New Reviews: Bauer, Fowler, Gomez-Jurado, Hannah, Leather, Russell, Walker, Walters

Here are this week's new reviews:

Michelle Peckham reviews Belinda Bauer's sequel to the award-winning Blacklands, Darkside which is now out in paperback;

Rich Westwood reviews Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May off the Rails and catches up with London's oldest serving detectives...;

I review Juan Gomez-Jurado's The Traitor's Emblem, tr. Daniel Hahn which is more history than mystery;

Susan White reviews Sophie Hannah's Little Face and also reviews the "Flipback" format it came in;

Terry Halligan reviews Stephen Leather's sequel to Nightfall, Midnight which continues the story of Jack Nightingale with his sold-off soul;

Amanda Gillies adds Craig Russell's character "Lennox" to her list of favourites, here in in his second outing: The Long Glasgow Kiss;

Lynn Harvey reviews the fourth in Martin Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police series set in France: The Crowded Grave

and Maxine Clarke reviews Trust No One by Alex Walters (already known to Euro Crime readers as Michael Walters) which is set in Manchester (rather than Mongolia).

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive.

Forthcoming titles can be found by author or date or by category, here and new titles by M K Bates, Laurent Binet, Patrick Easter, Karin Fossum, Christopher Fowler, Tom Grieves, Ewart Hutton, Arnaldur Indridason and Craig Russell have been added to these pages this week.

Trailer - The Moses Expedition

I rather enjoyed listening to God's Spy by Juan Gomez-Jurado last year - the action takes place during the election of the next Pope following Jean-Paul II's death. The 'hero' is Father Fowler, a military trained priest. He returns in Contract With God which came out last August in the UK and which will be published as The Moses Expedition in the US this August.

Here is the trailer for The Moses Expedition:

There's always next year...

I regret that I've not had time to read this yet and it's had such good reviews that I know I'm missing out... I'll get to it one day!

On the Orion website for God's Spy, there's a trailer which is one of the more informative (and least cheesy) one's that I've seen.

You can also download a twelve page extract here.

A certain giant online website has the trade paperback priced at a bargain £5.99. The mass market paperback is due out in April.

Recent Italian crime fiction reviews in the blogosphere...

A few weeks ago I posted that I was looking forward to God's Spy by Juan Gomez-Jurado. Well it seems Material Witness has acquired an advance copy and calls it "...a ripping tale and a very good read". You can read the full review here.

Crime Scraps posted a review recently of the second in the De Luca trilogy by Carlo Lucarelli - The Damned Season - which came out in the UK on 17 June. The De Luca books are set in an Italy in chaos at the end of the Second World War. The first one in the series is Carte Blanche, reviewed here on Euro Crime.

More Papal intrigue

I really will shut up about The Last Confession but I am intrigued by the forthcoming book from Juan Gomez-Jurado entitled 'God's Spy'. Actually 'God's Spy 'came out in the US in April, to good reviews I believe, but it won't be out in the UK until July.

Synopsis from amazon.co.uk: The novel takes place in the days following the death of Pope John Paul II, when 115 cardinals have to be called to the Vatican in order to take part in the Conclave to elect the new Pope. With Rome under siege to foreign press and thousands of mourners, the last thing it needs is a serial killer on the loose. Paola Dicanti is a profiler who works with the Italian police - she has been put in charge of profiling serial killers in a department of one ie herself. She is untested and her experience of serial killers is, as yet, theoretical. This is until she is called to the church of Santa Maria in the Vatican state. A cardinal has been found murdered, his eyes destroyed, his hands cut off. It seems that this is not the first victim - another cardinal was found in similar circumstances but the authorities didn't want a scandal. Recovering from a bitter affair with her boss, Paola begins to build her profile using information from the scene of the crime, from the autopsy, and from forensic evidence. She is helped in this by Anthony Fowler, a priest from the States. But it turns out that Fowler is no ordinary priest - he clearly has links to the CIA, and knows a lot about the serial killer than Dicanti could ever have guessed. The situation is complicated further when a young female journalist intercepts tapes that were meant to be sent to the press, putting her life in danger.

'God's Spy' is Spanish author Gomez-Jurado's first book. Read more on his website plus there's a website for the book where you can view a map of the Vatican, read about the characters and so on.