Carl Granville is a would-be novelist who is beginning to think his writing career is going nowhere fast, when in a clandestine meeting he is hired by the hottest editor in town to turn an old diary, articles and letters - in which all names and locations have been blanked out - into compelling fiction. For this task, and for his silence, he will be paid a quarter of a million dollars.
But as his work progresses, Carl realises that Gideon's book is more than just a potential bestseller. It is a revelation of chilling evil and a decades-long cover-up by someone with far-reaching power.
Then - suddenly, brutally - two people close to Carl are murdered, his apartment is ransacked, his computer stolen, and he himself is the chief suspect. With no alibi and no proof of his shadowy assignment, Carl becomes a man on the run. He has only one person to turn to, his ex-lover Amanda and they have only one option - to track down the author of the original diary, the place where the events related in it took place and the true identity of Gideon. He knows too much - but does he know enough to save himself ...

Elmore Leonard
`Higgins is my favourite. No, he doesn't learn from me, I learn from him'
The Times
`Highly recommended for connoisseurs of the genre'
Sunday Telegraph `Higgins writes brilliantly, with an especially sharp ear for dialogue'

Set in Canterbury, Massachusetts, Ambrose Merrion and Dan Hilliard are both long-serving members of the FBI as well as life-long friends. Through his sharp, well-observed dialogue, Higgins details how they met, their subsequent lives and careers and the problem now facing them: a Grand Jury is going to indict Dan for fraud and wants Ambrose to dish the dirt on his buddy. Dan, the brighter of the two, is more sucessful and stands accused of getting Merrion a position he didn't deserve. He doesn't understand who has accused him, or why, but forms a list of suspects in which his ex-wife is a strong contender.

George V. Higgins was a Boston district attorney and a newspaper columnist before becoming a bestselling novelist and was a professor at Boston University for many years. He died in 1999.

From Joseph Kanon, author of the award-winning Los Alamos, comes an espionage novel set at the height of Cold War paranoia, The Prodigal Spy.

The Observer described Los Alamos as 'an espionage novel that brilliantly captures the burgeoning cold-war paranoia', and in Joseph Kanon's second novel he has again masterfully recreated an era when East and West were no longer at war but were embroiled in something far more insidious: a murderous secretive game where the stakes were equally high and the weapons of stealth, suspicions and silence were just as deadly.
Waiter Kotlar is the epitome of the American dream, the son of working class immigrants who attends Yale and becomes part of the establishment. He seems an unlikely communist, but before his hearing with the Committee on Un-American Activities is concluded he has disappeared - defected to the East. Nineteen years later his son, Nick, receives a message that his father wants to see him in Prague. He is horrified, repelled - and intrigued. At first Nick refuses to go, until he realises that the message is a coded cry for help...
Accompanied by Molly, the beautiful journalist who has brought his father's message, Nick embarks on a clandestine mission to Czechoslovakia, to find a man who is old and dying - and who wants to come home. But Waiter Kotlar is no longer important enough to merit anyone's help. And therein lies the crux of the matter. He never was important: so why did the communists bring him out of America? The only reason, he tells Nick, was to protect someone else, someone infinitely more important - someone about whom he knows everything, except his name.
The Prodigal Spy is a novel of high suspense and intriguing sensibility, a novel that I guarantee you won't be able to put down.

Praise for Joseph Kanon's first novel Los Alamos, which was an international bestseller:
'A profoundly serious as well as grippingly entertaining novel' Allan Massie
'An espionage novel that brilliantly captures the burgeoning cold-war paranoia' The Observer
'Accomplished and beautifully written' Sunday Telegraph
'Enthralling ... a dream of a novel' Time Out

From the dazzling playing fields of the rich to the murky realm of superpower realpolitik, The Colour of Night is David Lindsey's spellbinding portrait of a man trapped in a labyrinth of international intrigue, revenge and love.

Harry Strand is a renowned international art dealer in old master and Impressionist drawings. Working from a gallery in Texas, he is mourning the death of his wife, Romy and trying to forget a previous career in American Intelligence. He is approached by the beautiful Mara Song needing to sell some precious Klimt Drawings after an acrimonious divorce. They begin to form a serious friendship and she goes with him to Italy on a business trip. Walking into her apartment one day Harry sees a video playing.... And finds himself watching a night surveillance of a chase scene and ,with heart-wrenching horror, witnessing his wife's final, terrifying moments as her car is forced off a road. Her death was not an accident and he knows who is responsible... The Cold War may be over but Harry's war has only just begun.

When the wife of a prominent QC is found dead at the bottom of a well, Inspector Thanet discounts accidental death. Virginia Mintar was no angel - her outrageous flirting knew no bounds and made her many enemies. On the night of her death she was surrounded by a group of people, many of whom had reason and opportunity to kill her. But which one took that final step? Who wanted her dead and gone?
Thanet and his partner Mike Lineham find their investigation hampered by a morass of family secrets. Who was Virginia's current lover? And what could her mother-in-law possibly have to hide? Add the Mintar's daughters to the equation - the elder has been missing for four years and the younger is engaged to a womanising tennis coach - and Thanet soon realises that the further he digs, the more complicated this case is going to become.

Distracted by anxiety over his own daughter's pregnancy, and with his Super on his back pushing for hard evidence, Thanet needs to pull out all the stops if he is to succeed in disentangling this complex web of infidelity, blackmail and a family's emotional tug-of-war.

Praise for previous Inspector Thanet mysteries:
'Simpson can disinter the past with the best of them, and her portrait of a small community is matchless... few writers can match Simpson's control' The Times

'Thrillers that are both well written and crisply plotted do not come along every day, so a Dorothy Simpson novel is a welcome and engrossing treat' The Lady
'Well-rounded characters, a satisfying mind teaser, the best of British' Observer
'First class ... there are very few practitioners of this sort as skilful as Dorothy Simpson' Birmingham Post