New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From
Weidenfeld
07 April-June
New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From
Weidenfeld
APRIL-JUNE 07
Boris Akunin
Pelagia and the Black Monk
Published May 2007 by Weidenfeld at £12.99
ISBN: 0297850865
Sister Pelagia, bespectacled, freckled, woefully clumsy and possessed of a not very nunnish aptitude for solving crimes, returns in a tale of monastic intrigue, murder and adventure.
Just as the dust from the case of the White Bulldog begins to settle in the small Russian town of Zavolzhsk, it is shaken up once again by the arrival of a stranger: this time, a desperately frightened monk from the island monastery of New Ararat, who seeks the help of the bishop, Mitrofanii.
The monks have been troubled by visions of a dark, hooded figure: a figure that appears to walk on the waters of the vast Blue Lake surrounding their monastery and strikes terror into the hearts of all who encounter it. Sceptical of ghost stories and dismissive of rural superstitions, Mitrofanii dispatches Alexei Lentochkin, his clever young ward, to investigate the mystery, only for Lentochkin himself to appear to fall victim to the phantom. With sightings of the Black Monk occurring with disturbing frequency, and rumours of suspicious deaths reaching his ears, the Bishop decides to send two more of his most trusted advisors, in turn, to New Ararat, but they too meet with unexpected fates. Finally, Sister Pelagia takes matters into her own hands, and, adopting a number of ingenious disguises, she ventures across the Blue Lake in search of answers, and in pursuit of the Black Monk. But as she delves deeper into the layers of secrecy that cloak the island and its strange population, and as the body count continues to rise, Pelagia begins to realise that an encounter with a ghost may be the least of her problems
Boris Akunin is the pseudonym of Grigory Chkhartishvili. He has been compared to Gogol, Tolstoy and Arthur Conan Doyle, and his Erast Fandorin books have sold over ten million copies in Russia alone. He lives in Moscow.
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Arnaud Delalande
The Dante Trap
Published June 2007 by Weidenfeld at £12.99
ISBN: 0297852027
Frank Wynne (Translator)
Venice, 1756. One of the city's brightest young actors has been brutally murdered: nailed to a cross in the theatre where he was due to perform, with his eyes put out, and lines of Latin verse carved onto his chest. The Doge, aware the city is full of enemies of the Republic, launches a secret investigation, led by Pietro Viravolta, a dashing young adventurer, and seducer (the best friend of Casanova), who currently awaits execution in the prison beneath the Bridge of Sighs. Viravolta is released, on the proviso that he will neither escape the city, nor pursue the great love of his life, Anna, the married woman whose husband was responsible for Viravolta's incarceration. His investigations lead him to Luciana, the beautiful mistress of a Venetian senator, to Spadetti, the master glass-maker of Murano, and to Caffelli, the tormented priest of San Giorgo Maggiore. Murder follows murder, each more gruesome than the last, and as Viravolta begins to draw the connections between these deaths, and the torments reserved for sinners in each of Dante's circles of hell, he finds himself embroiled in a terrible game of cat and mouse. As the streets of Venice fill with masked Carnival-goers, and as Anna and Viravolta are once again thrown together, he is drawn further into the inferno, to the heart of a secret sect and a plot to bring about the downfall of the city.
34-year-old Arnaud Delalande is a screenwriter and author, whose first novel, The Underground Notre Dame, has been translated into several languages. His other novels are The Church of Satan and The Music of the Dead. He lives in France.
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Bernhard Schlink
Self's Deception: A Gerhard Self Mystery
Published June 2007 by Weidenfeld at £14.99
ISBN: 0297848658
In Self's Deception, private investigator Gerhard Self receives a request to track down the daughter of Herr Salger, the Assistant Secretary of Bonn, who's been absent from her translation classes at the university. Repelled by the pomposity of the government official, he rejects the case. But an insistent letter--and five thousand marks--changes his mind. After discreet interrogations at her school and her former residences, and a quick survey of the local hospitals, it turns out she washed up at a psych ward where he's told she had fallen out of a window earlier that week and died. Self suspects that this may be a lie, and soon decides that one of the doctors is covering for her. As his investigation takes a sinister turn he realises that his quarry may have been involved in a terrorist incident--but a terrorist incident that the government seems intent on covering up. With the woman still missing, and a growing suspicion that the client who hired him may not actually be Herr Salger at all, Self finds himself embroiled in a dark and complex conspiracy that reaches to the very top of government. But with his plentiful supply of Sweet Aftons, and his cat Turbo to talk to (as well as the realisation that the young lady he is searching for is not without her own charms) Self sets out on his latest adventure with his inimitable blend of cynicism and charm.
Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944. A professor of law at the University of Berlin and a practising judge, he is the author of the major international best-selling novel The Reader as well as several prize-winning crime novels. He lives in Bonn and Berlin.
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