New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Harvill 03 April-June

File Updated: 15/04/2009

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Harvill APRIL-JUNE 03

Jean Christophe Grange Blood-Red Rivers Pbk published June 2003 by Harvill at £5.99 ISBN: 0099449021

In a world of knife-edge glaciers a hideous crime leads two maverick detectives to confront the limits of human evil A corpse is discovered wedged in an isolated crevice. It has been horribly mutilated. The brilliant but violent ex-commando Pierre Niemans is sent from Paris to the French Alps to lead the investigation. Meanwhile, in a town in south-west France, Karim Abdouf, a young Arab policeman, is trying to find out why the tomb of a young child has been desecrated. When a second baby is found, high up in a glacier, the paths of the two policemen are joined in the search for their killers, a trail that embroils them in the mysterious cult of the blood-red rivers...
Jean-Christophe Grang was born in 1961. He was a journalist before he set up his own press agency. His second novel Blood-red Rivers, has been made into a hugely successful film - with the title The Crimson Rivers - directed by Mathieu Kassovitz.

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Jean Christophe Grange The Flight of the Stork Pbk published June 2003 by Harvill at £5.99 ISBN: 0099448998
Artwork by: Design: Leno. Cover image: Jonathan Scott/Telegraph Colour Library

Translated from the French by Ian Monk

'"Jean-Christophe Grangè joins the hall of the great" Figaro

Every year the storks would set off on their astounding 12,000-mile migration from Northern Europe to the remote Central African Republic. One year, inexplicably, puzzling numbers of them fail to return. At the invitation of a Swiss ornithologist, Louis Antioch agrees to investigate the mystery of the birds' disappearance. Before he can set off on his quest, however, his patron is found dead in bizarre circumstances. Jean-Christophe Grange's uncompromising narrative develops at a nightmare pace from a Bulgarian gypsy encampment to a kibbutz in the Occupied Territories, to the African jungle, to Calcutta, where an appalling and gruesome truth emerges: the end of a mission that began with the Flight of the Storks...
Jean-Christophe Grang was born in 1961. He was a journalist before he set up his own press agency. His second novel Blood-red Rivers, has been made into a hugely successful film - with the title The Crimson Rivers - directed by Mathieu Kassovitz.

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Eva-Marie Liffner Camera Published May 2003 by Harvill at £10.99 ISBN: 1843430223

A photographer leaves all his belongings, among them many notes and photographs, to his niece. Intrigued by her inheritance, Johanna Hall begins to delve into her uncle's early years, which, until his death, had remained a well-kept secret. Her uncle had trained in London in the early 1900s, so Johanna goes there to extend her search. What she uncovers is a macabre history blackened with scandal.
In 1905, Madame Blavatsky holds Theosophist séances in London. Among the company attending them is die churchman Charles Leadbeater, a real person. Johanna discovers that Leadbeater used his position to take in young children and photograph them for use in the pedophile trade. Photographs of the séances and the children are taken by Herbert Burrows, to whom Johanna's uncle was apprenticed.
The narrative is developed both by Johanna in the course of her present-day research and by her uncle, as a young man, who tells his side of the story. Liffner's startlingly accomplished first book - part crime novel and part historical fiction - reflects upon the role of photography as a way of recording memories and of documenting truth.

Eva-Marie Liffiier was born in Goteborg, where she still lives. Camera won four prizes on its publication in Sweden.

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Henning Mankell One Step Behind Pbk published April 2003 by Harvill at £5.99 ISBN: 0099448874

See Review by Bob Cornwell
See Review by Martin Edwards - author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries
See Review by Martin Edwards - author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries

Translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg

"Mankell's plotting is clever and unobtrusive, and his books have real narrative drive: 400 pages fly past in no time. Mankell is a bestseller in Sweden and deserves to be one here too" Charles Mitchell, Spectator

It is Midsummer's Eve; three young friends gather in a wood. In the still- sunlit Scandinavian dusk, they don costumes and joyfully enact - or so it appears to an unseen observer - a kind of masque. The hidden watcher soon brings their performance to an end. His approach is careful; his aim, perfect. Three bullets, three corpses. He then cold- bloodedly photographs the grisly tableau. The Ystad police station meanwhile is experiencing a summer lull, and Inspector Wallander is at last at liberty to attend - albeit reluctantly - to his deteriorating health, but his peace of mind is shattered when one of his colleagues is murdered. An unknown killer is on the loose. The only lead is this disturbing photograph. Forced to dig more deeply than he would have wanted into the personal life of one of his colleagues, Wallander's investigation reveals something none of his team could ever have imagined. However, they remain tantalisingly, terrifyingly one step behind the lethal progress of a killer Kurt Wallander would have to suppose was deranged were the methods not so meticulous and the victims not so clinically targeted.

"The real test of thrillers of this kind is whether you want to spend more time in the detective's company. I certainly do" Sean French, Independent
"One of the most ingenious crime writers around ... Highly recommended" Peter Gutteridge, Observer
Henning Mankell, born in Stockholm in 1948, is the author of nine novels in the Wallander series which now span the bestseller lists of Europe. Four of these novels are to be filmed.

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Henning Mankell The White Lioness Published April 2003 by Harvill at £12.99 ISBN: 1860469604

In, 1992, in peaceful Southern Sweden, a young housewife, pillar of the Methodist church, disappears and is found murdered, execution style, and Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team are called in to investigate. But the chain of events leading to the murder began far away in South African, where Nelson Mandela has made his long walk to freedom, beginning South Africa's painful journey towards the end of Apartheid. The team find themselves caught up in a complex web involving renegade members of the South African secret service and a ruthless ex-KGB agent, all determined to halt Nelson Mandela's rise to power. Faced with an increasingly globalised world in which international terrorism knows no national borders, Wallander and his South African colleagues must prevent a crime that would change the face of history.

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Daniel Pennac Monsieur Malausséne Published June 2003 by Harvill at £12.99 ISBN: 1843430207

Ian Monk (Translator)
Benjamin Malausséne, the Belleville scapegoat, and his family of half sisters and brothers are once again the target for a series of increasingly catastrophic mishaps which culminate in his imprisonment on twenty-one counts of murder.
Meanwhile, the real serial killer remains at large.
In this sprawling novel, which brings his series of novels set in Belleville to a close, Pennac has allowed his unique imagination to run riot. The result is an increasingly huge cast of unforgettable characters and a series of inter-related plot lines which curl around one another before finally unraveling. From the art of the tattoo to cinema history, from the intricacies of cutting-edge surgery to the wonders of the wines of the Jura, there is something for everyone in this extraordinary tale.

Daniel Pennac was born in Casablanca in 1944. He travelled widely in his youth and has been employed in a number of capacities, including woodcutter, Paris cab driver, illustrator and, principally, schoolteacher. His 'Belleville Quintet, written around the character of Benjamin Malausséne, has been published in many languages.

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