New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Serpent's Tail 07 Jan-March
File Updated: 15/04/2009
New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Serpent's Tail JAN-MARCH 07

Vicki Hendricks Cruel Poetry Pbk published January 2007 by Serpent's Tail at £7.99 ISBN: 1852429275

See Review by Martin Edwards - author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries

Renata is young, beautiful, and has sex for money and kicks. Few are immune to her intoxicating allure - even her pet Burmese python, Pepe, seems captive to her charm. Richard is one of her clients, a poetry professor with a wife and two sons, whose erotic fascination with Rennie is threatening his home and job. Meanwhile, Julie, a shy wannabe-novelist, spies on Rennie from her room next door in between bouts of frustrated writing. Both would do anything to save Rennie from her dangerous occupation and become her one true love.
Narrated by these three characters, "Cruel Poetry" is a gripping story of fatal attraction, energized by high-voltage sex and suspense. Against contrasting backdrops - Miami's gaudy vacationland, the haunting atmosphere of the Everglades - Vicki Hendricks captures the Florida behind the postcards. As the lives of Richard and Julie unravel amidst drugs and murder, Hendricks sweeps us to a bittersweet climax.

Thousands of New and Used Books at your Fingertips...
Support Tangled Web - Buy Your Books Online


Jean Patrick Manchette Three To Kill Pbk published February 2007 by Serpent's Tail at £7.99 ISBN: 1852424753

See Review by Ian Morson Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger

Donald Nicholson-Smith (Translator
Late one night in Paris, travelling salesman Georges Gerfaut stops to help an injured motorist to hospital. Three days later, while Gerfaut is on holiday with his wife and daughters, he is attacked by two men. Quickly realising the duo's murderous intent, but perplexed as to their motives, Gerfaut goes on the run, communicating with his family by telegram. Terrified, yet exhilarated by this release from his humdrum life, Gerfaut resolves to turn the tables and track down his pursuers. Jean-Patrick Manchette presents a clash between two opposing worlds: a conventional, middle-class existence cluttered by possessions and responsibilities, and a violent criminal underworld. In Georges Gerfaut we find an unlikely hero, an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances and forced to fight for his life. "Three to Kill" is another riveting slice of '70s noir by a masterful stylist, ironist, and social critic.

Thousands of New and Used Books at your Fingertips...
Support Tangled Web - Buy Your Books Online


Marcos S & Taibo P I Uncomfortable Dead Pbk published January 2007 by Serpent's Tail at £7.99 ISBN: 1852429070


Translated by Carlos Lopez
In this vibrant and surreal detective mystery, the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and crime writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II create an uproarious murder mystery with intersecting storylines. Those chapters written by the famously masked Marcos are set in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, where, amid a hallucinatory blend of different voices, we meet Elias, a Zapatista detective tasked with locating missing people. Taibo's chapters star his Coca-Cola - and - cigarette-consuming series detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne: a Pl specialising in cases stranger than reality. The two stories collide absurdly and dramatically in the sprawl of Mexico City. The ugly history of the city's political violence rears its head, and both detectives find themselves in an unlikely dance of death with forces of criminal, historical, and political.

Thousands of New and Used Books at your Fingertips...
Support Tangled Web - Buy Your Books Online


Derek Raymond State of Denmark Pbk published January 2007 by Serpent's Tail at £7.99 ISBN: 185242947X


It is the 1960s. England has become a dictatorship, governed by a sly, ruthless politician called Jobling. All non-whites have been deported, "The English Times" is the only newspaper, and ordinary people live in dread of nightly curfews and secret police. Richard Watt used all his journalistic talents to expose Jobling before he came to power. Now in exile in a farmhouse amid the cruel heat of the Italian countryside, Watt cultivates his vineyards. His remote rural idyll is shattered by the arrival of an emissary from London. Derek Raymond's skill is to make all too plausible the transition from complacent democracy to dictatorship in a country preoccupied by consumerism and susceptible to media spin. First published in 1970, Raymond's brilliant satire is as dark and frightening as ever.

Widely admired as the godfather of the British noir novel, Derek Raymond was born Robin Cook in 1931. The son of a textile magnate, he dropped out of Eton aged sixteen and spent much of his early career among criminals. The Factory series followed his early novels, The Crust on Its Uppers and A State of Denmark. His literary memoir The Hidden Files was published in 1992. He died in London in 1994.

Thousands of New and Used Books at your Fingertips...
Support Tangled Web - Buy Your Books Online


Tony Saint The ASBO Show Pbk published February 2007 by Serpent's Tail at £7.99 ISBN: 1852429208


Council worker Roger joined the ASBO unit because new departments are the best places to avoid work. Feeling oddly blank about the death of his father and wanting to escape the office, he goes to investigate a condemned tower block on the notorious Composer's estate. Looking down from the third floor, Roger is mesmerised by the sight of local kids - mostly characters he recognises from the ASBO lists - drinking and fighting in the piazza below. He returns regularly, and even invites his colleague Spence along one night. Spence intentionally leaves his brand new Mercedes unlocked in the piazza, and waits for the fun to start. So the ASBO show is born. Soon Spence is hosting drug-fuelled parties for local dignitaries, celebrities, even hen nights, and Roger fears that his voyeurism has become corporate entertainment. Still, helped along by uppers and downers and his glamorous new girlfriend, he drifts along with it. By the time things get really ugly, it's much too late...

Thousands of New and Used Books at your Fingertips...
Support Tangled Web - Buy Your Books Online


Tony Saint Blag Pbk published February 2007 by Serpent's Tail at £7.99 ISBN: 185242494X


The knives are out for Harry and Sean in this hilarious parody of the murky world of immigration
Harry Verma - small-time immigration solicitor, nursing a sick father and a gambling habit - has taken to pulling more than just the odd legal aid fraud to help pay his unpredictable creditors. Sean Carlisle - enforcement officer, collaring illegal immigrants for a living - is self-destructing. Booze, pills and bending the law to get results are all taking their toll on his judgement.
Two men on opposite sides of a blured line have more in common than they think. As a runaway Asian bride, her corrupt father-in-law and a psychotic Glaswegian immigration officer with a Yardie fixation, bring them inexorably together, Harry and Sean have little choice but to team up for the blag of their lives.
Tony Saint follows up Refusal Shoes with a new novel further exploring the secrets of the immigration game and its dodgy practitioners. But this time, it's happening out there, right on your doorstep...
Refusal Shoes in development as a BBC drama
Tony Saint was born in Northumberland in 1968. He enjoyed success as a child actor working with both the RSC and the BBC. After university he joined the United Kingdom Immigration Service where he has worked for ten years. He has also written numerous scripts for radio and TV. He lives in London with his wife and son.

Thousands of New and Used Books at your Fingertips...
Support Tangled Web - Buy Your Books Online



top