The year hasn't got off to the best of starts for PI Sam Falconer. London is frozen in a January blizzard, and everywhere she goes, Sam has the creeping feeling of being watched. When she's asked to investigate the disappearance of a talented young rower from Oxford University, she hopes it will take her mind off her increasing paranoia. Harry was a stunning athlete, one of the most naturally gifted rowers the Oxford coach had ever seen. Then, just as the trials for the Boat Race were beginning, Harry literally vanished into the snow. Following the treacherous, icy waters of the Thames from Putney to Oxford, Sam begins to pick at the seams of the ruthlessly competitive world of rowing. Beneath the apparent camaraderie, there's a simmering current of jealousy and resentment. Harry haunts her - an elusive figure just beyond reach. Then a body surfaces in the water - and it's not Harry's. In discovering the truth about his disappearance, Sam must open a Pandora's Box of secrets, with deadly consequences...
Cutting Blades is the second novel to feature Sam Falconer, one of the most fascinating private investigators in contemporary crime fiction.

When Matthew's wife Charlotte is kidnapped, his world is thrown into chaos. Who has taken her - and why? There are no demands made for her release, just a threat that if he calls the police, Charlotte will lose the baby she is carrying - and then Matthew will lose her. Matthew is paralysed, haunted by the gloating phonecalls of her captor. As a prison governor, Matthew is convinced that Charlotte's abduction may be related to his job. Unable to talk to anyone in authority, he resorts to the only help he can find - Monk, an ex-prisoner who appears to have gone straight since his release, but has underworld contacts Matthew can only guess at. It's a devil's pact, but time is running out...

Friday 31 December 1999. In the early hours of the morning in a luxury central Leeds penthouse, masked intruders douse a terrified victim with petrol, set him alight and throw him burning from the ninth floor roof garden. DS Pete Bains is on night duty with CID when the call comes in. The body is quickly identified as Nicholas Hanley, a wealthy property developer, but Bains' attempts to pull together an enquiry stall when he cannot locate Hanley's lover, Anna Hart. Unknown to Bains, Hart and her daughter are less than five miles away, kidnapped at gunpoint and struggling to stay alive. Meanwhile, the security services are looking for DC Karen Sharpe. Eighteen months ago she walked out on Bains without a word of explanation. Now she has disappeared for real. What Sharpe has been doing not only connects her to Hanley's death, but has placed her at the disposal of men for whom human life means nothing. The danger is greater than anything she has faced before. If she cannot pull her shattered personality together, the last day of the millennium will be the last day of her life.

Rip Cantrell and former Air Force test pilot Charley are back! When Charley takes a job flying space-planes to the moon for the French lunar base project, she finds an anti-gravity beam generator, a weapon that the crazed project director intends to use to make himself ruler of the earth. Charley steals the plane and returns to base. In retaliation, the French kidnap Rip's uncle and force him to fly the saucer hidden in Area 51 to the moon - and the only thing capable of catching it, is the original Sahara saucer, now stored in the National Air and Space Museum. The chase is on!

Six months after nearly losing everything to the men who kidnapped his girlfriend's ten-year-old son, Elvis Cole is slowly coming back to life - when he receives an ominous phone call from the LAPD. An unidentified body has been found in a seedy Los Angeles alley and Elvis is called to the scene. When he arrives to view the body, cops scrutinize his reaction, telling him the only thing found in the room was a packet of newspaper articles all having to do with the past exploits of Elvis Cole. Finally, Elvis is told that before the man died, he said he was Elvis's father. Cole turns to the one person who can help him navigate the minefield of his past - his longtime partner, Joe Pike. As the two men launch into an investigation into the dead man's background, Elvis struggles with wanting to believe he's found his father at last - and allowing his suspicions to hold him back. And what he and Pike find is not reassuring. With each clue they uncover, a troubling picture emerges about the man who may have been Elvis's father. As Elvis and Joe approach the true identity of the dead man, they unwittingly walk straight into a hornet's nest. Gathering all the elements that have made Robert C

When Catherine Ducane disappears in the heart of New Orleans, the local cops react rapidly - she is the daughter of the Governor of Louisiana after all. But the case gets very strange, very quickly. Her bodyguard turns up horribly mutilated in the trunk of a beautiful vintage car and when her kidnapper calls he doesn't want money: he wants time alone with a minor functionary from a Washington-based organised crime task force. Quickly dragged down to the deep South, Ray Hartmann puzzles over why he has been summoned and why the mysterious kidnapper, an elderly Cuban named Ernesto Perez, wants to tell him his life story. It's only when he realises that Ernesto has been a brutal hitman for the Mob since the 1950s that things start to come together. But by the time the pieces fall into place, it's already too late... A QUIET VENDETTA is both the epic novel of one man's life in the Italian Mafia - a story that ranges from Cuba to Las Vegas and from L.A. to Chicago - and equally a powerful thriller of rage, love and loss. It confirms Roger Jon Ellory's place at the forefront of new thriller writing.

Top Keirnan has got problems. The research firm he's been running out of his 30s-era schoolhouse in Athens, Georgia, is beginning to founder, thanks to his former office manager (and ex-lover), who has stolen half his clients and set up shop on her own. And Top is no longer banking big bucks as an operative for Shaw's Mercantile Marine since they've decided his addiction to the adrenaline buzz is more of a risk than an asset. Things are looking tough for Top, when he gets a call. American Civil War General 'Stonewall' Jackson was shot by his own men while on night patrol. His aide-de-camp reached into the General's saddlebags to find something to press against the wound and pulled out a new flag, the Stars and Bars. Stonewall died, but the Bloody Red Rag, as the flag became known, went on to become the most valuable relic of the war. Now it's been stolen and Top is asked to find it. Normally Top wouldn't touch a job like this: the money's too small, and he's not excited about his arrogant, bigoted client, Professor Jay Pope-Scott. Problem is, Top badly needs those twenty thousand dollars. So he's soon taking on fanatical collectors, ultra-right-wing religious paramilitaries, a biker gang, Fourth Federal Bank and his former lover to save the school and recover the flag. In this sequel to Sam Hill's knockout debut novel, "Buzz Monkey", the action comes non-stop. The scrapes are daunting, the escapes hair-raising and the outcome stunningly unpredictable.

It was a crime so brutal it changed the lives of even the most hardened homicide cops. The Haas family murders left a scar on the community nothing can erase, but convicting the alleged killer - Karl Dahl - is a start. Only Judge Carey Moore seems to be standing in the way. Her ruling that Dahl's prior criminal record is inadmissible as evidence against him raises a public outcry - and puts the judge in grave danger. When an unknown assailant attacks Carey Moore in a parking garage, two of the city's top cops are called in to investigate and keep the judge from further harm. Detective Sam Kovac is as hard-boiled as they come, and his wisecracking partner, Nikki Liska, isn't far behind. Neither detective wants to be on this case, but when Karl Dahl escapes custody, everything changes, and a seemingly straightforward case cartwheels out of control. The stakes go higher when the judge is kidnapped from her home even as the police sit outside watching her house. Now Kovac and Liska must navigate through a maze of suspects that include the step-son of a murder victim, a husband with a secret life, and a rogue cop looking for revenge where the justice system failed.With no time to spare,

The discovery of a headless corpse on the rocks below cliffs on the Isle of Wight is only the beginning of a journey for DI Joe Faraday to the centre of the grim trade in human cargo from the crippled societies of the Balkans. From cheap labour to prostitution, Portsmouth, like every other city in the UK is home to untold human misery; a black economy built on illegal immigration. Joe Faraday is determined to find the real criminals that lie behind the tabloid hysteria. Detective Constable Winter on the other hand is determinded only to find a way out of the disciplinary action that threatens his entire career. A burgeoning relationship with a young prostitute isn't exactly helping his cause. Graham Hurley has written another vivid novel of all too human policeman struggling against an overwhelming tide of crime. This is crime writing with a vivid edge of documentary realism.