New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bloomsbury 08 Jan-March

File Updated: 30/03/2008

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bloomsbury JAN-MARCH 08

Justin Cartwright The Song Before It Is Sung Pbk published February 2008 by Bloomsbury at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0747585946

On 20 July 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassin's bomb. Axel von Gottberg and his conspirators were hunted down and hanged from meat-hooks, and the executions filmed. Sixty years later, Conrad Senior is left a legacy of papers by von Gottberg's close friend, the legendary Oxford professor Elya Mendel, and becomes obsessed with what they reveal and finding the brutal film. Award-winning writer Justin Cartwright has conjured a masterwork that addresses the nature of friendship and what it means to be human, and it is a remarkable tapestry of passion, ideas, frailty and courage.

Justin Cartwright's novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers and the acclaimed White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award. His previous novel, The Promise of Happiness, won the 2005 Hawthornden Prize and was selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club. Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London.

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Maureen Lindley The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel Pbk published January 2008 by Bloomsbury at Ł10.99 ISBN: 0747591164

At the tender age of eight, Eastern Jewel peeps in fascination from behind a screen as her lusty father seduces a fourteen-year-old servant with bound feet. Peculiar feelings are aroused in the unruly girl, who by the end of her life will have spied professionally on politicians, members of the Shanghainese underworld and the last emperor Pu Yi himself, and lived out her sexual fantasies with men (and women) all over the Far East. The daughter of Prince Su's last concubine, Eastern Jewel is an intoxicating heroine - a feisty, rebellious woman who refuses to accept mutely the docile, subservient role that early twentieth-century Chinese society prescribes for her. Her thirst for excitement and controversy sees her banished as a child from her beloved mother's protection to live with distant relatives in Tokyo. She grows to adore vibrant Japan, but her insatiable appetites naturally lead her into trouble, and this time the punishment is harsher - a sojourn in bleak, freezing Mongolia and a forced marriage to a highly unsuitable husband. And all this before she is twenty, with the real dramas of her life still to come. Eastern Jewel craves freedom and will not be pinned down by anyone, least of all a man. And yet, though she seeks out experiences unlike other women's, and influence beyond the reach of most men, there remains a gaping absence in her heart, a place haunted at night by troubling thoughts. Seductive, racy, and completely original, "The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel" is an eye-opening and gripping re-telling of the real life of a fascinating but contradictory woman, a heroine who battled to juggle her extraordinary public life with her private paper demons.

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Ryu Murakami Piercing Published January 2008 by Bloomsbury at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0747593132

Translated by Ralph McCarthy
Kawashima Masayuki is a successful graphic designer living in Tokyo with his loving wife, Yoko, and their healthy baby girl. Outwardly, their lives are a picture of happiness and contentment. Every night, however, unable to sleep, Kawashima creeps from his bed and watches over the baby's crib while his wife sleeps. But this is no ordinary domestic scene, for on each of those nights, as he stands gazing at his newborn child, Kawashima has an ice-pick in his hand, and an almost visceral desire to use it. One particular night, as this drama unfolds once more, Kawashima makes a decision to confront his demons, and sets into motion an uncontrollable chain of events seeming to lead inexorably to murder.
The follow up to "In the Miso Soup", "Piercing" confirms Ryu Murakami as the master of the psycho-thriller. Read and be terrified, sickened and utterly gripped. It is translated by Ralph McCarthy, translator of "In the Miso Soup".

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Rupert Thomson Death of a Murderer Pbk published February 2008 by Bloomsbury at Ł7.99 ISBN: 0747592675

Literary Review Thomson is probably the best writer of my generation
Boyd Tonkin, Independent Thomson's fiction is a sort of enchanted garden...a masterclass in the art of narrative

Towards the end of November 2002, Billy Tyler, a police constable in his mid-forties, is summoned to the mortuary of a hospital in Suffolk. For the next twelve hours, from seven in the evening till seven in the evening, he is responsible for guarding the body of the notorious child-killer, Myra Hindley. In the face of public hostility and media frenzy, Billy's job, as his superior puts it, is to 'make sure nothing happens'. As a seasoned police officer, Billy's approach is utterly professional, but as the night wears on, in the eerie silence of the hospital, the dead woman's presence begins to assert itself, and Billy's own problems and anxieties - a stalled career, a fractious marriage, a disabled daughter - gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance. In this daring novel, Rupert Thomson takes on one of the most controversial subjects of our time and addresses the difficult questions that arise from it. Who do we love, and why? How do we protect our children? What separates us from the people we call monsters? A vivid evocation of an extraordinary moment in crime history, "Death of a Murderer" is one man's dark night of the soul, a gripping meditation on the fears and temptations that haunt the lives of all of us.

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