New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From
Constable
08 Oct-Dec
New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From
Constable
OCT-DEC 08
M.C. Beaton
Agatha Raisin and a Spoonful of Poison
Published October 2008 by Constable at £18.99
ISBN: 1845296478
The 19th outing for Agatha Raisin, which will be a must have for her numerous fans.
Agatha has little time for the usual rural affairs with which she used to be so passionately involved in such as charity work, baking competitions and the Carsely Ladies Society. But in the quiet village of St Twadey on the outskirts of Mircester, tragedy strikes at the annual jam making competition. Someone has injected LSD into all the home-made jams and mayhem ensues. The judges go bananas on the spot and some of the more frail villagers who took the jams home end up either dead from heart attacks or from wandering under cars. Of course the youth of the village are the first to be suspected along with the few who have criminal records. But only blundering Agatha with her odd flashes of intuition would ever suspect the prim vicar's wife - but it will take all of her detective skills to prove the woman guilty!
M C Beaton worked as a Fleet Street journalist. She is the author of nineteen Agatha Raisin novels, as well as the 24 crime stories in the Hamish Macbeth series, which Constable & Robinson will be reissuing in 2008 and 2009. She divides her time between Paris and the Cotswolds, where she lives in a village very much like Agatha's beloved Carsely.
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Ruth Brandon
Caravaggio's Angel (Reggie Lee 1)
Published November 2008 by Constable at £18.99
ISBN: 1845296974
Dr Reggie Lee, newly arrived at the National Gallery, is putting together a small exhibition around three Caravaggios depicting 'St Cecilia and the Angel'. One is at the Getty, one at the Louvre, and she hopes it won't be too hard to track down the third. But a series of inexplicable obstacles keep getting in her way - and then, unexpectedly, a fourth Caravaggio turns up. One of them must be a fake. But which? When people start to die, it seems clear that someone doesn't want Reggie's show to go ahead. Why, she can't imagine. But her career is at stake, and she'd damned if she'll let herself be intimidated and bullied by these unseen forces. So Reggie investigates and her research takes her from Surrealist suicides to shady Italian art dealers, from seventeenth-century painting techniques to modern French politics in a viciously-fought Presidential election year.By the end it seems as though nobody in the opaque and ill-defined world of art can really stay incorruptible - perhaps not even Reggie herself.
Ruth Brandon is the pseudonym of Marian Silver. She divides her time between London and France and is currently working on her second crime title featuring Dr Reggie Lee. Her works include Other People's Daughters: the Life and Times of the Governess (W&N 2008) and The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini (Pan 2001).
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P J Brooke
Blood Wedding
Published December 2008 by Constable at £18.99
ISBN: 1845297415
An investigation into the murder of a beautiful Muslim girl spirals into terrorist outrage in Granada, the most exotic city in Spain.
Sub inspector Max Romero is called to help investigate the death of lovely Leila, a Muslim postgraduate student, researching the impact of the Spanish Civil War on Max’s home village in the Sierra Nevada.The prime suspect, Hassan, has links to a supposed terrorist group but the police bungle the intitial investigation and Max finds himself coopted into the anti-terrorist operation.
Max is the possessor of a large and fascinating family, headed by his charismatic grandmother Paula, whose presence looms large as the story moves from the ancient cobbled streets of Granada south to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada.The atmosphere is dominated by the mesmerising yet tragic beauty of the city of Granada, the last Moorish Kingdom in Europe, a Paradise lost, but which some hope to regain.
P J Brooke is the amalgam of a husband and wife writing team, Philip O'Brien and Jane Brooke. After a brief spell at the Foreign Office Philip taught Latin American studies at Glasgow University. He then moved to Latin America and witnessed some of its most dramatic moments: the Allende government and Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, the cocaine wars in Columbia and the Chavez revolution in Venezuela. On his return to the UK he stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Scottish Green Party and was a member of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, which led to the formation of the Scottish Parliament. Jane Brooke trained as a historian and social scientist, and worked as an urban planner and then policy advisor in Scottish local government. She is active in Green issues. Phil and Jane live part of the year in the old Moorish district, the Albayzin, in Granada, which is where the Inspector Max Romero novels are set. Blood Wedding is the first in the series.
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Alison Bruce
Cambridge Blue
Published December 2008 by Constable at £18.99
ISBN: 1845298632
See Review by
Cath Staincliffe
author of the popular Sal Kilkenny mysteries and the series creator of TV Blue Murder
Some hide the truth. Some hide from it. Goodhew hunts it through every page.
DC Gary Goodhew is intelligent, intuitive and the youngest detective at Cambridge's Parkside Station. He is the first on the scene when the body of a young woman is discovered on Midsummer Common and for the first time in his career is given the chance to work on a murder investigation. Soon there is an identity for the victim: Lorna Spence. Richard Moran, her boyfriend and employer, has reported her missing and is distraught to discover that she has been killed. He claims she was loved by his staff and his sisters, reserved Alice and vulnerable Jackie. He says she had no enemies but it isn't long before Goodhew discovers plenty, including her high maintenance colleague Victoria and Goodhew's reckless former classmate Bryn. They both swear that they have nothing to do with Lorna's death but Goodhew knows someone is lying.Then there is another brutal murder and Goodhew knows it is time to use his own initiative to flush out the killer, even though it means risking his job and discovering the truth about the one person he hopes will be innocent.
Alison Bruce was born in Surrey in 1966 and moved to Cambridge in 1998. She has learnt about Cambridge and East Anglia from researching her two previous non-fiction books, Cambridgeshire Murders (Sutton Publishing) and The Billingtons, Death in the Family (also published by Sutton). She is married with two small children and enjoys horse riding and dancing, when not working on her new crime fiction series featuring DC Gary Goodhew.
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Dennis Casley
Death Underfoot
Pbk published October 2008 by Constable at £0.00
ISBN: 0094721904
While investigating a case of corruption and revenge, Inspector James Odhiambo risks his marriage, career, and personal safety to discover who murdered the brash, sensual Diana Farwell upon her return to Africa. A first novel.
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Dennis Casley
Death Understates
Published November 2008 by Constable at £0.00
ISBN: 0094751307
Chief Inspector Odhiambo, en route back to Kenya, feels out of place in Washington, D.C. He is thrust back on to centre stage when his father-in-law is suspected of the murder of a banker and promptly disappears. Odhiambo probes the secrets of an international bank. More bodies impede his search for the truth - until he faces death himself?
(13 Nov 1995)
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Barbara Cleverly
Tomb of Zeus (Letitia Talbot Mysteries)
Published November 2008 by Constable at £18.99
ISBN: 1845296966
Barbara Cleverly’s dazzling new novel introduces Laetitia Talbot, an aspiring archaeologist with a passion for adventure.The story opens in Crete, 1928, and we find Laetitia on her thrilling first assignment at the Villa Europa.Her host, a charismatic and renowned archaeologist, is excavating the island’s fabled tomb of the King of the Gods.
But things soon begin to go very wrong.A beautiful young woman is found hanged and a golden youth drives his Bugatti over a cliff.From the shadows come whispers of past loves, old jealousies and ancient myths that threaten the joyous present. Lettie soon finds she will need all her courage and wits to unravel the secrets beneath the Villa Europa’s roof.
Barbara Cleverly was born in the north of England and is a graduate of Durham University. A former French teacher, her Joe Sandilands series was inspired by the contents of an old trunk in her attic. She now lives in the middle of Cambridge.
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Elizabeth Ferrars
A Legal Fiction
Published October 2008 by Constable at £0.00
ISBN: 0094694605
A painting is the cause of a murder, and also of research into a question of ownership, made intricate by an archaic law. The pronouncements of various solicitors on this question provide an accompaniment to the narrative.
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Bill Knox
Rally to Kill
Published November 2008 by Constable at £18.99
ISBN: 1845298624
Another Thane and Moss from the master thriller writer Bill Knox.
The murdered body of a girl, found in the boot of a wrecked car, is Detective Chief Inspector Thane’s starting point. At first, the killing seems the work of a sadistic opportunist and indeed there was a prowler in the area that night. But a confusing trail of evidence leads to other possibilities ranging from the rally-driving boss of a whisky investment firm to an elderly woman of iron will – or possibly even to the young cop who claims to have found the girl’s body accidentally.
Following the truth leads to a nightmare car chase though a mountainside forest – a race Thane and Moss have to win, because the killer is already out to strike again.
Bill Knox began writing as a young Glasgow journalist, crime reporter, motoring correspondent and news editor and went on to write some 70 novels by the time of his death in 1999.
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Gary Newman
The Ruffian on the Stair
Published November 2008 by Constable at £18.99
ISBN: 1845296370
Seb Rolvenden is a writer who lives in a lighthouse in Essex. On his grandfather's death he comes into some papers which reveal that Seb's grandfather, when young, was involved in the sensational disappearance in London of Julian Warbeck, an impressionist painter, and his masterpiece, "Ruffian on the Stair". Seeing a book in this, Seb goes off in pursuit of a trail of clues left in his grandfather's papers, unwittingly alerting others who are also after the lost masterpiece. His enquiries lead him to Jersey and to France, where among Seb's discoveries is the grave of the Vickybird, a vicious Victorian rentboy and artist's model whom his grandfather had known in London in the 1890s and who may have been the actual murderer of Julian Rawbeck. As the mystery deepens a chance encounter leads Seb to the whereabouts of the missing masterpiece - but the painting has one further explosive secret to reveal to him.
Praise for Gary Newman's previous novels:
'In what turns out to be an intriguing case of murder and romance, the author brings London's East End and India under the Raj vividly to life' - "Publishers Weekly".
'The author succeeds admirably in recreating Victorian London, both in character and setting. Fans of Anne Perry and other Victorian mysteries will enjoy' - "Library Journal". '
A most satisfying gothic detective tale' - "Booklist".
Gary Newman has taught foreign languages both at home and abroad and now works as a translator. A Geordie born and bred, he lives in the North-East of England.
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Michael Pearce
A Dead Man in Barcelona (Seymour Special Branch 5)
Published November 2008 by Constable at £18.99
ISBN: 1845298306
The fifth exciting crime thriller in Michael Pearce’s Dead Man series, featuring Seymour of the Special Branch.
Barcelona in 1912 is a city still recovering from the so-called ‘Tragic Week’ when Catalonian conscripts bound for the unpopular war in Spanish Morocco had rebelled at the city’s dockside against the royalist forces.In the fighting many were killed and afterwards even more were thrown into prison.Including an Englishman, who was later found dead in his cell.
The dead man had been a prominent businessman in Gibraltar, so what was he doing in Barcelona?What part did he play in the illicit three-way trade between Gibraltar, Spanish Morocco and Barcelona?And how did he meet his end murdered, in a prison cell?
The case, in Gibraltar’s view, crys out for investigation by someone independent of the Spanish authorities, so Scotland Yard are required to send out one of their men.Seymour ticks all the right boxes – he has experience of the tangled diplomatic world of that part of the Mediterranean. He speaks foreign languages.And almost more important, he grew up near the docks in London’s East End so with any luck he knows how to swim if, as you might say, push comes to shove…
Michael Pearce was raised in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where his fascination for language began. He later trained as a Russian interpreter but moved away from languages to follow an academic career, first as a lecturer in English and the History of Ideas, and then as an administrator.
Michael Pearce now lives in South-West London and is best known as the author of the award-winning Mamur Zapt books.
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