New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From
Phoenix
2001 April-June
New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From
Phoenix
APRIL-JUNE 2001
Kunal Basu
The Opium Clerk
Published May 2001 by Phoenix at £16.99
and £9.99
ISBN: 1865159190X
and 1861591926
The Opium Clerk is an epic debut novel
chronicling the fortunes of the opium trade in the
19th century. From an auction house in Calcutta
to Canton and then to Sarawak, land of the White
Rajas in Borneo, we follow the trail of Hiran, a
failed Brahmin, and his cycle of regeneration.
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Leslie Forbes
Bombay Ice
Pbk published May 2001 by Phoenix at £6.99
ISBN: 075380672X
Leslie Forbes' dazzling first novel is a story about alchemy, incest and the weather. A thriller set in a city where gangsters model themselves on film stars and what was sea yesterday has a high-rise on it today, it is also a meditation on the nature of scientific chaos.
Rosalind Bengal is a radio journalist and a producer of true crime videos. After twenty years in London
she still wakes with the cinnamon taste of cassia leaves in her mouth, a dream from childhood in India, where her father taught her about meteorology and the history of storms, and her mother taught her about alchemy and poison - amongst other, more terrible things she would rather forget.
But despite her fear of being drown back into the violent patterns of her lost, drowned past, Roz returns to India when she receives a letter from her half-sister, now married to a celebrated Bombay director who is filming an Indian version of The Tempest.
During the tense build-up to the Bombay summer monsoon, the two sisters' lives are threatened by
the brutal murder of a member of the hijra - or eunuch - community. Not satisfied to leave investigations to the Indian police, Roz begins a dangerous search for the truth ,helped by a Shakespeare- reciting taxi driver. The deeper she digs, the more it seems that there is a web of
intricate relationships between Bombay's eunuchs, its famous Bollywood movie world and its so-called polite society, and the more she puts her own life at risk. She discovers that her best weapon is not a gun but her knowledge of science and alchemy …
‘Bombay Ice is terrific. A thriller that thinks. I like most of all its big canvas. Leslie Forbes has gone for broke. Bombay Bollywood in all its gaudy: castrati, murder, monsoons, lepers and movie moghuls. That sort of daring is brave at the best of times. In a first novel it’s as rare as hen’s teeth.’ Christopher Hope
About the author:
Leslie Forbes is an award-winning radio broadcaster, freelance journalist, writer and artist. Born in Vancouver, Canada, she has lived in London for the past twenty years. Her new radio series Crimescapes: Six British Cities through the eyes of Six British Crimewriters, runs on BBC Radio 4 from 24th February to 31st March 1998, and she has previously written end presented series on the Bombay movie industry, the Indian Spice Trail, food in history and food in art.
She is the author and illustrator of several bestselling food and travel books, including A Table in Tuscany and Remarkable Feasts, and has written newspaper and magazine features on a wide range of topics. As an artist, she has been given an award from the Wellcome Centre for Medical Research to work with a physicist on a project that brings a combination of science and art to the public, in the form of a modern 'Cabinet of Curiosities'. She is also one of a group of cooks and scientists (from as diverse fields as atomic energy and flavour chemistry) which will make up the fourth conference for Molecular Gastronomy, to take place in 1999.
In the interests of research, she has cooked water buffalo for mujahideen in Pakistan, eaten snake blood soup with the Taiwanese mafia, and meet a real murderer/film director in Bombay.
Bombay Ice is Leslie Forbes' first novel. It has already been sold to publishers in the USA, Germany, Holland, Sweden and Italy.
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Leslie Forbes
Fish, Blood and Bone
Pbk published June 2001 by Phoenix at £6.99
ISBN: 0753811391
Written with the sophistication and intelligence so dazzling in the bestselling Bombay Ice, Leslie Forbes' second novel is a love story spanning a hundred years and two continents. Set in a walled London cloister, a Bengali opium garden and a wild 'paradise' mapped during Britain's great triangulation of India, it concerns three families, all descendants of a Victorian botanist whose husband was involved in a series of murders which haunt each succeeding generation until the truth is revealed on a modern Himalayan expedition to search for a lost cancer cure.
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Ken Lukowiak
Marijuana Time
Pbk published June 2001 by Phoenix at £7.99
ISBN: 0753814110
From the author of the critically acclaimed Soldier's Song
'brilliantly written... the Falklands Goodbye to All That' Sunday Express
This is his own painfully funny, true-life tale of surviving war, divorce, prison, gambling, a nervous breakdown, French Canadians, a shed-load of grass and a drug dealer who will only trade in tracksuit tops.
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