel

The 500 by Matthew Quirk

Faye Kellerman was given The Strand’s Lifetime Achievement award for excellence in crime writing.  

The ITW (International Thriller Writers) announced the winners the 2013 Thriller Awards on Saturday 13 July 2013.

Best Hardcover Novel 

Spilled Blood by Brian Freeman (SilverOak)

Best First Novel
The 500 by Matthew Quirk (Reagan Arthur Books)

Best Paperback Original Novel
Lake Country by Sean Doolittle (Bantam)

Best Short Story
“Lost Things” by John Rector (Thomas & Mercer)

Best Young Adult Novel

False Memory by Dan Krokos (Hyperion Books CH)

Best E-Book Original Novel
Blind Faith by CJ Lyons (CJ Lyons)

Thriller Master was awarded to Anne Rice in recognition of her legendary career and outstanding contributions to the thriller genre.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Literary Silver Bullet Award was awarded to Steve Berry

Corporate Silver Bullet Award was awarded to USO

Congratulations also go to Wiley Cash whose novel A Land More Kind Than Home won the SIBA 2013 Book of the Year Award.  The SIBA Book Award was created to recognize great books of southern origin.

William Landay on DEFENDING JACOB



Author photo by Henry Landay

    “Defending Jacob is smart, sophisticated, and suspenseful—capturing both the complexity and stunning fragility of family life.”—Lee Child

“A carefully plotted and precisely written thriller about a family put to the ultimate test . . . Defending Jacob is bound to enthrall.”—Thomas H. Cook

That's just two comments on Defending Jacob written by William Landay which has taken the book world by storm. His previous novels are "Mission Flats," which won theCWA Dagger Award as best debut crime novel of 2003, and "The Strangler," which was an L.A. Times favorite crime novel and was nominated for the Strand Magazine Critics Award as best crime novel of 2007.But let's hear from the man himself:

It is worth asking, in a magazine dedicated to crime fiction, why exactly we non-criminals are so fascinated with these stories. Clearly there is an endless appetite for them. We gorge ourselves on crime stories in novels, TV shows, movies, and video games. Then we turn on the news, where crime stories are covered out of all proportion to their newsworthiness. (“If it bleeds, it leads.”) But the connection between audience and subject is not intuitively obvious. Law-abiding people — people who would not so much as steal a stick of gum in their real lives — will happily devour a story about bloody murder. When they do recoil, the audience’s discomfort often has more to do with the style of the storytelling than the subject matter. So long as the violence is kept offscreen or at least is portrayed tastefully, no one seems especially troubled. In fact, there is a strange, petty sort of propriety among some readers: they will often object to bad language even as they gloss right over the most lurid scenes of violence. I once wrote a book about the Boston Strangler, which I worried was too gory and misogynistic a topic, but the only objections I ever heard were about my overfondness for the F-word. (An aside: my children, boys aged 8 and 10, have now discovered the F-word, no doubt from me, and they delight in driving me crazy by saying it. Thus, as we say in America, the chickens have come home to roost.)
There is nothing new about our criminophilia. We have been telling crime stories for a few thousand years now. Oedipus Rex is often called the first detective story. Even courtroom dramas like my latest, Defending Jacob, can be traced back to Plato. (Grisham fans, take note.) Crime fiction is about as durable a genre as we have.
Why? What do we see in these stories? Why do they resonate so deeply with us?
It is not an answerable question, of course, and I don’t propose to try, at least not in a scientific way. No doubt the answer would be different for everyone, anyway. A different balance of escapism, titillation, the perverse but natural attraction of danger, and the inherent drama of crime — so rich in conflict and action. Who knows? In any event, surely no single explanation will do.

But I would like to share with you a formulation that I came across when I was beginning to think about Defending Jacob: “bad men do what good men dream.” (The phrase seems to originate with a forensic psychiatrist named Robert I. Simon.) Like all aphorisms, it is a little too neat. It oversimplifies. And it also rings true.

Bad men do what good men dream.
In Defending Jacob I wanted to explore that idea. I wanted to narrow the gap between my audience and the fantasy world where they imagined crime takes place — between the good men who dream and the bad men who do. No more baddies in the inner city, as in my first book, Mission Flats. No more infamous villains like the Boston Strangler, as in my second. I wanted this criminal to be real, to be ordinary, just like us. And if I could not define precisely what “ordinary” and “us” might mean, because readers come in all shapes and sizes, I could at least define a world that looks like my own. Andy Barber, the narrator and protagonist of Defending Jacob, attended Yale, became a prosecutor in Middlesex County near Boston, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts — all qualities I share. Andy is not me, of course. The story-writing process is not that simple. And thankfully my two little boys are not Jacob Barber, the teenage boy accused of murder in my story. But my family and I are not so very different from the Barbers, and neither, I’d bet, are you.
Defending Jacob grew out of another novel that I began about four years ago as a follow-up to The Strangler, my last book. The Strangler, you may remember if you are among the seven people who actually read it, was about the criminal underworld in Boston in the early 1960s. I had an idea I would follow it with a similar book set in the Boston crime world of the 1970s, another fever swamp of corruption and hard crime. But the writing dragged, and when my editor’s patience finally ran out, she summoned me to New York for a face-to-face meeting in order to pronounce the project dead. (Wise woman.) She suggested, “Why don’t you start again. Write something closer to your own life and your own heart?” So I dissected the cadaver of my dead book, extracted a promising story line, and adapted it to the present day and to my own suburban world — a story about an ordinary father, a prosecutor, whose son is accused of stabbing a schoolmate to death.
The book has been received with incredible enthusiasm here in the U.S., where it has been out for about six weeks now. On the day of its release, it hit #1 on the Barnes & Noble bestseller list before lunchtime and has remained there ever since. Similar spikes followed on Amazon and at independent booksellers. The reviews have been glowing. The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks and counting. Just last week Warner Brothers bought the movie rights. It has all been a little surreal, honestly, for a writer who has been well reviewed but never a big seller. (In fact my poor sales and spotty rate of production led my previous publisher to drop me. This was at the nadir of the panic in publishing, in 2008, and I considered myself lucky to land with Orion — to have a British publisher at all.)
I think the success of the book comes down to that question of what crime novels teach us about ourselves. Why do we do the things we do? The classic formulation of these discussions is “nature versus nurture,” and the Barber family makes an interesting test case. Because in Jacob Barber we have a boy whose violence — if indeed he is violent, which is not at all clear in the novel — cannot be explained by his environment. So, to his bereft parents and his dogged pursuers, the question arises: might Jacob have inherited a violent streak? Might he be hardwired for it? Might it be nature, not nurture, in this case? It is an opportune moment to ask the question because we are only now discovering — through the sequencing of the human genome, among other ways — the precise biological mechanisms that might explain how such behaviors could have a physiological cause. How we might be hardwired to behave in certain ways. I can’t say much more without spoiling the story for you, so I’ll stop there. Suffice it to say that Defending Jacob raises the possibility that we have always held a thumb on the scale for “nurture” for the simple reason that we have never had the scientific means to study its opposite.
A final word: looking back on all this, I seem to have left the impression that Defending Jacob is a sterile, “issues” sort of book — a boring inquiry into this or that. It is not. My goal in writing it, first and foremost, was to tell a good story. Whether I’ve accomplished that or not isn’t for me to judge. But if you come to Defending Jacob looking for a ripping good story and to hell with all these Very Deep Thoughts, well, you won’t be disappointed, I hope. But if you’re looking for more, you may find it, too.


Orion; Hardback edition (15 Mar 2012)

Criminal Splatterings

According to Charlotte Williams at The Bookseller Vintage has acquired the licence to publish Ian Fleming's James Bond titles across all formats including digital, reversing the decision made by Ian Fleming Publications 15 months ago to publish the e-books direct. For the first time for an author's backlist, Vintage will publish in both its Classic and standard paperback ranges.  The full article can be found here.  The Reuters article about it can also be found here.

The debut novel of British screenwriter and creative writing lecturer Jenny Mayhew has been acquired by Hutchinson. The Wolf Man of Hindelheim is described as both a mystery and a love story.  The story is set in a German village between the wars.  When a baby girl goes missing from the home of the village doctor local police constable Theodore Hildebrandt arrives to investigate the mystery.  The Wolf Man of Hindelheim is due to be published in March 2013.

More news on the rights front! Harper Collins have scooped in a three book crime thriller deal the debut novel of former Metropolitan Police Officer Luke Delaney. The first novel, Senseless, which features DI Sean Corrigan on the case of an unusually vicious murderer, will be published by Harper Collins in early 2013.

Lloyd Shepherd whose debut novel The English Monster was published recently has had an interesting discussion lately with the discussion board Mobilism when he found a request for his novel to be pirated being circulated on the board.  He decided to respond in an effort to try and understand why.  It resulted in an article for the Guardian as he describes his parley with eBook pirates.

So is Jo Nesbø the new Stieg Larsson?  This was a question that he was asked recently at the New Zealand International Arts Festival. And his response? Characteristically it was one that those of us that have heard him talk before would have expected from him. So what exactly did he say?  Apparently with the wryness that we have come to expect from him his response was "It could have been worse - I could have been the new Dan Brown.".  Barry Forshaw’s article in the Independent on his new book The Phantom can be found here.  The film of his book the Snowman is due to filmed shortly by Martin Scorsese.  

The Telegraph have got a list of 100 novels everyone should read. As can be expected there are not a large number of crime novels. Only thirteen by my calculations.  I have to say that aside from that minor quibble, I was pleased to see a number of my favourite non-crime books on the list.  The first and foremost being Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Beloved by Toni Morrison and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen to name a few.
 
The nominees for the 2011 Strand Critics Awards have been announced by The Strand Magazine for books published during 2011. Recognizing excellence in the field of mystery fiction, the nominees have been judged by, and winners selected from, book reviewers from the nation's top daily newspapers as well as Andrew F. Gulli, Managing Editor of the magazine and announced on July 11th, 2012 in New York City.
 
The nominees are –

Best First Novel:
The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Sister by Rosamund Lupton (Crown)
Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson (Harper)
The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis (Soho)
The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly (Pamela Dorman Books)

Best Novel
The Affair by Lee Child (Delacorte Press)
The Drop by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown and Company)
Buried Secrets by Joseph Finder (St Martin’s Press)
Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James (Knopf)
The Cut by George Pelecanos (Reagan Arthur Books)
This is the fourth time that Michael Connelly has been nominated but the first time for the others in the Best Novel category.
 
Lifetime Achievement awards are being given to Joseph Wambaugh and John Sandford.
The awards will be presented at an invitation-only cocktail party, hosted by The Strand on July 11, 2012, in New York City.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros have optioned the film rights for William Landay’s novel Defending Jacob. It is a shame they have not realized that Defending Jacob is not his debut novel but in fact his third.  His first, Mission Flats, won in 2003 the prestigious CWA New Blood Dagger Award.
 
Bloody Scotland which is due to take place between 14^th and 16^th September 2012 have announced a crime fiction short story competition for budding writers. Glengoyne Highland Single Malt is sponsoring a short story writing competition as part of Bloody Scotland. With the aim of discovering the next big name in crime fiction, the competition gives you the opportunity to be published in an ebook anthology of short crime stories entitled Worth The Wait. Entries may be submitted now through June 29th, 2012. Stories must be original (not previously published), in English, and may not exceed 3000 words. Entrants must be 18 years of age or older and there are no restrictions on country of residence (though an entry fee of £10 or the local equivalent is required). See the competition page on the festival website for all the details.

ITV have commissioned a new series of Morse prequel Endeavour.  There will be 4x 120 minute episodes.  According to the press release from ITV it follows the well-received response to the recent one-off Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour.  Once again Morse author Colin Dexter will act as consultant.  Filming will take place in Oxford later on this year.
 
Fans of Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series will be pleased to hear that according to Deadline.com Entertainment One and Piller/Segan/Shepherd, partners on the Syfy series Haven, are re-teaming for another drama series project. The two companies have acquired the TV rights to best-selling author Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series of 6 books featuring the popular character Sara Linton. The project will go into development immediately, with Slaughter co-writing the pilot script with Piller/Segan/Shepherd principal Scott Shepherd.
 
According to Total Film the new Avengers character banners have been revealed.  What with the film Marvel Avenger Assemble due to be released in the UK on 27 April 2012 lots of us are waiting for it.  The trailer can be seen below-

Sometime ago Shotsmag Confidential blogged about the City University London establishing a dedicated MA course in Crime Writing.  Things have moved on since then and they have now listed some of the authors that will be guest lecturing.  The authors are, Mark Billingham, Natasha Cooper, Barry Forshaw, Sophie Hannah, John Harvey, Cathi Unsworth, Dan Waddell and Laura Wilson.

That Stieg Larsson just won’t go away. Maclehose Press have published (with an introduction by Tariq Ali)  The Expo Files: And Other Articles by the Crusading Journalist. The Expo Files is a collection of essays and articles on right-wing extremism and racism, violence against women and women’s rights, homophobia and honour killing. The Expo Files is due to be published in April 2012.