Fourth outing for Joe Sandilands

Drugs, sex and firebombs in the 21st in the Harpur and Iles series

For years Colin Harpur's boss, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles ran a dubious but practical arrangement with the main drugs pushers on his ground - Mansel Shale and Panicking Ralph Ember-Iles would protect their business if they ensured peace on the streets. Now that pact is suddenly hit sideways, and gang war erupts.

Beware the Tallyman, a merciless predator...Somewhere in the Millside district of Glasgow a tallyman - an unlicensed loan shark - is preying on people in desperate financial straits. He loans them cash at rates they cannot hope to pay back - and then demands various services in kind. And these 'services' make the Tallyman a one-man crime wave. It's a tough, depressing case for Inspectors Thane and Moss, especially after one of Thane's close friends is found dead - a victim of the brutal moneylender. And so it takes all of Thane's hot-headed drive and Moss's cool determination to flush out the Tallyman - but neither of them is prepared for the final violent confrontation in the heart of Scotland's wild, craggy highlands.

Mordecai Ledbury, crippled, ugly and saturnine, the most famous advocate of his time and an expert at making enemies, spends a night in a dilapidated old house where his family once lived, hoping to discover what event in her early life had turned his strange and embittered mother into a monster of malice. By morning, outside the bedroom where Mordecai had slept, a masked intruder lies dead, the back of his head blown off by a shot from a heavy calibre pistol. The gun is the relic of Mordecai's eccentric and reclusive uncle, who had lived in the isolated house since the end of World War II. Mordecai himself admits to firing the shot so is he therefore guilty of murder? Or was the gun, as he claims, only intended to frighten off the intruder, making the killing not 'excessive use of force' but a tragic accident? With its echoes of recent life events, this is a veritable legal cliffhanger, with the Director of Public Prosecutions, aided and abetted by a hostile local police force - whose chief constable Mordecai has insulted at a party - pressing for a charge of murder, and the public and the press arguing for the accused to go free. In this most haunting and evocative of Peter Rawlinson's novels to date, a tragic wartime love story and a dark family secret combine with the author's mastery of courtroom drama to make this a story that will grip the reader to the very last page.

When Montague Pluke takes a holiday abroad in the Italian medieval town of Siena, he is dismayed to discover the authorities there deny the existence of the world famous Golden Trough. Even though the Golden Trough of Siena has not been seen for 600 years, Pluke is determined to find it.

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Winston Churchill is dismayed to receive unauthorised information on the perilous state of Britain's rearmament programme in the year 1937. The Foreign Office brings in Lord Edward Corinth to investigate the leaks. Falling rapidly under Churchill's spell, he is sidetracked from the investigation to concentrate instead on finding the murderer of a Foreign Office official, who could have been one of Churchill's sources. He soon finds himself trying to untangle a web of deception that threatens the security of the state.

Following a second murder within the FO, Edward sets out for Spain to find the murdered mans son. Once there, his real objective though is the need to satisfy his gnawing fear that his friend Verity Browne is in extreme danger. Reporting on the Civil War for the New Gazette, Verity scents a scoop when she is given secret information that the enemy is planning an attack on the undefended town of Guernica. With Edward in tow, she arrives just in time to witness a barbarous aerial bombardment on a civilian population with no means of defending itself