The leader of a religious cult in Guyana instigates a mass suicide. He succeeds in killing himself and his whole flock of worshippers, save one. One man escapes. In the wood in the country land outside Ystad, the police make an horrific discovery: a severed head, and hands locked together in an attitude of prayer. A Bible lies at the victim's side, handwritten corrections and amendments on every page. A string of incidents, including attacks on domestic animals, has been taking place and Inspector Wallander fears that these events could be the prelude to attacks on humans on a much greater scale. Linda Wallander, preparing to join the Ystad police force, arrives at the station. Showing all the hallmarks of her father - the maverick approach, the flaring temper - she becomes involved in the case and in the process has to confront a group of extremists bent on punishing the world's sinners. Before the Frost is a totally compelling and atmospheric crime story.

After the enormous and steadily increasing success of the Kurt Wallander series, Henning Mankell begins a new chapter: as Kurt prepares for retirement his daughter Linda prepares to join the Ystad police force and becomes an immediate star in her own right.

Henning Mankell is the prize-winning author of the eight novels in the Inspector Wallander series, now translated into many languages and consistently dominating bestseller lists in Europe. His novel Sidetracked won the CWA Gold dagger in 2001.

David Bellos (Translator)

Each day, inhabitants of a small community in the French Alps find another of their ewes with its throat cut. When one of the villagers too is killed people begin to wonder: could it be the work of a werewolf? Soon suspicion falls on Massart, one of the villagers, because of his beardlessness (according to popular legend, werewolves have no hair on their bodies because they are inside the body). Soliman, the victim's adopted son; Le Veilleur, a lonely sheperd and Camille, a lovely girl from the city, decide to pursue Massart and their hunt leads them into the Alps, but their incompetence is undisguisable and they decide to summon Commissaire Adamsberg - well known for his peculiar investigation methods - to help. Thanks to his extraordinary intuition, Adamsberg unearths an astonishing truth, one that the villagers are going to find hard to believe.

France's queen of crime writing pits the eccentric genius of Commissaire Adamsberg against a deep village history and very present wolves. Vargas needs no comparisons, but her mysteries are compelling reminders of the best of P. D. James.

Fred Vargas was born in Paris in 1957. As well as being a best-selling author in France, she is by training an historian and archaeologist.