New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Weidenfeld 08 July-Sept
File Updated: 30/03/2009
New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Weidenfeld JULY-SEPT 08

Boris Akunin The State Counsellor: Further Adventures of Fandorin (Erast Fandorin 6) Pbk published September 2008 by Weidenfeld at £10.99 ISBN: 0297852906


The reactionary Adjutant General Khrapov, newly appointed governor-general of Siberia and soon-to-be minister of the interior, is murdered in his official saloon carriage on his way from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The killer, disguised as Fandorin, boards the train at Klin, where it has been delayed by snowdrifts on the line. He leaves a knife bearing the initials "CG" (Combat Group) thrust up to the hilt in his victim's chest and escapes through the window of the carriage. Fandorin is first arrested for the crime, but quickly released when the train pulls into Moscow and the General's staff realise their blunder. The murder threatens the career of Prince Dolgorukoi, Moscow's elderly governor-general, and Fandorin's greatest fan. He asks Fandorin to investigate, even though someone new, Prince Pozharsky, has been sent from St. Petersburg to head the investigation. The head of the CG is a man named Mr. Green, the son of a Jewish pharmacist whose family suffered very badly from the pogroms. He bears a grudge and, together with his fellow revolutionaries, seeks vengeance. He is a man of steel, who has toughened himself so much that he is a worthy, and daunting, adversary. However, this is a battle between good and evil and Fandorin reminds us that two wrongs never make a right as he battles against Green in a test of wills. The mystery surrounds the mole: who is the leak? And what motivates them? This is what Fandorin must find out, even if it means that he places his own lover, the fiery Esfir, under suspician. In the end, Fandorin becomes so disillusioned that he walks away from promotion, and to the life of a civilian, at last.

Boris Akunin is the pseudonym of Grigory Chkhartishvili. He has been compared to Gogol, Tolstoy and Arthur Conan Doyle, and his Erast Fandorin books have sold over eighteen million copies in Russia alone. He lives in Moscow.

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New
Stefan Brijs The Angel Maker Published July 2008 by Weidenfeld at £12.99 ISBN: 0297852191
See Review by Ian Morson Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger
A dark fairytale that will appeal to readers of Perfume, The Island of Dr Moreau or the films of Tim Burton
After many years Doctor Victor Hoppe returns to the small village he grew up in. His return after an absence of many years generates a lot of interest - and suspicion - as he is accompanied by three triplets, all of whom share the same physical deformity as the doctor - a hare lip. These children are very quiet and are rarely seen in the village. But with time, and a series of apparently miraculous cures and tales of the wife he lost, the doctor begins to win the villagers over. He hires an ex schoolmistress, Charlotte, to look after the children and has strict instructions about the way they are to be brought up. But the longer Charlotte works with the doctor, the more she begins to suspect that the children - and the doctor - aren't what they seem. As a child, the doctor was locked away in a harsh children's home run by nuns - because of his autism and his hare lip, he was assumed to be an idiot. He was eventually rescued but was determined never to succumb to the religious zealotry he witnessed in the convent and to dedicate his life instead to the pursuit of science.He began a career as a geneticist but his desire to correct the mistakes of nature lead him to eventual ruin and disgrace.

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New
Alan Furst The Spies Of Warsaw Published August 2008 by Weidenfeld at £16.99 ISBN: 0297855417
An Autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers' bar in the city's factory district, he will meet with the military attache from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, with war coming to Europe, and French and German operatives locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attache, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn in to a world of abduction, betrayal and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations.Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amidst an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters --
Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence, last seen in Furst's The Polish Officer; the mysterious and sophisticated Doctor Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier's brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence.
And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed. The Spies of Warsaw is Alan Furst's finest novel to date -- the history is precise, the writing evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel -- exciting, atmospheric, erotic and impossible to put down.

Alan Furst has lived for long periods in France, especially in Paris, and has travelled as a journalist in Eastern Europe and Russia. He has written extensively for Esquire and the International Herald Tribune. He lives in New York state.

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New
Andrew Pepper Kill-Devil And Water (Pyke Mystery 3) Published August 2008 by Weidenfeld at £12.99 ISBN: 0297852396
See Review by Bernard Knight ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series
By the author of The Last Days of Newgate. Pyke returns in a gripping tale of brutal murder and deception, set in the back streets of Victorian London and the cane fields of Jamaica.

London: 1840. The economy is sliding into recession; gangs of unemployed workers roam the streets; the city is on the verge of anarchy and a murderer prowls the capital's poor neighbourhoods. Pyke, still grieving over the death of his wife and struggling to shoulder his responsibilities as a father, is in debtors' prison, having lost his home and reached the edge of bankruptcy. Fitzroy Tilling, now head of the new Metropolitan Police Force gives Pyke his freedom, but in return he must agree to investigate the brutal death of a young mulatto woman, recently arrived from Jamaica, and apparently working as a prostitute. Her body, found near the docks, has been viciously mutilated, but the police force are concentrating all their resources on the suspicious death of an influential aristocrat, and Pyke must therefore work alone. It is not long before another poor, young woman turns up dead, also mutilated and dumped by the river, and Pyke begins to suspect that he has stumbled on something more sinister, and more far-reaching than the murder of a couple of prostitutes.Torn between his duties as a father and his instincts as an investigator, between grief for his wife and desire for one of his suspects, Pyke's investigation takes him from the London docks to the sugar plantations of Jamaica, from a fading colonial mansion to the back-street pornography shops of the East End and from the sewers beneath the city to the vaults of the Bank of England, in a struggle against ambitious and ruthless enemies, as well as demons of his own.

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