New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Vintage 07 April-June

File Updated: 30/06/2007

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Vintage APRIL-JUNE 07

Richard Blandford Hound Dog Pbk published June 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099492865

Elvis is the premier Elvis impersonator in the whole of the Cambridgeshire region. He's fat and bald and old; partial to cocaine, he sells skunk to the local teenagers; he masturbates five or six times a day, and he hates Elvis Presley. Elvis has been married three times, but, as he says, never for very long. He finds being Elvis a useful way into the beds of Cambridgeshire's bored housewives. Elvis's life starts to go wrong when his backing singers, Gay Elvis and Fat Elvis, mutiny. They love Elvis Presley and want to sing the songs in historical sequence. He replaces them with Buddy Holly, a postman with bladder problems, but the new arrangement is not without its difficulties. Then Eddie calls to offer the biggest gig yet of Elvis's career. Eddie, a gay gangster who 'looked after' Elvis on one of his stints in prison, wants him to perform at the birthday party of Johnny Brooks, another gangster, even more vicious, who just happens to be married to Elvis's third ex-wife. Without question, the best Elvis-impersonator novel you'll ever read, "Hound Dog" is very very funny and really quite sad. It marks the debut of a formidable new writer.

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Edmund Crispin The Moving Toyshop Pbk published May 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 009950622X

Richard Cadogan, poet and would-be bon vivant, arrives for what he thinks will be a relaxing holiday in the city of dreaming spires. Late one night, however, he discovers the dead body of an elderly woman lying in a toyshop and is coshed on the head. When he comes to, he finds that the toyshop has disappeared and been replaced with a grocery store. The police are understandably skeptical of this tale but Richard's former schoolmate, Gervase Fen (Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature), knows that truth is stranger than fiction (in fiction, at least). Soon the intrepid duo is careening around town in hot pursuit of clues but just when they think they understand what has happened, the disappearing-toyshop mystery takes a sharp turn...

Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery, an English crime writer and composer. He graduated from St John's College, Oxford, in 1943, with a BA in modern languages, having for two years been its organist and choirmaster. From 1943 to 1945 he taught at Shrewsbury School and in 1944 published the first of nine Gervase Fen novels, The Case of the Gilded Fly. He became a well respected reviewer of crime, writing for the Sunday Times from 1967 until his death in 1978. He also composed the music for many of the Carry On films.

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Edmund Crispin Love Lies Bleeding pbk Pbk published May 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099506211

Taut and clever, "Love Lies Bleeding" revolves around events which begin at the Castrevenford Schools, separate boys and girls institutions where small disturbances have surprising ramifications. Gervase Fen, the Oxford Professor of Language and Literature, who has been called in to speak for the schools' Speech Day by the Headmaster, an old university acquaintance, is soon in the thick of a mystery which grows deadlier as it becomes more inexplicable. Was young Brenda Boyce assaulted, and, if so, by whom? Who has broken into the chemistry laboratory, and what have they stolen? And what, if anything, is worth the risk of committing murder? As Fen pursues the increasingly convoluted path toward the truth, he discovers happenings more convoluted than any play.

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Edmund Crispin Holy Disorders Pbk published May 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 009950619X

"Holy Disorders" takes Oxford don and part time detective, Gervase Fen to the town of Tolnbridge, where he is happily bounding around with a butterfly net until the cathedral organist is murdered, giving Fen the chance to play sleuth. The man didn't have an enemy in the world, and even his music was inoffensive: could he have fallen foul of a nest of German spies or of the local coven of witches, ominously rumored to have been practicing since the 17th century? Tracking down the answer pleases Fen immensely - only the reader will have a better time.

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Edmund Crispin Love Lies Bleeding Pbk published April 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099506211

Taut and clever, "Love Lies Bleeding" revolves around events which begin at the Castrevenford Schools, separate boys and girls institutions where small disturbances have surprising ramifications. Gervase Fen, the Oxford Professor of Language and Literature, who has been called in to speak for the schools' Speech Day by the Headmaster, an old university acquaintance, is soon in the thick of a mystery which grows deadlier as it becomes more inexplicable. Was young Brenda Boyce assaulted, and, if so, by whom? Who has broken into the chemistry laboratory, and what have they stolen? And what, if anything, is worth the risk of committing murder? As Fen pursues the increasingly convoluted path toward the truth, he discovers happenings more convoluted than any play.

'Edmund Crispin's writing is enthralling, of the highest order and cannot fail to appeal...Read him. He's the crime writer's crime writer.' Jonathan Gash

Edmund Crispin was born Robert Bruce Montgomery in Buckinghamshire in 1921. He wrote only nine detective novels and two volumes of short stories, but he also contributed articles and reviews to many periodicals, and was crime fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times from 1967 until his death in 1978.
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Rene Denfeld All God's Children Pbk published June 2007 by Vintage at Ł8.99 ISBN: 009951267X

In May 2003, the body of nineteen-year-old Jessica Kate Williams was found by a railway track in Portland Oregon: beaten, broken and horribly burnt. But the terrible chain of events that led to her death had been put in place almost a decade before. James Daniel Nelson first hit the streets as a teenager in 1992, joining a clutch of runaways and misfits who camped out together in a squat under a Portland bridge. Within a few months, the group - they called themselves a 'family' - was arrested for a string of violent murders. While Nelson sat in prison, the society he had helped form grew into a phenomenon. Street families spread to every city in America from New York to San Francisco, and to many small towns in between, bringing violence with them. In 2003, almost eleven years after his original murder, Nelson, now called 'Thantos', got out of prison, returned to Portland, created a new street family, and was ready to kill again. In this dark and compelling portrait of one of America's most frightening sub-cultures, Rene Denfeld draws on material gathered over a decade spent with the 'families', revealing the extremes to which desperate teenagers (the majority of whom hail from loving middle-class homes) will go in their search for a sense of a belonging.

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Ake Edwardson Never End Pbk published June 2007 by Vintage at Ł6.99 ISBN: 0099472066

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

There's a heatwave in Gothenburg. But while carefree school-leavers celebrate in the sunshine, tragedy waits to pierce the heady days of summer. It is late when nineteen-year-old Jeanette bids goodbye to her friends and sets off for home. She takes a shortcut through a city park - a decision which will add hours to her journey. Next morning the police come to question Jeanette about the rape, but in her desperation she has already scoured all traces of the crime away. Chief inspector Erik Winter and his colleagues are reminded of a rape and murder case which remains unsolved after five years. Could this be the work of the same person? As more girls fall victim, each of them strangled, Winter grows increasingly certain that each crime holds the key to the others. Scratching around for clues, the police find themselves drawn into the underground clubland of Gothenburg. A concrete connection between the murders still eludes them, but their list of suspects is growing: the spurned ex, the surly father, the naive school friends, the uncooperative victim; someone knows much more than they are letting on. Whose dark secret is threatening the young women of Gothenburg?

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James Fleming White Blood Pbk published April 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099497085

The son of an English father and Russian mother, Charlie Doig is a big man - big in stature and big in spirit. A naturalist, he roughs it around the world collecting birds and insects for museums. In 1914 he's on a mission for the Academy of Scientists in Russian Turkestan when war breaks out. His pay is stopped and his companion goes off to enlist. Doig, however, has no intention of volunteering to be killed. He returns to the Pink House, his family's home near Smolensk, and to the woman he loves, his cousin Elizaveta. At first the Pink House remains almost untouched by outside events, and the familiar ways continue as before. But imperial Russia is doomed and with it all the old certainties. When Elizaveta's fiance is assassinated, Charlie fulfils his greatest wish and himself takes her as his bride. The very next morning he looks out of the window of their bedroom and sees two men, soldiers by the look of them, approaching through the snow. Against all his instincts he gives them shelter. What follows is almost unbearable in its tension. Trapped by the snow with Doig and his new wife are a motley collection of old aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on - and the two soldiers, one of whom, Prokhor Glebov, Doig is convinced is a Bolshevik out to destroy them all. Beautifully written, by turns savage and tender, this compelling novel confirms James Fleming as one of the very best novelists we have.

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Mark Haddon A Spot of Bother Pbk published June 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099506920

George Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. 'The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.' Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased - as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind. The way these damaged people fall apart - and come together - as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon's disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

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Matt Haig The Dead Fathers Club Pbk published April 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099488752

Eleven-year-old Philip Noble has a big problem. It all begins when his dad, who has been killed in a road accident, appears as a bloodstained ghost at his own funeral, and introduces Philip to the Dead Fathers Club. The Dead Fathers Club are ghosts of dads in Newark who gather near the bottle banks outside the Nobles' pub. Philip learns the truth about ghosts: the only people who end up ghosts are murdered. He has to get revenge for his dad's murder by killing the murderer, his dad's brother, Uncle Alan. If he doesn't succeed in killing his uncle before his dad's birthday, just ten weeks away, his dad's spirit will never rest and he will always suffer the Terrors. So begins Philip's quest to avenge his dad and to save his mum from the greasy clutches of Uncle Alan, who seems intent on taking his dad's place in their lives. As Uncle Alan moves into the pub, Philip arms himself with weapons pilfered from the school chemistry cupboard, and attempts to carry out his father's relentless demands. But, things keep distracting him. Leah for a start - the gorgeous daughter of Alan's Bible-bashing business partner, Mr Polonius.

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Kenneth J Harvey Inside Pbk published April 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099488760

Fourteen years after being wrongfully convicted of a murder, Mister Myrden is pardoned and released from prison. Stepping back into the world, he feels overwhelmed and disoriented on the outside. When he returns to his old neighbourhood, a street where violence lurks behind practically every door, he finds himself out of place and ambivalent to his wife, who is living in another man's house, to his friends who want both to celebrate and provoke further violence, and to the one million dollars compensation he has received from the government. What Myrden wants is his daughter, who is married to an abusive man, and his beloved granddaughter out of that neighbourhood. In a fit of rage, he makes a decision that will save his granddaughter from the cycle of abuse, but will result in his own destructive lurch back to prison. "Inside" is a dazzling novel about the institutions that we create in order to keep people confined, and about how the dynamic of a destructive family often shuts its children off from the vast possibilities of the world.

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Susan Hill The Risk of Darkness Pbk published June 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099462125

Simon Serrailler's story began in "The Various Haunts of Men" (about a serial killer) and continued with "The Pure in Heart" (about a kidnapped schoolboy). Susan Hill is not afraid to tackle difficult issues, nor to face up to the realities of stress in an ordinary English police station. Her third crime novel, "The Risk of Darkness", even more compulsive and convincing, follows up the child abduction and explores the crazy grief of a widowed husband, a derangement, which turns to obsession and threats, violence and terror. Meanwhile, handsome, introverted Simon Serrailler, whose cool reserve has broken the hearts of several women, finds his own heart troubled by the newest recruit to the Cathedral staff: a feisty female Anglican priest with red hair ...
"The Risk of Darkness" is packed with action and adventure. Like "Various Haunts", it hinges on a terrific twist, which comes as a complete surprise to the reader; and like "The Pure in Heart", it deals in depth with complex daily problems.

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Thomas Keneally The Commonwealth of Thieves Pbk published June 2007 by Vintage at Ł8.99 ISBN: 0099483742

The Story of the Founding of Australia
"The Sydney Experiment" was the political experiment of founding Sydney as a penal settlement to receive criminals. In late-18th-century Britain, people were hanged for petty offenses, yet crime was rife. The gaols were bursting and over-flow prisoners were kept in notorious 'hulks', rotting old ships moored offshore. Out of this situation was born the 'solution': criminals perceived to 'damage' British society would be transported. Australia was surrounded by sea and a very long way away: thus Sydney was founded as 'an open-air prison' with 'walls 14,000 miles thick'. Thus, too, was Australia colonised. There had been no reconnaissance (Captain Cook had landed just the once) and British politicians were utterly ignorant about the undespoiled continent to which they dispatched a convoy of 11 ships in 1787 (the First Fleet). The transports spent 8 hellish months at sea. Tom Keneally tells the fascinating story of Captain Arthur Phillip, the Commodore of the First Fleet, who was empowered to govern the new colony, and who then became the friend of Bennelong, one of the native aboriginal tribespeople, who found themselves desperately interacting with the convicts, sailors, marines and officers suddenly dumped on their shores. There were orgies, diseases, court marshalls, hangings, escapes, hunger ...Governor Arthur Phillip, who was in effect the despotic ruler of New South Wales, imposed order ...and eventually the 'open-air prison' was to develop into one of the most vibrant cities in the world.

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Gene Kerrigan The Midnight Choir Pbk published June 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099483769

See Review by Bernard Knight ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series

Tense and expertly plotted, "The Midnight Choir" is a stunning portrayal of life on the edge of society. Joshua Boyce watches a jewelers from a rented flat across the road, noting the comings and goings as he plans a job; Dixie Peyton, desperate for cash, attempts to mug an American tourist, threatening him with a syringe purporting to contain HIV-infected blood; Detective Inspector Synott calls on an alleged rape suspect, already convinced of the boy's guilt; gangland leader Lar MacKendrick is working out, getting back in shape after brother Jo-Jo was viciously murdered. Meanwhile in Galway, Garda Joe Mills apprehends a jumper from a pub roof and discovers that the man is covered in dried blood.
In "Little Criminals", Kerrigan gave a small insight into a previously unseen underworld. In "The Midnight Choir", that world explodes. We enter a gritty landscape of characters with questionable and contrary ideals; all struggling to survive in a time and place that's constantly knocking them back. Everyone has an axe to grind; criminals and police alike live by their own code, with both sides resorting to desperate measures as a means to an end. Law enforcement is often murky, and getting away with it is everything, no matter which side you're on. "The Midnight Choir" is a magnificent accomplishment, a powerful and intricate novel, driven to the last page at a tremendous pace by an original voice.

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Henning Mankell Chronicler of the Winds Pbk published April 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099455471

Tiina Nunnally (Translator)
One night Jose Antonio Maria Vaz hears gunfire from the deserted theatre next door to his bakery. Bemused he races to the uppermost gallery and there beneath him on a spot-lit stage lies the wounded body of Nelio, the fabled street urchin, renowned throughout the city for living on his wits. Gasping, Nelio asks to be taken to the roof to breathe in the beautiful air, fresh off the Indian Ocean. There on the theatre roof, his life ebbing away, Nelio begins his story. At the age of five, Nelio witnessed his village burned to the ground, and the brutal massacre of his people by bandits. He himself escaped by chance; a man handed Nelio a gun and ordered him to shoot another boy, instead he turned the gun on the bandit, shot and ran. He made his way to the coast, encountering bizarre characters en route who gave him guidence. Upon arrival in the city Nelio joined a rough street gang, and began a very different way of life. A dazzling departure from the master of crime, Henning Mankell's "Chronicler of the Winds" takes us to the African continent, a place for which the author has a great passion. An expertly crafted fable.

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John Marks Fang Land Pbk published April 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0099502771

Robert, my love, there isn't much time. This will be my last communication, unless by some chance I survive... I have tried to report everything as it happened, so there can be no doubt about my veracity. I have to hurry or the sun will go down, and I will have to deal with this menace in the dark...He has some plan in New York, that's clear. He is a form of terrorist; but his terror is strange. It's like a virus, and I have it...He has put something terrible inside of me. Evangeline Harker, Associate Producer on television news magazine "The Hour", is sent to Transylvania to scout out a possible story on a notorious Eastern European crime boss named Ion Torgu. But she finds the true nature of Torgu's activities to be far more monstrous than she could have imagined. In the New York office that once stood in the shadow of the Twin Towers, Evangeline's disappearance causes uproar and a wave of guilt and recrimination. Then suddenly, months after her disappearance, she's found convalescing in a Transylvanian monastery, her memory seemingly scrubbed. But then who was sending e-mails in her name? And what do those crates delivered to the office contain? And why does the show's sound system appear to be infected with some strange aural virus? As a very dark Old-World atmosphere deepens in the halls of one of America's most trusted television programmes, its employees are forced to confront a threat beyond their wildest imaginings. Written in the form of diary entries, e-mails and therapy journals, "Fang Land" manages both to be a genuinely frightening vampire novel in the grand tradition and a biting commentary on the way we live and work now.

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Kevin Sampson Stars Are Stars Pbk published June 2007 by Vintage at Ł7.99 ISBN: 009947025X

At the age of fifteen Danny May has just one dream: to be an artist, and to go - like John Lennon before him - to Liverpool Art School. Living in Toxteth with his mother and five sisters, Danny meets Nicole and falls in love. She's clever, politically aware, and astonished at how unworldly an inner-city kid can be. In the autumn of 1980, Danny receives the devastating news that the Art School's funding has been withdrawn by the new Tory government. He slides into apathy, robbing, drug dependency. Nicole stands by him, trying desperately to break his depression, but when he burgles her parents' house she abandons him and leaves for Paris. Their love affair, played out to a soundtrack of Bowie and Joy Division, is grand, romantic and doomed. Then, in July 1981, he finds himself sucked into the longest, most exhilarating and frightening day of his life. Set on fire by rioters, Toxteth is ablaze. Danny, transfixed, starts to paint versions of the same picture, over and over again. His subject is Toxteth in flames. He writes to Nicole, a cry for help. She hears him and tracks him down.

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