New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bantam 08 April-June

File Updated: 28/06/2008

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bantam APRIL-JUNE 08

Simon Beckett Written in Bone Pbk published April 2008 by Bantam at Ł6.99 ISBN: 0553817507

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

I took the skull from its evidence bag and gently set it on the stainless steel table. 'Tell me who you are...' As a favour to a colleague, Dr David Hunter is on the remote Hebridean island of Runa to inspect a grisly discovery. He's familiar with death in all its guises but is shocked by what he finds: a body, incinerated but for the feet and a single hand. It appears to be a textbook case of spontaneous human combustion. The local police are certain it's an accidental death, but Hunter is not convinced. Examining the scorched remains, he finds evidence that this was no accident; this was murder. And as the isolated community considers the enormity of Hunter's findings, a catastrophic storm hits the island. The power goes down, communication with the outside world ceases...and the killing begins in earnest.

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Lee Child Bad Luck and Trouble Pbk published April 2008 by Bantam at Ł6.99 ISBN: 0553818104

Daily Mirror Child is a great storyteller, building plots that, although complex, are as compelling as they are ultimately logical...another sure-fire hit.
Yorkshire Evening Post The twists come thick and fast...and the surprise developments are genuinely unexpected...Child, as always, delivers.

You do not mess with the Special Investigators! The events of 9/11 changed Jack Reacher's drifter life in a practical way. In addition to his folding toothbrush, he now needs to carry photo ID to get around. Yet he is still as close to untraceable as a human being in America can get. So when a member of his old Army unit manages to get a message to him, he knows it has to be deadly serious. The Special Investigators always watched each other's backs. Now Reacher must put the old unit back together. Someone has killed one of them, and he can't let that go.

Lee Child is British, but after he was made redundant from his job in television, he moved with his family from Cumbria to the United States to start a new career as a writer of American thrillers. He now divides his time between France and New York. All his novels feature the maverick Jack Reacher, and all have been international bestsellers.

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Ariana Franklin The Death Maze Published June 2008 by Bantam at Ł12.99 ISBN: 0593056507
Since solving a particularly nasty case of child murder using her forensic skills, Adelia Aguilar is deemed too valuable to send back to the School of Medicine in Salerno. Instead, King Henry II has decided to keep her in England. This is bad news for Adelia - in twelfth-century England women doctors are regarded with great suspicion. So, with her illegitimate child, Adelia is forced to live and practice in the secrecy of Cambridgeshire's fenland. But at Henry's court, terrible things are happening. Queen Eleanor is not only stirring up revolt against her husband, but rumor has it that she has also poisoned the King's favorite mistress, Rosamund Clifford.In a race against time to prove Eleanor's innocence, Adelia is recruited to help. It isn't easy. An assassin is at large and so is Queen Eleanor with an army of supporters. Adelia has never faced greater danger. The armies that might cause civil war lie behind her. The icy winds of a dreadful winter blow around her. And ahead she must brave the thorns of the impenetrable labyrinth that surrounds Fair Rosamund's tower, and decipher the mystery of the dead woman who lies frozen within.

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Mo Hayder Ritual Published April 2008 by Bantam at Ł14.99 ISBN: 0593056418

Just after lunch on a Tuesday in April, nine feet under water, police diver Flea Marley closes her gloved fingers around a human hand. The fact that there's no body attached is disturbing enough. Yet more disturbing is the discovery, a day later, of the matching hand. Both have been recently amputated, and the indications are that the victim was still alive when they were removed. DI Jack Caffery has been newly seconded to the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. He and Flea soon establish that the hands belong to a boy who has recently disappeared. Their search for him - and for his abductor - lead them into the darkest recesses of Bristol's underworld, where drug addiction is rife, where street-kids sell themselves for a hit, and where an ancient evil lurks; an evil that feeds off the blood - and flesh - of others …

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Charlie Newton Calumet City Pbk published June 2008 by Bantam at Ł11.99 ISBN: 0593058445

See Review by Cath Staincliffe author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries and the series creator of TV Blue Murder
Patti Black is the most decorated cop in Chicago; a ghetto street officer, she redefines the word badass. But the steel-plated exterior she shows to the world – solitary, friendless, loveless – hides the hideous traumas of her past. As an orphaned child, she was horribly sexually abused by her foster parents, and the torments of the past are only barely contained by her meticulously maintained tough-guy persona. When a series of seemingly unrelated cases – a drug bust gone bad, a mayoral assassination attempt, the abduction and murder of a state’s attorney, a long-hidden body walled up in a tenement basement – all point in her direction, she comes to the horrified realization that her past is no longer staying in its deeply suppressed place. It’s back and it’s hunting her down.

A thumbnail on the Chicago-born author reads like that of one of his characters – a fellow who, in his mid-fifties, has seen a bit more reality than is often healthy but come away with P. J. O’Rourke’s sense of humour instead of angst. Charlie Newton has built successful restaurants and hotels, raced thoroughbreds that weren’t quite so successful and sold television and film in the Middle East to gentlemen who often weren’t. Generally speaking, he’s lived a life in the borderlands (literal and figurative) where stories like CALUMET CITY happen. And survived to enjoy it.

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Manda Scott The Crystal Skull Pbk published April 2008 by Bantam at Ł6.99 ISBN: 0553817663

The end of the world starts now ... Ancient wisdom predicts the end of the world with uncanny precision. But it also provided the key to staving off apocalypse: a flawless sapphire of incomparable beauty carved into the perfect likeness of a human skull. Hidden for four centuries, a crystal skull of exquisite beauty has just been found by Stella Cody, who also inherits its legacy of dark secrets, intrigue, and murder. Facing an increasingly implacable enemy, Stella and her lover, Kit, struggle to crack the code that hides the Skull's intended resting place. Their search takes them from the intellectual rigour of Cambridge University to the untamed wildness of England's prehistoric stone circles. But time is against them, and they have days - hours - left to uncover the secret that may yet save the world.

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James Sheehan The Law of Second Chances Published April 2008 by Bantam at Ł17.99 ISBN: 0593057724

A street robbery gone wrong, and a badly botched trial result in two innocent men on death row. Jack Tobin is fighting for justice in a new and gripping courtroom drama.
Benny Avrile, an impoverished hood in New York City, is about to hit the big-time. His mark is a retired oil man who is visiting his mistress with $10,000 in his pocket. Benny is told that if he carries out the robbery he'll get a share of the profits - an offer that is far too good to refuse. But as he walks up to the oilman's car, gun in hand, a shot rings out, and the oilman falls dead. Benny is arrested and sentenced to death. Representing people on death row is what trial lawyer Jack Tobin does best. Based in Florida, he is meeting with Henry Wilson, a drug-user, career criminal, and one of the biggest men Jack has ever met. Henry has been on death row for seventeen years now and his execution by lethal injection is just six weeks away. Jack is convinced that Henry is innocent, but whether he can find a legal basis to delay execution and get Henry a new trial remains the question that may save Henry's life. The clock is ticking, two innocent men are facing the death penalty, yet the one person who Jack most wants to save - his beloved wife, Pat - has the least time of all …

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R.D. Wingfield A Killing Frost Published April 2008 by Bantam at Ł14.99 ISBN: 0593060474

On a rainy night in Denton, Detective Inspector Jack Frost is called to the site of a macabre discovery in the woods – that of a human foot. Meanwhile a multiple rapist is on the loose, the local supermarket reports poisoned stock, and a man claims to have cut up his wife into little pieces yet can’t recall where he hid them. But it is when two young girls are reported missing in quick succession that the Denton crime wave reaches terrifying heights.
As the exhausted Frost staggers from case to case, pressured from all sides and haunted by memories of his wife, something nasty arrives at the station in the form of Detective Chief Inspector Skinner. The scheming, slippery Skinner clearly has his eye on the Superintendent’s office, but his first job is to manipulate the transfer of the unorthodox DI Jack Frost to another division. Will Frost find the missing girls before his new nemesis forces him away from Denton once and for all?

After a successful career writing for radio, R.D. Wingfield turned his attention to fiction and created the character of D.I. Jack Frost, who has featured in the titles Frost at Christmas, A Touch of Frost, Night Frost, Hard Frost, and Winter Frost. The series has been has been adapted for television as the perennially popular A Touch of Frost starring David Jason. R.D. Wingfield died in 2007.

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Inger Ash Wolfe The Calling Published May 2008 by Bantam at Ł17.99 ISBN: 0593061357
An unforgettable first crime novel, as chilling as Seven and as hypnotising as Hannibal Lecter
A small town - sleepy, remote, safe and unprepared when a deadly visitor comes calling ...Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef of Port Dundas, Ontario is making her way toward retirement with something less than grace. Hobbled by a bad back and a dependence on painkillers, and blindsided by her recent divorce, sixty-one-year-old Hazel has only the constructive criticism of her old goat of a mother to buoy her. But when a Port Dundas woman is found murdered in her home - with no sign of resistance and her mouth sculpted into a strangely meaningful shape - Hazel's bickering department springs to life. And as more bodies are found, Hazel must confront a clamoring press and the town's rumour mill whilst she edges ever closer to this terrifying, gruesomely inventive serial killer.

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