New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bantam 07 Jan-March

File Updated: 25/03/2007

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bantam JAN-MARCH 07

Lee Child The Hard Way Pbk published March 2007 by Bantam at Ł6.99 ISBN: 0553815873

See Review by Cath Staincliffe author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries and the series creator of TV Blue Murder

Late at night in a New York cafe, army-cop-turned-drifter Jack Reacher orders coffee in a cup made of foam, not china, so that he can move on at a moment's notice. He owns nothing, carries less, has never encountered a female colleague he can't bed, or a case he can't solve. But now, Reacher is confronted by a situation so disturbing and deceptive that the truth eludes him. Has he painted targets on the good guys' backs? So Reacher starts over at square one. He sweats the details and works the clues. As they used to say back in the service, he's doing it the hard way. Until, what started on a busy New York street explodes three thousand miles away in the sleepy English countryside with Reacher striding alone in the shadows, armed and dangerous, and invincible.

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Tess Gerritsen The Mephisto Club Published January 2007 by Bantam at Ł14.99 ISBN: 0593055926

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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Tess Gerritsen Vanish Published January 2007 by Bantam at Ł12.99 ISBN: 0593053516

The nameless and beautiful woman appears to be just another corpse in the morgue. An apparent suicide, she lies on a gurney in the cold room, awaiting the dissecting scalpel of medical examiner Maura Isles. But when Maura unzips the body bag and looks down at the body, she gets the fright of her life. The corpse opens its eyes. Now very much alive, the "dead" woman is rushed to the hospital where her next action shocks everyone. With cool precision, she murders a security guard and seizes hostages. One of those hostages is a very pregnant patient - Jane Rizzoli. Who is this mysterious hostage-taker, and what does she want? As tense hours tick by, Maura joins forces with Jane's husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, to track down the nameless woman's identity. When Federal agents suddenly appear on the scene, Maura and Gabriel realize they are dealing with a case that goes far deeper than just an ordinary hostage crisis. Only Jane, trapped with the armed madwoman, holds the key to the mystery. And only she can solve it - if she survives the night.

Tess Gerritsen left a successful practice as a medic to raise her children and concentrate on her writing. Harvest, Life Support, Bloodstream, Gravity, The Surgeon, The Apprentice and The Sinner have been New York Times and Sunday Times bestsellers. Her most recent novel is Body Double.
She lives with her husband and two sons in Maine.

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Tess Gerritsen Vanish Pbk published January 2007 by Bantam at Ł6.99 ISBN: 0553816837

The nameless and beautiful woman appears to be just another corpse in the morgue. An apparent suicide, she lies on a gurney in the cold room, awaiting the dissecting scalpel of medical examiner Maura Isles. But when Maura unzips the body bag and looks down at the body, she gets the fright of her life. The corpse opens its eyes. Now very much alive, the "dead" woman is rushed to the hospital where her next action shocks everyone. With cool precision, she murders a security guard and seizes hostages. One of those hostages is a very pregnant patient - Jane Rizzoli. Who is this mysterious hostage-taker, and what does she want? As tense hours tick by, Maura joins forces with Jane's husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, to track down the nameless woman's identity. When Federal agents suddenly appear on the scene, Maura and Gabriel realize they are dealing with a case that goes far deeper than just an ordinary hostage crisis. Only Jane, trapped with the armed madwoman, holds the key to the mystery. And only she can solve it - if she survives the night.

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Mo Hayder Pig Island Pbk published February 2007 by Bantam at Ł6.99 ISBN: 055381463X

Journalist Joe Oakes makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes. A born sceptic, he believes everything has a rational explanation. But when he visits a secretive religious community on a remote Scottish island, everything he thought he knew is overturned. Questions mount: why has the community been accused of Satanism? What has happened to their leader, Pastor Malachi Dove? And perhaps most important, why will no one discuss the strange apparition seen wandering the lonely beaches of Pig Island? Their confrontation, and its violent and bloody aftermath, is so catastrophic that it forces Oaksey to question the nature of evil, and whether he might not be responsible for the terrible crime about to unfold. In her compulsive and haunting new novel, Mo Hayder dares her readers to face their fears head on and to look at what lurks beneath the surface of everyday normality. "Pig Island" is about the unspeakable things people can do to each other. Brace yourself for a terrifying read.

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Carl Hiaasen Nature Girl Published February 2007 by Bantam at Ł12.99 ISBN: 0593057317

Observer 'Carl Hiaasen's latest screwball thriller ... is sometimes ludicrous but always engaging and frequently hilarious.'
Independent `Nature Girl, the product of a deranged imagination, combines the comedic energy of Moličre with Mark Twain's lightness of phrase.'

Honey Santana - self-proclaimed queen of lost causes - has a Plan.
She may be a single mother living in a trailer-park with her teenage son; she may have just been sacked from her day job for whacking an over-friendly co-worker in the balls with a crab mallet; she may be an obsessive compulsive with an anger management problem.
But she's determined to set up her own eco-tour business, paddling tourists around the Florida Everglades in ocean kayaks. She's also working on a scheme to help rid the world of irresponsibility, indifference and dinner-time telemarketers. The result is a kayaking trip from hell involving an unplanned overnight stay on Dismal Key - one of the Everglades' Ten Thousand Islands - for Honey, her kayaks, and her two `guests': a part-time telephonist who's recently foul-mouthed her, and his less than enthusiastic mistress.
What Honey doesn't know is that, lurking in the island's undergrowth, are two men with death on their minds: Sammy Tigertail, a half-blood Seminole Indian and failed alligator wrestler; and Honey's deranged co-worker, Louis Piejack, now with most of his fingers surgically mis-attached to the wrong knuckles, and intent on revenge.
A holiday to die for? In Hiaasen's chaotic universe, anything can happen ...

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William Landay The Strangler Published February 2007 by Bantam at Ł12.99 ISBN: 0593049357
See Review by Cath Staincliffe author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries and the series creator of TV Blue Murder

This story is set Boston in the year 1963. It is a city on the edge. On street corners, newsboys hawk the shocking headline: Kennedy Is Dead. In the city's underworld, a mob war rages. But what terrifies Bostonians most is the mysterious killer who has already claimed a dozen victims, a murderer whose name is indelibly linked to their city: the Boston Strangler. For the three Daley brothers, sons of a Boston cop, crime is the family business. They are simply on different sides of it. Joe is the eldest, a tough-talking cop whose gambling habits - fast women, slow horses - drag him down into the city's gangland. Michael is the middle son; a Harvard-educated lawyer working for an ambitious attorney general, he finds himself assigned to the embattled Strangler task force. And Ricky, the devil-may-care youngest son, floats above the fray as an expert burglar - until the Strangler strikes too close to home. As Joe's mob debts close in around him...and Michael becomes snarled in a murder investigation gone very wrong...and Ricky is hunted by both sides of the law...the three brothers - and the women who love them - are forced to take sides. Now, each must look deeper into a killer's murderous rage, into their family's own lethal secrets, and into the one death that has changed them forever. As William Landay's complex, compassionate, and terrifying novel builds to a climax, two mysteries will collide - and a shattering truth will be revealed.

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Allan Mallinson Company of Spears Pbk published March 2007 by Bantam at Ł6.99 ISBN: 0553816756

Literary Review 'A damn fine, rip-roaring read.'

It is 1827, and Matthew Hervey is on the look out for a new posting. He soon finds one in the Cape Colonies, where there is need of a man to re-organise the local forces, and in particular to form a new company of horse. Accompanied by a mixed-race captain from the disbanded Royal African Corps, Hervey heads out into the great South African plains and towards the territory of the Zulu and their legendary leader, King Shaka. But it is not till he nears the Umtata River that his fiercest battle really begins. For the Zulus fight like no army he has encountered before. As Hervey and his greenhorn troops are plunged into battle, death is only a heartbeat away..."Matthew Hervey has now joined Sharpe and Jack Aubrey as a creation of superlative skills and character." - "Birmingham Post".

Brigadier Allan Mallinson was a serving cavalry officer. Besides the Matthew Hervey series, he is the author of Light Dragoons, a history of four regiments of British Cavalry, one of which he commanded, and a regular reviewer for The Times and the Spectator. Allan Mallinson’s six previous novels featuring Matthew Hervey - A Close Run Thing, The Nizam’s Daughters, A Regimental Affair, A Call to Arms, and The Sabre’s Edge and Rumours of War, which were Sunday Times Bestsellers - are all available in Bantam paperback.

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Julia Navarro The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud Published January 2007 by Bantam at Ł10.99 ISBN: 0385339623

"The Brotherhood Of The Holy Shroud" is the explosive international bestseller that mixes fact and fiction to tell the riveting story of one of the world's most controversial relics, the Turin Shroud - believed by millions of the faithful to bear the likeness of Christ - and the desperate race to save it from those who will stop at nothing to possess its legendary power. A fire at the Cathedral of Turin and the discovery of a strangely mutilated body attract the attention of Italy's special Art Crimes Department, for the fire is only the latest in a troubling series of arson attacks and break-ins at the cathedral which houses the famous shroud. Department chief, Marco Valoni leads a team of top investigators in a race to solve a crime certain to shock the world: someone is planning to steal the Holy Shroud. Spanning centuries and continents, from the storm-rent skies over Cavalry, through the glories of Byzantium and the intrigue and treachery of the Crusades, "The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud" is a provocative page-turner of the highest order - one that will challenge you to believe.

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Duncan Staff The Lost Boy Published March 2007 by Bantam at Ł14.99 ISBN: 0593056922

The definitive book on the Moors Murders

A series of child-murders that took place in Yorkshire in the 1960s shocked and scandalised the country. The two people responsible, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, were tried in a sensational case and have become notorious as the human face of evil. It is a story that has captivated for forty years. Four children were murdered by Hindley and Brady, the body of one of their victims, Keith Bennett, has never been found. In "The Lost Boy", Duncan Staff has produced the nearest to a definitive book on the subject we will ever read. In 1999, Duncan Staff made a documentary on the Moors murders for BBC2. In the course of producing this programme he, as a matter of course, invited Myra Hindley to put across her side of the story. Much to his surprise, she agreed. What followed was a correspondence in which Hindley spoke candidly about some aspects of her crimes. The programme aired, concluding unquestioningly with a reaffirmation of her guilt. After her death, her estate sent Duncan Myra Hindley's unpublished papers - which proved a window into the disturbed world of Hindley and Brady. Drawing on this unique resource, and combined with extensive research, the co-operation of the families of the victims, the police and expert witnesses Duncan Staff has written this authoritative investigation into these infamous crimes. "The Lost Boy" is the compelling story of some of the twentieth-century's most notorious crimes. Duncan Staff has undertaken an exhaustive, and sensitive, exploration into all aspects of these murders and their long-felt aftermath. It also presents for the first time a compelling theory about the location of the final resting place of the Moors Murderers' last victim, Keith Bennett.

Duncan Staff is a leading documentary maker and journalist who has produced and presented a number of critically acclaimed, commercially successful programmes. His work has been shown on BBC1, BBC2, Channel 4 and ITV’s World in Action. He also writes for the national press, principally the Guardian.

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