Actor Toby Flood, formerly of big and small screen, arrives in Brighton on the first Sunday in December with the other cast members of the Joe Orton play Lodger in the Throat. They have been on tour since September and are looking forward to the end of the run the following Saturday.
Flood is visited that night by his estranged wife, Jenny, now living with wealthy entrepreneur Roger Colborn, whose country residence, Wickhurst Manor, lies just north of Brighton. Jenny runs a shop in the Lanes and is worried about a strange man who has taken to hanging around outside. Roger has dismissed her concerns and she hopes instead that Toby will agree for old times' sake to follow the man and get to the bottom of his behaviour. Reluctantly, Toby agrees.
Next day he trails the man to his house and confronts him. Derek Oswin is an unemployed loner, who blames Colborn for his father's death from cancer, on account of dangerous practices at the defunct plastics factory run by Roger and his father, the late Sir Walter Colborn. Many other workers at the factory met a similar fate and Oswin wants to remind Colborn of what he should have on his conscience. Circumstances conspire to draw Flood further and further into Oswin's life. Colborn gets wind of Flood's contact with Jenny and tries to buy him off, but Flood sees only a longed-for opportunity to win Jenny back. Before he fully understands the risks he is running, he finds himself entangled in the mysterious - and dangerous - relationship between the Oswins and the Colborns. Prospects of his survival until the close of the show suddenly start to look very far from good.
Play to the End is another classic Robert Goddard mystery, intricate, fascinating and deeply satisfying to the last page.

Robert Goddard was born in Hampshire. He read History at Cambridge and worked as an educational administrator in Devon before becoming a full-time novelist. His bestselling novels are: Past Caring, In Pale Battalions, Painting the Darkness, Into the Blue (winner of the first WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award and dramatized for TV in 1997, starring John Thaw), Take No Farewell, Hand in Glove, Closed Circle, Borrowed Time, Out of the Sun (a sequel to Into the Blue), Beyond Recall, Caught in the Light, Set in Stone, Sea Change, Dying to Tell and Days Without Number

Student Grey Hutchins comes to Tokyo seeking answers to what happened during the notorious Nanking Massacre in which, in one city, the Imperial Japanese Army killed up to 300,000 civilians. Only one man can help her, a survivor of the Massacre, and now a visiting professor at the prestigious university of Todai in Tokyo; a man who is rumoured to possess documentary evidence of Nanking.
But first Grey must gain his trust. Increasingly desperate and alone, she accepts a job as a hostess at the ‘Some Like It Hot’ club, an upmarket nightspot catering for Japanese businessmen and wealthy gangsters. One gangster dominates – an old man in a wheelchair guarded by a nurse with sharpened teeth –said to rely on a powerful elixir for his continued wealth and well-being; It is an elixir which other members of the club want for themselves - at any price …
With its focus on 1980's Tokyo and China in the late 1930s, and a woman who has quite a lot to prove and even more to hide, this is a literary thriller of the highest order. With its heady atmosphere of overt violence, lurking fear and sexual tension, Tokyo is a novel that takes hold of the reader and does not let go until its explosive final pages.

A mesmerizing classic of a thriller: When the body of a young female trainee is found horribly murdered in the Nurses's station of the Western State Mental Hospital, Massachusetts, there is apparently no shortage of suspects - a whole hospital of them. One inmate claims to have seen the killer who he will only describe as The Angel. Twenty years later, Francis Petrel, once a patient at the hospital, writes his account of the events of the murder and its investigation on the walls of his tiny apartment. As he writes he is visited by hallucinations, by the increasing anxiety at his loosening grip on reality. As he goes deeper and deeper into his story about those events, he plunges further into the return of his own madness. He remembers how he is co-opted into the investigation by Lucy Jones, a driven young profiler who has her own reasons for pursuing this particular killer. But she, and Francis, face the same conundrum: how does one find a cold blooded killer masquerading as mad in a world populated by the deranged? In the end it will come down to Francis - he is the only one of the investigating team capable of recognizing the essential lie that The Angel embodies: for though his acts are those of a mad man, he most

John Katzenbach is the author of eight previous novels: the Edgar Award-nominated In the Heat of the Summer and The Shadow Man, The Traveller, Day of Reckoning, Just Cause, State of Mind, Hart's War and The Analyst. He has been a criminal court reporter for The Miami Herald and Miami News. He lives in western Massachusetts.