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Michael Blaine
Whiteout
Published January 1999 by Headline Feature at £16.99
ISBN: 0747273405
See Review by
John Boyles
Sometimes you have to kill the people you love...
It begins when nineteen-year-old Maurice Coleman checks himself out of an expensive
private mental facility and begins the journey home. At first his plans are hazy, but
pretty soon the medication begins to wear off and the voices start up again, telling him
what he's got to do.
First get hold of a cheap semi-automatic - easy enough in backwoods New York State - and
get the family all together somewhere remote. Then make all the bad things right, once and
for all.
As Maurice's mother Moira, his father Nathan and sister Crissie all struggle through a
vicious snowstorm to answer Maurice's summons, they have no idea they are heading for a
place of judgement. A place where the tangled web of love and hate that makes a family is
about to be brutally unravelled. A place where each one will discover just how far they'll
go to survive.
An almost unbearably tense thriller and a powerfully moving story of a family fracturing under the pressure of mental illness, Whiteouts is the brilliant debut of a major new talent. Michael Blaine currently teaches writing and literature at the City University of New York and is the editor in chief of New York Stories magazine. He lives in Delaware County.
Michael Blaine has spent his entire life as a literary writer and has published fiction in the best journals with the requisite tiny circulations: The England Review, The North American Review and many others. He has been awarded, amongst other prizes, two New York State Council on the Arts Fellowships for Fiction, a Katherine Anne Porter Prize three City University of New York Fiction Writing Fellowships.
Sam Llewellyn
Shadow in the Sands
Pbk published March 1999 by Headline Feature at £5.99
ISBN: 0747260052April 1903, Charlie Webb is a professional racing yacht skipper, a working class hero of all the picture papers. When the Duke of Leominster invites him to a secret meeting in London with a mysterious gentleman named Carruthers, he finds himself searching for a Napoleonic wreck loaded with bullion.
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Anne Perry
Tathea
Published February 1999 by Headline Feature at £17.99
ISBN: 0747222606
Her husband and beloved son assassinated, Tathea, once Queen of Shinabar, is alone and in exile. Numbed by grief, she takes refuge in the Lost Lands, where she tries to find meaning in her life. But in her quest for the truth, she discovers that it does not come without cost.
New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry lives in Portmahomack, Scotland, and her well-loved series featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt has recently been adapted for television. THe Cater Street Hangman was watched by millions of viewers when it was broadcast by ITV. Also available from Headline are the critically acclaimed William and Hester Monk mysteries.
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Rob Ryan
Nine Mil
Published January 1999 by Headline Feature at £12.99
ISBN: 0747222738
Praise for Underdogs:
'a hardboiled tour-de-force, I doubt whether there's going to be a better first crime novel this year' Independent on Sunday
'a wonderfully exhilarating novel, combining a cinematic narrative drive with winning characters particularly Alice, as pert as her 19th century namesake - and a brilliantly imagined dreamlike subterranean landscape' Sunday Times
'a dazzling first novel set in the underground tunnels that lie beneath Seattle...[an] always unpredictable tale that combines the sheer giddy pace of a road movie with a touch of Lewis Carroll' Time Out
Ed Behr is a man trapped in a nightmare. As a kid running wild on the streets of New Jersey, he and his crew used to play some rough games. But one game involving concrete blocks and a bridge over the freeway resulted in tragedy - and an early introduction to the living hell known as the Penal Correction System. Ten years later, Ed scrapes a living as a taxi driver, his youthful dreams gone, his one lonesome obsession to find the girlfriend he lost all those years ago - a girl called Honey. Then one day Ed gets a fare with a familiar face, a tanned and healthy and wealthy face he remembers from long ago. Billy, the one who got away, while the rest of them all paid the price. Suddenly Ed can see a way of redeeming his life, of getting revenge. It's time to play the game one more time...
Rob Ryan was born in Liverpool in 1951, although his inability to master either the tricky accent or the legendary scouse wit eventually say him exiled to the south, specifically London. He lectured until the mid-1980's, when he stumbled into a bar in Soho and decided that he, too, would join the media. His first articles were published in The Face, Arena, American GQ and The Sunday Times. He joined the staff of the latter· in 1990 as Deputy Travel Editor. In 1997 he left to help launch Conde Nast Traveller. He is now a freelance writer and lives in London with his wife and three children, one of whom has the uncanny ability to speak in a scouse accent.
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Rob Ryan
Underdogs
Published March 1999 by Headline Feature at £9.99
ISBN: 0747273219
'a hardboiled tour-de-force, I doubt whether there's going to be a better first crime novel this year' Independent on Sunday
'a wonderfully exhilarating novel, combining a cinematic narrative drive with winning characters - particularly Alice, as pert as her 19th century namesake - and a brilliantly imagined dreamlike subterranean landscape' Sunday Times
'a dazzling first novel set in the underground tunnels that lie beneath Seattle...[an] always unpredictable tale that combines the sheer giddy pace of a road movie with a touch of Lewis Carroll' Time Out
'fantastic, head-spinning, surreal and hilarious by turns' The Guardian
'pacy and intriguing, [this is] a dark thriller with a refreshingly different angle brought about by its unique and surreal setting' Big Issue
On the surface...Seattle is a bright, confident, super-modern city. But Seattle has a secret. When most of the city burned down in 1889, they rebuilt it one-storey up, to avoid the constant flooding. The result: a mysterious, sealed-off world of abandoned, hundred-year-old streets, houses, even a theatre, that still exists. Frankly, anything could be down there...
On the surface...Underdogs is a thriller about what happens when a suspected psyche and the eight-year-old girl he's taken hostage find themselves lost in Seattle's secret underbelly, pursued by an ex-Vietnam Tunnel Rat who's about to have some very nasty flashbacks. But beneath the rollercoaster thriller is a literary labyrinth dating back to the last century, a rather curious wonderland...
On the surface...Rob Ryan is a freelance writer who has contributed to The Face, Arena and American GQ, and was Deputy Travel Editor of the Sunday Times before leaving to help launch Conde Nast Traveller. But in fact he's one of the most exciting and original new British thriller writers to come along for years...
