New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bloomsbury 08 April-June
File Updated: 30/03/2009
New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Bloomsbury APRIL-JUNE 08

Tim Adler Hollywood and the Mob: Movies, Mafia, Sex and Death Pbk published April 2008 by Bloomsbury at £9.99 ISBN: 0747573506


From its earliest days, the Mafia has sought to make a fast buck from the American film industry. Stories of intimidation, threats and violence mingle with those of glamour and excess. In this stunning story of infamy and ballsy enterprise, Tim Adler tells the secret history of Al Capone, Sam Giancana and John Gotti's attempts to infiltrate the studio lots. However, although they have controlled the moguls and the money, the Mob learned how to be cool from classic films like "The Godfather" and characters like Tony Soprano, leaving them forever intertwined in both fact and fiction.

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Ronan Bennett Zugzwang Pbk published April 2008 by Bloomsbury at £7.99 ISBN: 0747587299


Zugzwang: derived from the German, Zug (move) + Zwang (compulsion, obligation). In chess, it is used to describe a position in which a player is reduced to a state of utter helplessness. He is obliged to move, but every move only makes his position even worse. It is St Petersburg, 1914: imposing and shabby, monumental and squalid, and - under its surface of frosty glamour - seething with plots and secret allegiances. On a blustery April day, O.V. Gulko, a respected newspaper editor, is murdered in front of a shocked crowd. Five days later, Dr Otto Spethmann, famous psychoanalyst, receives a visit from the police. There has been another murder in the city - and somehow he is implicated. He is mystified - and deeply worried, as much for his young, spirited daughter as for himself. He is preoccupied, too, by two new patients: Anna Petrovna, the society beauty plagued with nightmares with whom he is steadily and inappropriately falling in love, and troubled genius Rozental, the brilliant but mentally fragile chess master, due to play the most important competition of his life - the spectacular St Petersburg chess tournament - but on the verge of a complete breakdown. With the city rife with speculation and alarm, Spethmann broods over his own chessboard, its pieces frozen mid-battle, and contemplates the many forces - political, historical, sexual - that are holding him in their grasp

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James Delingpole Coward on the Beach Pbk published June 2008 by Bloomsbury at £7.99 ISBN: 0747592748


Dick Coward is an ordinary chap who keeps finding himself in extraordinary circumstances. Caught up in World War II's major events, he flies Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, acts as a military advisor at Stalingrad, from whence to D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine. But to Coward there are worse things than war, not least the possibility of the family estate ending up in the hands of his ghastly, undeserving brother, James. Only by amassing military glory to satisfy his father can Coward guarantee that justice prevails.

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Walter Mosley Killing Johnny Fry Pbk published May 2008 by Bloomsbury at £7.99 ISBN: 0747593140


When Cordell Carmel catches his long-term girlfriend in the throes of ecstasy with another man - the thick-necked chauvinist Johnny Fry - something profound happens to him. Overnight, the calm life of this middle-aged translator becomes something unrecognizable. As the boundaries of his routine existence dissolve, he finds himself suddenly prey both to thoughts of murder and to an insatiable libido, and begins a dark and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey through New York in search of retribution and gratification. Along the way, he develops an obsession with a mysterious woman named Sisypha, who leads him deep into the erotic heart of the city. "Killing Johnny Fry" is about a man questioning for the first time the social and sexual rules we take for granted - and the powerful, disturbing connections that can be made between people when these rules are subverted. It is something altogether new and provocative from one of America's most celebrated writers.

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New
Kate Summerscale The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House Published April 2008 by Bloomsbury at £14.99 ISBN: 0747582157

It is a summer's night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them. Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Road Hill House a fortnight later. He faces an unenviable task: to solve a case in which the grieving family are the suspects.The murder provokes national hysteria. The thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes - scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing - arouses fear and a kind of excitement. But when Whicher reaches his shocking conclusion there is uproar and bewilderment.
A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, this has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery - a body; a detective; and, a country house steeped in secrets. In "The Suspicions of Mr Whicher", Kate Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life.

Kate Summerscale is the author of the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, which won a Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award. She has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize. She lives in London.

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Anne Zouroudi The Messenger of Athens Pbk published June 2008 by Bloomsbury at £7.99 ISBN: 0747592756


Idyllic but remote, the Greek island of Thiminos seems untouched and untroubled by the modern world. When the battered body of a young woman is discovered at the foot of a cliff, the local police - governed more by archaic rules of honour than by the law - are quick to close the case, dismissing the death as an accident. Then a stranger arrives, uninvited, from Athens, announcing his intention to look into the crime he believes has been committed. The stranger's methods of investigation are unorthodox, and his message to the islanders is plain - tell the truth or face the consequences. Before long, he's uncovering a tale of passion, corruption and murder. But the stranger brings his own mystery into the web of dark secrets and lies. Who has sent him to Thiminos, and on whose authority is he acting? And how does he know of dramas played out decades ago? Rich in images of Greece's beautiful islands and evoking a life of which few outsiders know, this wonderful novel leads the reader into a world where the myths of the past are not forgotten and forbidden passion still has dangerous consequences.

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