New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Severn House 08 Oct-Dec

File Updated: 30/03/2009

New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Severn House OCT-DEC 08

Alys Clare The Joys of My Life (Hawkenlye) Published October 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727866958
The new novel in the popular ‘Hawkenlye’ series
May 1199: a party of five from Hawkenlye Abbey is summoned to the Ile d'Oleron by Queen Eleanor and have journeyed hundreds of miles for more than three weeks to reach their destination. The queen has summoned Abbess Helewise and her party to discuss the building of a chapel at the abbey, dedicated to the well-being of the soul of her dear son King Richard. Meanwhile Sir Josse d’Acquin receives secret orders of a very different kind that set him on the trail of a group of mysterious knights rumoured to be devil worshippers. As Helewise heads for home, Josse follows his quarry to Chartres, where at night in the shadows of the new cathedral he meets the last person he expects to find there: Joanna. And she has grave problems of her own . . .

Alys Clare is the pseudonym for the author of some twenty novels, including the popular ‘Hawkenlye Abbey’ series of mediaeval mysteries. Born in Kent, near the fictional setting of her novels, she studied archaeology at university. She spends part of each year in Brittany, France.

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Susan Rogers Cooper Shotgun Wedding (Milt Kovak) Published October 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727866974
The ninth Milt Kovak mystery from this bestselling author . . .
Normally bucolic Longbranch, Oklahoma, has hit a bit of a rough spot. On the happy occasion of the wedding between Chief Deputy Emmett Hopkins and Deputy Jasmine Bodine, all hell breaks loose. The town bank is robbed, a temporary sheriff’s deputy is murdered, and a city police officer is shot-gunned and left for dead. Sheriff Milt Kovak sends the happy couple off on their honeymoon, ready to deal with the mess himself. Little does he know that the pair’s idyllic honeymoon in the blue Caribbean will be complicated by a hurricane, psychotic pirates, and semi-naked hotel employees. Milt, however, has his own problems, what with the bank robbery, a kidnapping, and having to deal with his ex-wife, something he’s spent the last fifteen years trying desperately not to do.

Susan Rogers Cooper is half-Texan, half-Yankee, and now lives with her family in a small town in central Texas. She is the author of eighteen mystery novels in three different series: the ‘Milt Kovak’ series, the ‘Kimmey Kruse’ series and the ‘E.J.Pugh’ series. She was nominated for an Edgar for best paperback mystery of 1998 for her E.J. Pugh novel Home Again, Home Again.

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Sarah Cox Blood Is Thicker (DS Matt Arnold) Published November 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727867156
A stunning debut crime novel by a serving police officer
A toddler is dead, laid on his mattress wearing his favourite Spider-Man costume, his head smashed against his bedroom wall. But who is to blame?
DS Matt Arnold is tasked with finding the killer amongst the child’s dysfunctional family, a family whose background is riddled with violence and secrets. As he tries to unravel the past, he becomes the confidante of the victim’s brother, Jake, a boy who himself has been damaged by his upbringing.
Matt and his team at their South London H.Q. struggle to understand the indifference of the parents, Denise and Lee Clarkson, whose attitude to Ryan’s death render them angry and incredulous. These emotions are compounded by an appalling hit-and-run accident which leaves Matt’s own son, Ben, fighting for his life. It is a tragedy that threatens to tear his family apart in his effort to achieve justice for both young victims.

Sarah Cox is a serving police officer, based for 26 years in South London and having a working insight into life on the streets of the capital. She is the youngest of a large family, and is married with three children of her own.

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John Creasey A Rocket for the Toff Published October 2008 by Severn House at Ł0.00 ISBN: 0727805762
Book 42 in the Toff series
Kate Lowson was waiting at the airport for the arrival of her fiance, when suddenly the Alsatian sprang at her. As she lay on the ground, the figures that has been present earlier sidled off into obscurity. And an atmosphere of innocence descended yet again. But then who should appear on the scene but the Toff. And very soon the whole story became as lively as an electric wire as the balance of power fell first one way, then the other, with Kate Lowson firmly in the middle of the puzzle.

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Diane Fanning Punish the Deed (Lucinda Pierce) Published December 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727867075
A new mystery for Homicide Investigator Lucinda Pierce . . .
When children’s charity worker Sharon Flemming is brutally murdered and a note found by her mutilated body bears the words ‘I was left behind’, Lucinda Pierce must track down this violent killer before he strikes again. And when a series of notes are also left on her car windshield, she knows this has got personal.
Lucinda is still having to cope with her own injuries, both emotional and physical, and comes face to face with a very personal danger. Comfort comes from a most unlikely source but can only lead to further complications . . .
Diane Fanning is a journalist and an Edgar Award Finalist author of six true crime books. She has been featured on Court TV, the Discovery Channel and local TV channels as well as having been interviewed by countless radio stations across the States. Diane was born in Baltimore, Maryland, lived for more than two decades in Virginia, and now lives in New Braunfels, Texas.

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Elizabeth Ferrars Tale of Two Murders Published October 2008 by Severn House at Ł0.00 ISBN: 0727800043
(Depart This Life)
Stephen Gazeley was a perfectly nice and charming man - on the surface. But those slightly closer to him, such as his sister Hilda, knew a darker side; a side that made him bad-tempered and aggressive. But what had he done that was bad enough to lead him to being bludgeoned to death in his study?

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John Harvey Frame Published November 2008 by Severn House at Ł0.00 ISBN: 0727848380
Set in a politically divided Britain, a thriller about a freelance journalist who discovers secret plans for the overthrow of the British government, but no one seems to believe his story. From the author of COLD LIGHT, WASTED YEARS and CUTTING EDGE.
New Ed edition (26 Oct 1995)

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Veronica Heley False Step (Abbot Agency) Published December 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727867083
The third ‘Abbot Agency’ mystery
Bea Abbot’s domestic agency does not, repeat not, investigate murder… that is, until she finds herself in the company of a dead man dressed as a pantomime dame. It looks like suicide, but why don’t his red-spangled shoes fit?
Matthew Kent was an entertainer known to be a kindly and modest man in private, so why had he staged this grotesque charade in death? And why is his daughter so keen to hustle his mortal remains away without publicity? Then again, who exactly inherits his delightful Kensington house, and which of the women around him – two surviving wives and a daughter – really cared about him, rather than his money?
Bea’s own house is in chaos as builders remodel the agency offices, and to make matters worse, Max, her Member of Parliament son, moves in with her when his marriage looks like breaking down.
Struggling to run the agency from her bedroom, concerned about both her young assistants’ emotional problems, Bea tries to discover what the body on the bed was really like in life, why there is so much confusion about his death, and who is destined to die next…

Veronica Heley is married to a probation officer with a musician daughter and is actively involved in her local church and community affairs. She lives in Ealing, West London.

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Bill James Off-street Parking Published December 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727866915
Detective Constable Sharon Mayfield is on routine surveillance when she spots, outside his house, a dead man in a car. The locks had been sealed with superglue and Claude Huddart’s face has been mutilated.
As with most murders, there’s a jigsaw puzzle to be solved. But here the pieces don’t fit. Why is an informant, Jeremy Dince, if that is his real name, being almost exceptionally polite and helpful? And there’s just something that doesn’t feel right about the grieving Alice Huddart.
For Sharon, pub and clubs remain the best potential source of information where an over-the-top and aged Ronald Blenny attempts to pick her up on the pretext of sharing some information about the killing. Then there’s the younger and more sinister Philip Otton, acquaintance of the bereaved Alice, and known to both Blenny and Dince.
Sharon cannot fathom why she is being warned off and cannot work out the connection between the protagonists until her police officer boyfriend Luke drops strange hints about the case and about her commanding officers.
The climax is swift, shocking and unexpected. Once again, Bill James has drawn a fiercely believable picture of police on the beat and the struggles they face.

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Evan Marshall Evil Justice (Anna Winthrop) Published December 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727867091
A Hidden Manhattan Mystery
Terror grips Manhattan as the Ankh Killer leaves a trail of strangled, mutilated women across the city. Then sanitation supervisor Anna Winthrop discovers the killer’s latest victim in her own garage – coquettish Shari Baird, a member of Anna’s crew. Tommy Mulligan, Anna’s best worker, was seen running from Shari’s body; he’s arrested and thrown into a cell on Rikers Island. When Tommy’s father begs Anna to prove his son’s innocence, Anna agrees.
Delving into Shari’s past, Anna uncovers a group of ‘urban explorers’ to which the young woman belonged. But it seems Shari did far more than explore, as a web of blackmail and sadistic murder comes to light. With the help of her boyfriend, sexy midtown cop Santos Reyes, Anna rushes to uncover the truth before the real Ankh Killer snatches another woman from the streets . . .

Evan Marshall is the author of the first Hidden Manhattan Mystery, Death is Disposable, also from Severn House, as well as several bestselling instructional guides for novelists. A successful literary agent, he lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.

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Gladys Mitchell Skeleton Island Published November 2008 by Severn House at Ł0.00 ISBN: 0727811886
A book in the Mrs Bradley series
Miss Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell, whose detective stories have been popular for over five decades, died at the age of 82. She wrote as Gladys Mitchell, and also as Stephen Hockaby and Malcolm Torrie. Born in Cowley, Oxfordshire on April 19, 1901, she was the daughter of James and Annie Mitchell. Her father's family were Scots, and a Scottish influence is apparent in several of her novels. Gladys Mitchell was educated at the Green School, Isleworth, Middlesex; then Goldsmith's and University Colleges, University of London. Between 1921 and 1950 she taught at St. Paul's School, Brentford, St. Ann's Senior Girls' School, Ealing, and the Brentford Senior Girls' School, her subjects being English, history and games. Retiring from this work in 1950, she became bored without the constant stimulus of teaching, even although she was then extremely busy with writing, and had been producing a book a year ever since 1929. She accepted a position at the Matthew Arnold School, Staines and taught there from 1953 to 1961. After then finally giving up teaching she lived at Corfe Mullen in Dorset for several years. She remained unmarried. Gladys Mitchell's first novel Speedy Death was published in 1929; it featured Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, a witty, bizarre but stylishly competent sleuth whose investigations were eventually to fill over sixty books. Mrs. Bradley, later Dame Beatrice, a psychoanalyst, author and holder of honorary degrees from almost every university in the world, was the epitome of the professional woman. Many of her rational and socially progressive views were similar to those of her originator, for whom at times she seemed a mouthpiece. Some of the books, Death at the Opera, in 1934 and Laurels are Poison in 1942, for example, were set in girls' school or college backgrounds which Gladys Mitchell knew so well and whose tension-generating potential she so skilfully exploited. A survivor from the Golden Age of detective fiction (the 1920's and 1930's), she was an early member of the Detection Club whose active supporters included authors as celebrated as Dorothy L Sayers, G K Chesterton and Agatha Christie. She frequently satirized or reversed traditional patterns of the genre, succumbing to black humour, creating tongue-in-cheek mysteries and treading with extreme narrative confidence the hazardous paths between spoof and classic sleuthing fiction. Many of her books were spiced by eccentric and colourful themes like transvestism, witchcraft, folklore and the esoteric, and her strong interest in ancient buildings and customs. Her recreations included the study of architecture and writing poetry. She wrote detective fiction with undiminished energy and adroitness well into the 1980's, and was a member of the Crime Writers' Association and the Society of Authors. In 1976 Gladys Mitchell received the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger award. As well as producing witty and incisive detective stories for adults she wrote several satisfying mystery books for juveniles.
New Ed edition (31 Jul 1985)

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Gladys Mitchell Dance to Your Daddy Published November 2008 by Severn House at Ł0.00 ISBN: 0727812025
A book in the Mrs Bradley series
New Ed edition (27 Feb 1986)

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Ian Morson Falconer and the Ritual of Death (William Falconer) Published November 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727867024
Master William Falconer returns in this chilling and atmospheric medieval murder mystery.
Oxford University, 1271: for the first time in history a college is to be purpose-built for students to live and study in. As old buildings are pulled down to make way, a body is revealed. It becomes clear that the man was murdered.
Regent Master William Falconer is distracted from examining the apparent suicide of a serving girl and deduces that the skeleton is twenty years old. He must rack his brains of his past time in Oxford to recall any significant events, when England was involved in an earlier Crusade, which could provide a solution to this case. As the heavens open, and Oxford is threatened with flooding, Falconer is drawn into violent events where the past and the present collide with startling consequences . . .

Ian Morson was born in Derby and now lives in Cornwall, where he has been involved with various conservation projects. He is the author of the Falconer series, the latest of which was shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger.

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Nick Oldham Crunch Time (DCI Henry Christie) Published November 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727867032
The new Detective Chief Inspector Henry Christie novel
Willing to do almost anything to escape his humdrum desk job, DCI Henry Christie leaps at the chance to go working undercover again, possibly his last chance ever. His task – to ingratiate himself with Ryan Ingram, one of London’s top criminals, who has relocated to the north of England to escape the unwelcome attention of the police down there.
Ingram is suspected of many violent crimes, and Henry must put his own life on the line in order to bring about his downfall. But the last thing Henry needs in this dangerous situation is the appearance of a man bearing a fatal grudge that will jeopardise not only himself, but also his family.
As Henry attempts to balance his latest case with his personal life, he finds himself dealing with a series of events which begin to spiral murderously out of his control…

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Rosemary Rowe Death at Pompeia's Wedding (Libertus) Published October 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727866982
The tenth book in the Libertus Mystery of Roman Britain series . . .
Libertus attends a society wedding as his patron's representative, but before the ceremony can begin the father of the bride is discovered dead – poisoned – after testing the wedding wine. Pompeia, the bride, hysterically declares that she has caused the death, but Libertus believes otherwise, and is retained by the potential bridegroom (who needs the substantial dowry) to prove her innocent. His investigations uncover hidden tensions in the house and when another guest, Antoninus, is discovered a little later murdered at his home, moments before Libertus was due to call on him, events take a different and more sinister turn.

Rosemary Rowe also writes historical romances under the pseudonym Rosemary Aitken. She lives in Gloucestershire.

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Stephen Solomita Cracker Bling Published December 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727867210
Another contemporary hard-boiled noir mystery set in New York’s seedy underworld
Nineteen-year-old Hootie is a mixed up kid. His late dad was a Crow Indian; his mother, remarried to a Jamaican, is black. His sister is a qualified attorney. But Hootie is neither black, nor white, nor Latino, nor Asian. He’s been an outsider all his life.
It’s a pity because he’s bright. But not bright enough to keep him out of trouble. So he has only just been released from Rikers Island after pleading guilty to three downtown burglaries.
Thrown out of home, in the early morning he descends into the subway in Harlem where he is befriended by ‘Bubba’ Yablonsky, the biggest white man Hootie has ever seen, built like an interior basketball lineman, which he once was. Bubba produces a gun and lets off a fusillade of shots at a subway rat. And then offers Hootie a home, a shelter, great food, and the friendship of his friend Amelia. And Hootie wonders where the catch is, for there has to be one. What else has Bubba shot at? Who else?
And that question also exercises cynical Detective Peter Chigorin, called ‘the Russian’ by his peers for his vodka drinking habits. He’s investigating a homicide nearby, plus the murder of an innocent rat. Are they connected? And where do Bubba and Hootie fit in?

Stephen Solomita has written another tense noir mystery; atmospheric and uncomfortably realistic. The conclusion is once again shocking and unexpected.

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Peter Tremayne Return of Raffles Published November 2008 by Severn House at Ł0.00 ISBN: 0727841408
Seventy years after E.W. Hornung killed off his famous upper-class burglar hero, Raffles, by involving him in the Boer War, Peter Tremayne resurrected him for a new series of stories. The idea is that Raffles used the fact that everyone thought him dead to create a new identity, free from the suspicion that surrounded his own name.

Peter Tremayne is the fiction pseudonym of a well-known authority on the ancient Celts, who has utilised his knowledge of the Brehon law system and 7th-Century Irish society to create a new concept in detective fiction.
New Ed edition (20 Dec 1990)

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Sally Wright The Code of Silence (Ben Reese) Published October 2008 by Severn House at Ł18.99 ISBN: 0727866796
A thrilling new Ben Reese mystery from this Edgar Award finalist
1947: a female linguist at Arlington Hall, a high-security US decoding and decrypting facility, is murdered while trying to get vital information to Carl Walker, a friend and colleague. Suicide was suggested but Carl never believed this was the truth.
Ten years later, Ben Reese, whose beloved wife has just died, receives an unexpected letter from Carl, a distant acquaintance of his who disappeared unexpectedly, asking for assistance in tracking down a murderer by the name of Weisberg who is guilty of breaching US security. Ben’s efforts to find the man are difficult and disturbing, but he knows it is essential once he realizes it is connected to the Venona Code, a Soviet code partially decrypted by the US and Britain. Tracking the killer down will have international consequences . . .

Sally Wright is the author of five previous Ben Reese mysteries. Pursuit and Persuasion was a finalist in the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. She studied literature at Northwestern University. She lives with her husband in Bowling Green, Ohio.

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