John Baker's books depress Northern tourist boards. As one of Britain's leading contemporary crime novelists, with a highly-acclaimed series featuring detective Sam Turner, Baker focuses on the underbelly of life in York. Verging away from the image of the rich tourist destination boasting high-culture, he focuses on the parts of the city where crime and violence are rife and where poverty presides.

Now in Shooting in the Dark Sam Turner returns to face his most challenging case yet. Beautiful Angeles Falco and her sister Maura have made an appointment to see Sam, but Maura, uncharacteristically, doesn't show up. Angeles is convinced that they are being stalked but there is no evidence. That is until Maura turns up horribly murdered on the moors and Sam and his crew find themselves right up to their necks in a very scary case indeed. To top it all, Geordie's brother Ralph turns up out of the blue, and he's not what you'd call an asset to the team ....

John Baker's novels have garnered much critical acclaim and with a TV series now under development, his writing career is certain to flourish.

Praise for John Baker
`Neatly plotted and engagingly and wittily written.' Daily Mail
`One of Britain's most talented contemporary crime writers.' The Times
`Brings heart, invention and wit to the business of adapting the tough?guy novel to the realities of contemporary Britain ....He has a fine eye for urban sleaze and an ear for the turn of contemporary speech.' Independent On Sunday
`A tough, gritty read in the new modern manner of the British thriller. If you're into black comedy with a touch of surrealism, then Death Minus Zero will have you chuckling through the length of its two hundred odd pages.' The Irish Times `Dry and clever, this first novel boasts a fine assortment of peripheral players, with just the right blend of amoral behaviour and a sense of justice.' San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle
`Exceedingly cunning, laid?back plot. Genial, fast and funny. Literary Review
`Great characters, idiosyncratic plot ? a definite original.' TIME OUT
`Absorbing and well written with an exciting finale.' Evening Standard `Steeped in the hard?boiled genre of Chandler and Elroy. Brilliant.' Peterborough Evening Telegraph
Set in York, Baker's debut novel is engagingly credible, off the wall, romantic without being sentimental, with a sharp sense of humour. A great cast of characters I look forward to encountering again.' Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News
`Baker is said to be one of the most highly acclaimed new crime writers on the scene, and I can understand that acclaim.' Yorkshire Evening Press

This omnibus edition contains 70 stories, a collection that features many of Block's best-loved characters, including:
Matt Scudder (eight stories)
Ehrengraf (nine stories)
Chip Harrison (two stories)
Bernie Rhodenbarr (three stories)

Byrne and Susan Hollander stroll home from a concert on a fine summer's evening in New York. Some hours later, their daughter Kristin arrives home to discover her parents brutally killed and the house ransacked. She also finds she is now a very young millionaire. A few days later the police trace the two killers to an apartment in Coney Island and both are dead. One killed the other before turning the gun on himself. At least that's the way it looks. So that's that. Another case solved. But for Matt Scudder it's only the beginning. The more he looks into it, the more things look wrong to him. There's a murderer out there, and he's just getting started. Pitted in a deadly game of cat and mouse, Scudder is up against the most resourceful and diabolical killer of his career.

For fans of James Lee Burke and Dave Robicheaux, The Convict and Other Stories is a superb collection of stories set in and around the American Deep South and its charismatic people. From New Orleans to Dallas, with excursions further afield in Korea and Vietnam, James Lee Burke's characters live out lives of laughter and tragedy, mystery and intrigue, finding the memorable in the commonplace and bringing vividly to life the heat and dust of southern life.

James Lee Burke has frequently been praised for the superb writing and strong suspense of his Dave Robicheaux mysteries. Now in this powerful new novel, he enters the front ranks of contemporary ficiton writers and mainstream bestsellers. When a Nazi submarine is discovered off the coast of Louisiana it soon becomes clear that the dark forces it represents are alive and all too well. Neo Nazi's are on the march in New Orleans and their leader, icy psychopath Will Buchalter, will stop at nothing to get his hands on the submarines mysterious cargo. Only detective Dave Robicheaux and his family stand between Buchalter and his terrifying ambitions.

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With his widely acclaimed novels featuring detective Dave Robicheaux James Lee Burke is a bestselling crime novelist. This early novel proves him to be a writer of the American South second to none. Two for Texas is the story of Son Holland and Hugh Allison - two prison escapees from Louisiana - and their whirlwind trip into Texas territory where they collide with more fascinating characters and adventure than they could have imagined possible from within the walls of their gaol cells.
Two for Texas has all the lyrical beauty and powerful storytelling of James Lee Burke at his very best.

When Aaron Crown is finally imprisoned for the decades-old murder of Ely Dixon, it is to Dave Robicheaux that he proclaims his innocence loudest. Dave isn't keen to get involved, but then a filmmaker seeking to prove Crown's innocence is murdered and the mob accuse Dave of taking a pay-off.

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This terrific thriller outstrips its genre label giving a rich, sardonic and terrifying portrayal of contemporary America and the Louisiana setting is as charged as an electric storm. Sonny Marsallas, a New Orleans street hustler turns up in New Iberia and entrusts Dave Robicheaux with a mysterious notebook. A series of violent events ensues. Sonny's girlfriend is killed for what she knows...and the motive for her murder is only the first of the answers that Robicheaux is going to have to learn if his own life is not to be forfeit. Why do a bunch of leftist South American guerillas know Sonny as Red Angel? Why is the Mob out to acquire a piece of New Iberian swamp and might Sonny this time have pushed his wheeler dealing one step too far?

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Toussaint Boudreaux, a docker - hardworking and looking for a break - earns extra cash as a prize fighter. But the only break he gets lands him in gaol and then on a chain gang. Avery Broussard, wayward son of an old plantation family, loses his freedom for a cartload of Prohibition moonshine and finds himself attached to the same work camp as Boudreaux. Neither would have chosen the life - blood, sweat and tears come with the territory - but each is determined to make the best of it or find a way out.

Half of Paradise is a powerful novel of people from very different backgrounds who find their destinies tragically intertwined.

Small-time black hustler Tee Bobby Hulin is partly redeemed, in Robicheaux's eyes, by a rare musical gift. Three men are present when Amanda Boudreau is raped and murdered, and Tee Bobby's prints found at the crime scene. Dave reckons he's innocent, and Tee Bobby pleads so, then attempts suicide in his holding cell. Why? Soon after, hooker and junkie Linda Zeroski is beaten to death by a man wearing leather gloves who, with great care and precision, crushes every bone in her face. Louisiana's murky history casts a long shadow in the work of James Lee Burke, but nowhere longer than here, and a family called LaSalles, who settled there before the Louisiana Purchase and built their wealth upon the backs of slave labour. When lawyer Perry LaSalles takes on the defence of Tee Bobby Hulin, Dave knows his motives are fuelled by guilt. For Tee Bobby's grandmother Ladice was seduced by Perry's grandfather, and Amanda Boudreau's death is related to events that happened long before Tee B obby was born ... In this rich and compelling novel James Lee Burke weaves a web of plots and subplots involving perfectly observed characters. Dense with passion and compassion, Burke's novels get better and better.

G.K. Chesterton's quiet and unassuming little priest has long since joined the pantheon of great literary detectives. Combining the shrewdness of Miss Marple, the insight of Sherlock Holmes and the punctiliousness of Hercule Poirot with the deep and intuitive knowledge of the dark secrets of human nature gained in the confessional, Father Brown is perhaps better equipped than any of them to uncover the startling truth whenever murder, mayhem and mystery stalk society.