Hardback - Fiction
January
THE GIRL IN THE LAKE
In 1989, a killer dumped the body of twenty-year-old Lucie Martin into a picturesque lake in the West of France. Fourteen years later, during a summer heatwave, a drought exposed her remains.
THE MAN ON THE CASE
No one was ever convicted of her murder. But now, forensic expert Enzo Macleod is reviewing this stone-cold case - the toughest of those he has been challenged to solve.
THE SKELETON IN THE CLOSET
Yet when Enzo finds a flaw in the original evidence surrounding Lucie's murder, he opens a Pandora's box that not only raises old ghosts but endangers his entire family.
May
SUMMER OF LOVE
She made a profit from her youth. She's not beautiful anymore - but she will be young forever.
Called away from his pregnant girlfriend, Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen knows the sight of the murdered prostitute will be with him all his life. But this is what he does: he finds killers. Helen Tozer, more than most, understands why.
SUMMER OF DEATH
The girl they called Julie Teenager had a client list full of suspects - all rich, powerful - and protected. Someone warns off the beat coppers; someone disturbs the crime scene. Breen begins to fear that this is more than the murder of a prostitute. It's political.
Then Helen, with her ex-copper's instincts and fierce moral sense, gets dangerously involved. And Breen knows he has more to lose than ever before. He is about to become a father. He can have no sympathy for the devil.
Breen and Tozer met through murder. They work in a world before forensics or criminal databases; a world that's bigoted and brutal. Tense, dramatic and ingeniously plotted, Sympathy for the Devil is a gripping police thriller that delivers crime with a conscience.
July
INFILTRATOR
One-time Swedish government agent Piet Hoffmann is on the run: both from the life prison sentence he escaped, and from the Polish drug mafia he double-crossed. Only Hoffmann's handler, Erik Wilson, knows he now hides in Calí, Colombia, living under a false identity with his wife Zofia and sons Rasmus and Hugo.
INFORMANT
But life on the run is precarious. And so when Hoffmann, in order to survive, accepts employment as a bodyguard and hit man for the Colombian cocaine mafia, and is simultaneously approached by the US DEA to infiltrate the same cartel, he chooses to say yes to both. Hoffmann has a new, lucrative double life.
IN TOO DEEP
However, Hoffmann's successful balancing act is short lived. When Timothy D. Crouse, Chairman of the US House of Representatives, is kidnapped while on a trip to Colombia, US forces settle on a new enemy for their next War on Terror. This gives the cartel and the US government the same problem. Piet Hoffmann.
Condemned and hung out to dry, Hoffmann is stranded, and marked. Yet Erik Wilson will find him help from the most unlikely of figures - the stubborn, acerbic Swedish detective who has never forgotten Piet Hoffmann's face. DCI Ewert Grens - the enemy who Hoffmann once tricked - will now become the only ally he can trust.
November
Frankenstein meets The Shadow of the Wind in a Gothic thriller set in the diabolical city of fin-de-siecle Barcelona.
Daniel Amat has left Spain and all that happened there behind him. Having just achieved a brilliant role in Ancient Languages at Oxford University and an even more advantageous engagement, the arrival of a letter - a demand - stamped Barcelona comes like a cold hand from behind.
He arrives back in that old, labyrinthine and near-mythic city a few days before the great 1888 World Fair, amid dread whispers of murders - the injuries reminiscent of an ancient curse, and bearing signs of the genius 16th century anatomist, Vesalius. Daniel is soon pulled into the depths of the crime, and eventually into the tunnels below Barcelona, where his own dark past and the future of science are joined in a terrible venture - to bring the secret of Vesalius to life.
Gothic and gripping, this historical thriller makes of Barcelona a diabolical character - emerging out of the dark into a new electrical age, aflame with spirit, superstition and science. Published in eighteen countries, Jordi Llobregat's bestselling first novel mixes a passionate setting and cryptic mystery into a genre-crossing phenomenon.
Hardback - Non Fiction
October
Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you're dead.
So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from shelves.
We are fondly introduced to each potential rediscovery: from lost Victorian voices to the twentieth century writers who could well become the next John Williams, Hans Fallada or Lionel Davidson. Whether male or female, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner - no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten.
These 99 journeys are punctuated by 12 short essays about faded once-favourites: including the now-vanished novels Walt Disney brought to the screen, the contemporary rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie who did not stand the test of time, and the women who introduced psychological suspense many decades before it conquered the world.
This is a book about books and their authors. It is for book lovers, and is written by one who could not be a more enthusiastic, enlightening and entertaining guide.
Paperback - Fiction
February
William Shaw - The Birdwatcher
March
Roslund & Hellström - Three Seconds; Two Soldiers; Cell 8 all tr. Kari Dickson
April
Peter May - Snake Head
May
James Henry - Blackwater
June
D A Mishani - The Man Who Wanted to Know tr. Todd Hasak-Lowy
July
Peter May - Cast Iron
September
Peter May - The Runner
November
Peter May - Chinese Whispers
William Shaw - Sympathy for the Devil
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