New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From
Bantam
07 July-Sept
New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From
Bantam
JULY-SEPT 07
Simon Beckett
Written in Bone
Published August 2007 by Bantam at £12.99
ISBN: 0593055241
See Review by
Cath Staincliffe
author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries and the series creator of TV Blue Murder
On his way back from ongoing investigation in Scotland, forensics anthropologist David Hunter is asked if he could examine a strange fire-death on the remote Hebridean island of Runa - reported by Brody, a retired policeman who lives there. The journey over to Runa is delayed by rough seas and it's dark by the time Hunter and the two mainland police officers and a reporter accompanying him arrive. Warned that it will be unlike anything else that he has encountered, Hunter goes straight to where the body lies - in a ruined croft. It is indeed unusual: almost totally incinerated except for the feet and a single hand. And nothing else appears to have been affected by the fire. It appears to be a textbook case of the phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion. The police are quick to record it as an accidental death, but Brody is less convinced. Hunter, having established that the victim was female, keeps an open mind but on closer investigation of the site the next day, discovers skull fragments that lead him to just one conclusion: this was no accident, this was murder. And he's soon forced to realise that Runa is far from the peaceful community it seems, and that the burned corpse is only one of its dark secrets. Then the full force of an Atlantic storm descends, cutting off all power and contact with the mainland. As the storm rages, the killing begins in earnest...
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Tom Cain
The Accident Man
Published July 2007 by Bantam at £12.99
ISBN: 0593058054
Wilbur Smith
This is the best first thriller I have read since 'The Day of the Jackal'.
Lee Child
'Audacious, authentic, full of tension and tradecraft . . . a great thriller.
Meet the Accident Man, Daniel Carver. Carver is a good guy who makes bad things happen to bad people. Drug-baron's helicopter develops mechanical failure mid-flight: Daniel Carver. Terrorist blown-up in his own bomb factory: Daniel Carver. Ex-SAS, now freelance mercenary he is the frontline weapon of the 'Corporation', a black-ops British government outfit, or is it? Carver is called to do a hit at very short notice. Do this job for us and be paid very well. Refuse and you better run and hide. He believes the target to be a high-ranking Pakistani terrorist. The job is to organise a car crash in a Paris underpass. But Carver is being set up. When he discovers the real identity of his target, and more importantly the identity of the target's female companion, he knows one thing - his life is over. This is a secret too big to let him live, unless he can track down the real villains before they get to him. Combining the plotting of Robert Ludlum, with the pace and tension of Lee Child, Tom Cain is a major new thriller writer and "The Accident Man" is a classic in the making and launches Daniel Carver straight into the top rank of action heroes.
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Christopher Fowler
Ten-second Staircase
Pbk published July 2007 by Bantam at £7.99
ISBN: 0553817205
First a controversial artist is found dead in her own art installation, inside a riverside gallery with locked doors and windows - and the only witness is a small boy who insists that the murderer was a masked man riding a stallion. Then a television presenter is struck by lightning while indoors. Clearly, these are the kind of impossible crimes that only Arthur Bryant and John May of the Met's Peculiar Crimes Unit might be able to solve. But Bryant has lost his nerve following a disastrous public appearance, and May is fighting to keep the unit from closure. Worse still, the case of the Leicester Square Vampire, an unsolved mystery from the past that changed both their lives, has returned to haunt them in the present. With a sinister modern-day highwayman bringing terror to the London streets in a series of crimes each more puzzling than the last, the elderly detectives track their suspect to an exclusive private school and a deprived housing estate. But just when they need all the help they can get to uncover a new breed of criminal, the highwayman begins to be hailed a national hero, and the public turns against them. Bryant and May, the nation's most extraordinary investigators are back on the case in a breathless adventure that explores the dark side of celebrity, the conflicts of youth, age and class, and the peculiar myths of old London.
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Tess Gerritsen
The Mephisto Club
Pbk published August 2007 by Bantam at £6.99
ISBN: 0553817809
Christmas Eve in Boston is no holy night for medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles. In a rundown house a woman has been dismembered in an act of carnage that leaves veteran cops in shock. The last person called from the dead girl's phone is Dr. Joyce O'Donnell, a celebrity psychiatrist who's made her name defending serial murderers. But there are other clues that make the police wonder if this slaying was part of a Satanic ritual. Drawn on the wall, in blood, are ancient symbols, and a mirror-image word in Latin that, translated, says: "I have sinned." Then a second woman is found butchered on Beacon Hill, just outside the grand residence of Anthony Sansone, a reclusive historian. He is the leader of the Mephisto Club, an old and secret society dedicated to the study of evil, and to confronting it in its purest form. On the door to Sansone's house have been scrawled yet more ancient symbols. Are they clues? Or threats? When the same symbols appear on Maura Isles' door, Maura and Jane must call on the Mephisto Club for assistance. Because this is a form of evil Boston PD has never encountered before. And the only way they can defeat it is by turning to the people who understand the devil himself.
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Robert Goddard
Name to a Face
Published September 2007 by Bantam at £14.99
ISBN: 0593053672
This work presents the sequence of extraordinary events over the past 300 years. It is a chain of intrigue, deceit, greed and murder. It covers: the loss of H.M.S. Association with all hands in 1707; an admiralty clerk's secret mission thirty years after; a fatal accident during a dive to the wreck in 1996; and an expatriate's reluctant return home ten years later. The simple task he has come to accomplish, shown to be anything but. A woman he recognises but cannot identify. A conspiracy of circumstances that is about to unravel his life. And with it, the past.
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John Twelve Hawks
Dark River (Fourth Realm Trilogy)
Published July 2007 by Bantam at £14.99
ISBN: 059305489X
Fear stalks our lives, in the press, on the television, over the airwaves, across the internet. Everywhere we go, someone somewhere is always watching. Waiting for the mistake that will reveal secrets, truths, lies, the real story or what they want to believe. No longer is anonymity a given right. We are being controlled without our knowledge and we don't appear to care. Daily we sacrifice little freedoms that will never be returned. We are all victims. They are some who will fight to the death to protect those freedoms. They will not allow the forces of commerce and ideology to dictate their lives. They are off the grid. Gabriel Corrigan is one such man. The system doesn't like it. It says that you cannot opt out, that you have to participate. And it will do whatever it takes to return Gabriel to the fold - alive or dead. He can run but he can't hide - forever...
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Dennis Lehane
Coronado
Pbk published September 2007 by Bantam at £6.99
ISBN: 055381818X
See Review by
Cath Staincliffe
author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries and the series creator of TV Blue Murder
Boston Herald,
'A brilliant, insightful and intriguing literary voyage'
Kirkus Reviews
'...a writer of commanding gifts, who seems poised on the threshold of even greater accomplishment'
Publishers Weekly
'Powerfully envisioned lives, recounted unflinchingly'
From Dennis Lehane, the award-winning author of Mystic River, Shutter Island, and the Kenzie-Gennaro series, comes a brilliant collection of five short stories and a play.
Along with completely original material, this new col-lection is a compilation of the best of Dennis Lehane's previously published short stories, including "Until Gwen," which was adapted for the stage in 2005 and appears in this book as the title play, Coronado.
At turns suspenseful, surreal, romantic, and tragically comic, these tales journey headlong into the heart of our national myths-about class, gender, freedom, and regeneration through violence-and find that the truth waiting for us there is not what we'd expect.
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Denise Mina
The Dead Hour
Pbk published July 2007 by Bantam at £6.99
ISBN: 0553815601
When Paddy Meehan, Glasgow's youngest aspiring journalist, is called to a domestic dispute at a house in a wealthy suburb in the north of the city, it seems like just another police call. The blonde bleeding from a head injury in the shadows doesn't want any help; and the well dressed man at the front door assures Paddy that everything's fine, and that she can leave. And then he slips her a crisp GBP50 note to keep the story out of the paper. By the next morning the woman's dead. Paddy may have found the story she's dreamed about, but she'll lose all credibility if the word gets out about her bribe. The police who attended the call are twisting the evidence for reasons of their own. Only Paddy cares enough to pursue a dark and brutal truth that could make her career - or kill her.
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Denise Mina
The Last Breath (Paddy Meehan 3)
Published August 2007 by Bantam at £12.99
ISBN: 0593051432
It is Glasgow in 1990. Paddy Meehan is home alone when there's a knock at the door. It's the police and they have bad news. Former boyfriend Terry Patterson's naked body has been found in a ditch. He's been tortured, hooded, then shot through the head: all hallmarks of an IRA assassination. Paddy is devastated: Terry was her first lover; the sort of journalist she's always aspired to be. But why have the police come to her? Although she and Terry have had an on/off affair since they first worked together in the 1980s, she hasn't seen him for over a year. She is therefore horrified to find that not only has Terry named her next of kin, but he has left her a huge Georgian house in Ayrshire and several suitcases full of notes. What was Terry trying to tell her? As Paddy begins her investigation into his death, she realises that if the secret he was about to expose was worth killing for, she is next in line...
Denise Mina is the author of the Garnethill trilogy, the first of which, Garnethill, won the John Creasy Dagger for best first novel. A stand-alone novel, Sanctum, was followed by her creation of the Paddy Meehan series which include The Field of Blood, winner of the 2006 Barry Award, and The Dead Hour, which was nominated for a 2007 Edgar Award.
She has also written a year-long run of Hellblazer for DC Comics and the graphic novel A Sickness in the Family. Her first play ‘Ida Tamson’ was staged in 2006.
In between writing she raises children, mooches about eating toast and listens to thrash metal. Nice life.
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