New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Vintage 2005 July-Sept
File Updated: 16/12/2006
New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Vintage JULY-SEPT 2005

Roddy Doyle Oh, Play That Thing Pbk published September 2005 by Vintage at £7.99 ISBN: 0099477653


On the last page of A Star Called Henry, the first volume of the The Last Roundup trilogy, we left Henry Smart on the run from his Republican paymasters, the men for whom he had perpetrated murder and mayhem. He flees from Dublin to Liverpool and from thence to Ellis Island, New York, America. And this is where Oh, Play That Thing begins...
It's 1924, and New York is the centre of the universe. Henry falls on his feet, as a handsome man with a sandwich board, and - this being Prohibition - behind his sandwich board a stash of hooch for the speakeasies of the Lower East Side. When he starts hiring kids to carry boards for him, he catches the attention of the mobsters who run the district and soon there are eyes on his back and men in the shadows. It is time to leave, for another America: Chicago. In Chicago there is no past waiting to jump on Henry. The place is wild, as new as he is, and newest of all is the music. Furious, wild, happy music played by a man with a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong. His music is everywhere, coming from every open door, every phonograph. But Armstrong is a prisoner of his colour; there are places a black man cannot go, things he cannot do. And the mob is in Chicago too: they own every stage - and they own the man up on the stage. Armstrong needs a man, a white man, and the man he chooses is Henry Smart.
This is a novel of prodigious energy and invention. Its language and its rhythms are as breathtaking as the music it celebrates. It shows yet again that as a writer Roddy Doyle is unequalled in his vision, his ambition, his ability to surprise us with each new novel. It is nothing less than a triumph.

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Carlo Lucarelli Day After Day Pbk published August 2005 by Vintage at £6.99 ISBN: 0099464381

See Review by Bob Cornwell

Oonagh Stransky (Translator)

A professional killer is at large in the cities of Italy. Code named "The Pit Bull" the killer is a master of disguise and an expert with weapons. He modifies his guns and his bullets are untraceable. His skill with prosthetics, wigs, makeup and padding means that no two victims witness the same before their death and, as with the search for the ever-reincarnating "Iguana" in Almost Blue, once again this is a hunt for a man with no face. Only the picture of a pit bull terrier, from which the killer takes his name, left behind at each murder can link the crimes. Stuck in a rut, the Pit Bull's life continues, day after day. And, day after day, Ispettore Negro works on her seemingly impossible case. When an innocent young man, surfing the Internet, unwittingly places himself in serious danger from the Pit Bull, Negro uses the man's knowledge of cyberspace to help her close in on her terrifying target.

Ispettore Grazia Negro returns to track down another faceless killer in this intelligently woven plot of sex, violence and suspense from the author of Almost Blue.

Carlo Lucarelli was born in 1960 in Modena, Italy. One of the most exciting young writers in Europe, he has written eleven novels, all of them noirs. Lucarelli hosts a popular television series in Italy that examines unsettling and unsolved crimes and the urban centres in which they occur. He also teaches writing in Turin and edits an on-line magazine.


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