Literary suspense from France.

In 1995 an American billionaire and media mogul - Charles Wallerstein - decides to revive interst in the jigsaw by setting up the' International Speed Puzzle Circuit'. One by one the players on the circuit are murdered. Each victim has a limb removed, although the killer leaves in its place a polaroid picture of another person's limb. The police assume the collected photos will confirm the identity of the assassin. They need to find the vital missing piece, that philosophical element without which the whole of the rest of the puzzle has no meaning... Antoine Bello's prize winning detective novel is a satirical, comic 50-piece jigsaw puzzle the solution to which lies in the reader's hands. Each piece of the puzzle, each short chapter, is a clue, written in its own unique style.

Bristling with a razor-sharp wit, The Burglar Diaries is the first person account of petty thief Bex: a bit of a geezer who, with long time partner-in-crime Ollie, just about gets by on the money he makes from house-breaking in small town suburbia.
Not the sharpest tools in the box, Bex and Ollie get into more than their fair share of scrapes, but they stick together, have a laugh, and make enough cash to stay in the pub all weekend. A confident and lippy raconteur, Bex frequently shares his thoughts on life which are as dodgy as he is and offer an hilarious insight into the mind of the petty criminal.
With brilliant dialogue, and spot-on descriptions of classic bungling burglars, Danny King has written the funniest book of the year.

'I'd like to make a withdrawal'... Chris Benson idolises his older brother Gavin. In fact, everyone looks up to him. But then they have little choice when they are lying on their stomachs in the middle of the Halifax with a gun shoved in their face... When Gavin gets sent down for a 15-year stretch the somewhat unprofessional trio of Chris, Sid and Vince are left without their ringleader. As if Chris hasn't enough to deal with already with his adulterous partner Debbie spending money faster than he can nick it, his love-lorn, sexually frustrated sister-in-law to 'console', and the Neighbourhood Watch scheme to look after...

Adriana Hunter (Translator)

When you moved out of North London to a picturesque hamlet in the Dordogne no one said it would be like this in February: freezing cold, dark by mid-afternoon and so quiet. Members of the Caminade family keep dying in suspicious circumstances, and the doctor knows more about it than he's prepared to reveal. You're sure there's a murderer at large: could it be the Old Dutch Woman or her deranged son, or the Mad Englishman from over the hill, and could you be the next victim, maybe you're imagining things, maybe it's the whisky, but then what's that scratching sound coming from the other half of the house... The first in a series, Death in the Dordogne portrays a rural France very different from A Year in Provence and other saccharine tales of expatriate derring-do. It is an essential book for everyone planning to go on a French holiday.