In this affecting crime novel from Edgar-winner Cook (The Chatham School Affair), Eric Moore, a prosperous businessman, watches his safe, solid world disintegrate. When eight-year-old Amy Giordano, whom Eric's teenage son, Keith, was babysitting, disappears from her family's house, many believe Keith is an obvious suspect, and not even his parents are completely convinced that he wasn't somehow involved. As time passes without Amy being found, a corrosive suspicion seeps into every aspect of Eric's life. That suspicion is fed by Eric's shaky family history - a father whose failed plans led from moderate wealth to near penury, an alcoholic older brother who's never amounted to much, a younger sister fatally stricken with a brain tumour and a mother driven to suicide. Not even Eric's loving wife, Meredith, is immune from his doubts as he begins to examine and re-examine every aspect of his life. The ongoing police investigation and the anguish of the missing girl's father provide periodic goads as Eric's futile attempts to allay his own misgivings seem only to lead him into more desperate straits. The totally unexpected resolution is both shocking and perfectly apt.

The New Yorker Mr Daley is a writer of fine craft and understanding. His story is instructive, moving and entirely satisfying

Gabe Driscoll, chief of Internal Affairs for the New York City police department, stands in the city morgue, watching an autopsy. His interest is more than professional. The body is that of activist priest Frank Redmond, who along with Driscoll belonged to a championship swim relay team at a Jesuit high school in the 1950s. More than three decades later, Redmond has gone off a Harlem rooftop a few blocks from his church, and the surviving members of the team - Driscoll and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Andrew Troy - find themselves reunited in a bizarre new race to figure out how and why Redmond died. Was it suicide, as police and diocesan investigations have summarily concluded? Or was he pushed - murdered - and if so, by whom? The search for answers takes them to Vietnam and Africa and back to Harlem, and inside their own ambitions, passions and secrets, both past and present.

Vince Conte was a New York cop until he punched the senior officer having an affair with his wife. Forced to resign, he's bored by his work for a private security firm. Tony Murano was a tennis player dating the daughter of royalty. Then his career faltered and his girlfriend got pregnant. Now Murano is under his father-in-law's thumb, unable to find the investors he needs to become a businessman in his own right. When tabloids all over Europe publish pictures of his poolside tryst with an anonymous woman on the day his wife gave birth to the royal heir, Murano's father-in-law is all too glad to dismiss him. His young wife is heartbroken, though, and her mother decides to investigate. Who arranged the photos? What was the true motive? Assigned to the job, Conte finds himself a target as he follows a trail of photographs and money that takes him to Italy, Amsterdam, Monaco, and back.

Vince Conte was a New York cop until he punched the senior officer having an affair with his wife. Forced to resign, he's bored by his work for a private security firm. Tony Murano was a tennis player dating the daughter of royalty. Then his career faltered and his girlfriend got pregnant. Now Murano is under his father-in-law's thumb, unable to find the investors he needs to become a businessman in his own right. When tabloids all over Europe publish pictures of his poolside tryst with an anonymous woman on the day his wife gave birth to the royal heir, Murano's father-in-law is all too glad to dismiss him. His young wife is heartbroken, though, and her mother decides to investigate. Who arranged the photos? What was the true motive? Assigned to the job, Conte finds himself a target as he follows a trail of photographs and money that takes him to Italy, Amsterdam, Monaco, and back.

A young wife is home alone when the phone rings in "So Help Me God." Is the strange voice flirting with her from the other end of the line her jealous husband laying a trap, or a stranger who knows entirely too much about her? In "Madison at Guignol" an unhappy fashionist discovers a secret door inside her favourite clothing store and insists the staff let her enter. But even her fevered imagination cannot anticipate the horror they have been hiding from her. In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves. With wicked insights, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates why the females of the species - be they six-year-old girls, seemingly devoted wives, or ageing mothers - are by nature more deadly than the males.

"The authenticity is on display on every page, in every paragraph. From how hot desert air feels on the skin in Las Vegas to how paperwork is shuffled in the Justice Department to how a hired killer slips into a locked hotel room to fulfil a contract, the author's skiff in creating his world repeatedly awes the reader" Michael Connelly
A stunning debut ... a brilliantly plotted thriller. 'Washington Post A writer of infernal ingenuity ' New York Times Review

Murder has always been easy for the Butcher's Boy-it's what he was raised to do. But when he kills the senior senator from Colorado and arrives in Las Vegas to pick up his fee, he learns that he has become a liability to his shadowy employers. His actions attract the attention of police specialists who watch the world of organized crime, but though everyone knows that something big is going on, only Elizabeth Waring, a bright young analyst in the Justice Department, works her way closer to the truth, and to the frightening man behind it.

Winner of the 2006 Edgar Award for Best First Novel

"Ask the Parrot" is a masterpiece of lean writing and tight plotting, rough humour and deft characterization, the latest in Richard Stark's "Parker" series which has won him a wide following across the world of crime fiction addicts.
Parker is on the run after a country town bank robbery goes wrong. There are road blocks in the lanes, and search parties with sniffer dogs are out in the woods. Separated from his associates, Parker is confronted by a local citizen with a shotgun. But this citizen is not out to arrest him: he wants Parker to help him carry out a robbery of his own.
So Parker joins the posse looking for himself and enters into a queasy partnership with an embittered recluse intent on robbing the racetrack where he was once employed.

Broken by his last case, homicide detective Joe Cashin has fled the city and returned to his hometown to run its one-man police station while his wounds heal and the nightmares fade. He lives a quiet life with his two dogs in the tumbledown wreck his family home has become. It's a peaceful existence - ideal for the rehabilitating man. But his recovery is rudely interrupted by a brutal attack on Charles Bourgoyne, a prominent member of the local community. Suspicion falls on three young men from the local Aboriginal community. But Cashin's not so sure and as the case unfolds amid simmering corruption and prejudice, he finds himself holding on to something that it might be better to let go. The relentless story of a town with a hidden past versus a man who is trying to forget his, "The Broken Shore" delivers powerful, lean writing, pumping more muscle and feeling into one paragraph than other writers can muster in a page. A masterpiece of insight and passion, Peter Temple's UK debut announces the arrival of a talent to rival Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin.

Sarah Longmore's apartment was in Kensington, on the rough edge, near the Dynon railyards in a cracked and potholed dead-end street with unpaved verges, weeds battling to survive. Just before a six-metre corrugated iron wall, I turned into a small cinder yard. A yellow Ford ute, better days seen, had its blistered nose to a building - partly brick, partly cinder-block, partly rusted tin. I parked the Lark next to the ute, switched off the wipers, sat listening to the engine note. Jack Irish - gambler, cook and cabinetmaker, finder of people who don't want to be found - has a new job, hunting for evidence that might save the beautiful sculptor Sarah Longmore from going down for murder. Jack soon discovers there was nothing straightforward about Mickey Franklin's death, and between the case and his own dealings with dodgy racehorses, falls headlong into a world of shady deals, sexual secrets and country rednecks.

‘Joseph Wambaugh invented the modern police novel and Hollywood Station is classic Wambaugh: brilliant characterization, impeccable plotting, stunning sense of place, and that special brand of irreverent, mordant humour for which Wambaugh holds the patent. This is the master at his best.’ Jonathan Kellerman