The Satapur Moonstone
by Sujata Massey
(Soho Crime)
The highly anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed novel The Widows of Malabar Hill.
India, 1922: It is rainy season in the lush, remote Sahyadri mountains, where the princely state of Satapur is tucked away. A curse seems to have fallen upon Satapur’s royal family, whose maharaja died of a sudden illness shortly before his teenage son was struck down in a tragic hunting accident. The state is now ruled by an agent of the British Raj on behalf of Satapur’s two maharanis, the dowager queen and her daughter-in-law.
The royal ladies are in a dispute over the education of the young crown prince, and a lawyer’s counsel is required. However, the maharanis live in purdah and do not speak to men. Just one person can help them: Perveen Mistry, Bombay’s only female lawyer. Perveen is determined to bring peace to the royal house and make a sound recommendation for the young prince’s future, but she arrives to find that the Satapur palace is full of cold-blooded power plays and ancient vendettas. Too late, she realizes she has walked into a trap. But whose? And how can she protect the royal children from the palace’s deadly curse?
Hump’s First Case
by Ralph Dennis
(Brash Books)
The tenth unforgettable novel in the legendary crime series
It’s a bitter, cold night in Atlanta. Ex-cop Jim Hardman walks in on a convenience robbery committed by a young woman and two men that leaves an innocent clerk dead. It’s an ugly experience Hardman can’t shake…and it gets worse when the parents of the female felon want to hire him to find their fugitive daughter before the cops do. Hardman wants nothing to do with the job. But his sometime partner Hump Evans is bored and short on cash… and takes the case. Soon Hump is pursued by a chain-wielding gang of racist bikers and mired in a seedy underworld of drugs, prostitution, and senseless violence that even the tough, ex-NFL player can’t handle alone…
“Exceptional characterization, strong and vigorous prose, and a glimpse into a place and time that has long since disappeared.” Mystery Scene Magazine
“Dennis may not have made literature of Hardman, but he damn sure touched on it more than a time or two.” Joe R. Lansdale, New York Times bestselling author
“A lightning-paced crime story packed with irreverence and loads of action.“ Publishers Weekly
“Tough, gritty and funny. The Hardman novels stack up against the best PI fiction. Ever.” The Fine Art of Murder
“Ralph Dennis has mastered the genre and supplied top entertainment.” The New York Times This new edition includes an afterword by Mel Odom, the award-winning author of The Rover
The Colorado Kid (Illustrated Edition)
by Stephen King
(Hard Case Crime)
Stephen King’s bestselling unsolved mystery, THE COLORADO KID — inspiration for the TV series HAVEN — returns to bookstores for the first time in 10 years in an all-new illustrated edition.
On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues, and it’s more than a year before the man is identified. And that’s just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still…? No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett’s THE MALTESE FALCON and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world’s great storytellers presents a moving and surprising tale whose subject is nothing less than the nature of mystery itself.
Broken Ground
by Joe Clifford
(Oceanview Publishing)
Perfect for readers who appreciate the novels of Dennis Lehane with deeply flawed characters struggling to walk the righteous path.
At an AA meeting, handyman and part-time investigator Jay Porter meets a recovering addict who needs his help. In the midst of another grueling northern New Hampshire winter, Amy Lupus’ younger sister, Emily, has gone missing from the Coos County Center, the newly opened rehab run by Jay’s old nemeses, Adam and Michael Lombardi. As Jay begins looking into Emily’s disappearance, he finds that all who knew Emily swear that she’s never used drugs. She’s a straight shooter and an intern at a newspaper investigating the Center and the horrendous secret hidden in it―or beneath it.
When Jay learns of a “missing” hard drive, he is flung back to five years ago when his own junkie brother, Chris, found a hard drive belonging to Lombardi Construction. For years Jay assumed that the much-sought-after hard drive contained incriminating photos of Adam and Michael’s father, which contributed to Chris’ death. But now he believes that hard drive may have harbored a secret far more sinister, which the missing Lupus sister may have unwittingly discovered. The deeper Jay digs, the more poisoned the ground gets, and the two cases become one, yielding a toxic truth with local fallout―and far-reaching ramifications.
Once More Unto the Breach
by Meghan Holloway
(Polis Books)
For readers of The Nightingale and Beneath a Scarlet Sky comes a gripping historical thriller set against a fully-realized WWII backdrop about the love a father has for his son and the lengths he is willing to go to find him, from a talented new voice in suspense.
Rhys Gravenor, Great War veteran and Welsh sheep farmer, arrives in Paris in the midst of the city’s liberation with a worn letter in his pocket that may have arrived years too late. As he follows the footsteps of his missing son across an unfamiliar, war-torn country, he struggles to come to terms with the incident that drove a wedge between the two of them.
Joined by Charlotte Dubois, an American ambulance driver with secrets of her own, Rhys discovers that even as liberation sweeps across France, the war is far from over. And his personal war has only begun as he is haunted by memories of previous battles and hampered at every turn by danger and betrayal. In a race against time and the war, Rhys follows his son’s trail from Paris to the perilous streets of Vichy to the starving mobs in Lyon to the treacherous Alps. But Rhys is not the only one searching for his son. In a race of his own, a relentless enemy stalks him across the country and will stop at nothing to find the young man first.
The country is in tatters, no one is trustworthy, and Rhys must unravel the mystery of his son’s wartime actions in the desperate hope of finding him before it’s too late. Too late to mend the frayed bond between them. Too late to beg his forgiveness. Too late to bring him home alive.
Go, Lovely Rose / The Evil Wish
by Jean Potts
(Stark House Press)
GO, LOVELY ROSEThey find Mrs. Henshaw at the bottom of the cellar stairs with her neck broken. Everyone assumes she has fallen. But when Rose’s sister appears on the scene, she immediately begins to cry murder. And she’s right! Young Hartley is the obvious suspect. Mrs. Henshaw had been his and his sister Rachel’s housekeeper for many years, and there was no love lost between any of them. In fact, no one in town really liked Rose Henshaw. Her ex-husband, Francie, certainly knew how evil she could be—she ruined his life. The rest of them were simply afraid of her: young Dr. Craig, the newcomer in town; and Bix, Hartley’s teenage girlfriend; her father, Hugh Bovard, editor of the local paper; and his shattered wife, Althea, still mourning the loss of her son. They all hated Rose Henshaw for one reason or another—but who hated her enough to push her down the stairs?
THE EVIL WISHEver since Marcia and Lucy were little girls, they would hide in the basement of their brownstone and listen in on their father’s conversations. But now they are in their 30s, still living with their domineering father, and one day they eavesdrop on a very portentous revelation. Their widowed father intends to marry his secretary, give her all his money, and let her kick his daughters out of their house. In their anger and outrage, Marcia and Lucy hatch a plot to murder him. When their father and his secretary are involved in a fatal car crash, their plans prove unnecessary. But what are they to do with their murder scheme and the residual guilt—particularly when the aborted plot develops a life of its own?
The Sun Worshippers / Yellowleg
by A. S. Fleischman
(Stark House Press)
THE SUN WORSHIPPERSGamage is on his way to Thebes, the Southern California desert town that Colonel Martinka built-up with his date plantations. Now the eccentric Colonel is building a pyramid in the desert and the land boom is ready to begin. Gamage is an ex-newspaperman-turned-film-writer who’s burned a few bridges in Hollywood. He’s been hired to write Martinka’s story for the family and prepare the world for the coming land grab. How was he to know that Ginny would be there, married to the Colonel’s son Frank. He thought he’d seen the last of her in Europe, the night she ran out on him. How could he know he’d meet Conny, who would become his Girl Friday, and perhaps something more. And how could he know he would find respect for the old recluse himself, trapped behind the layers of family fear and fabrication. Thebes is waiting like a desert mirage and Gamage is on his way to find it—and himself.
YELLOWLEG Yellowleg carries the scars from a scalping he received from a drunken Confederate soldier. He’s had seven years to hone these scars into the perfect act of revenge. He’s found the man who did it. He’s even riding with him, a man named Turk, and his sidekick Billy. But Yellowleg doesn’t reckon on a side trip to Siringo, a ghost of town where a small boy needs to be buried. The boy’s mother Kit is a woman of fierce pride and doesn’t want Yellowleg along. But it is his bullet that kills the boy. And guilt takes the place of revenge as he follows her out of town on the way through Apache country to find a resting place in Siringo—with Turk and Billy, and all the time in the world to set things straight between them.
Wear Your Home Like a Scar
by Nik Korpon
(Down & Out Books)
In Wear Your Home Like a Scar, Nik Korpon explores the catastrophic consequences of trying to start anew and reinvent yourself.
A clandestine surgeon goes to extreme lengths when she’s torn between family loyalties. A con man tries to help his girlfriend escape her pimp, despite what the tarot cards tell her. A drifter hunts down the man who hung her out to dry with a cartel boss. A sicario has a crisis of faith when an old legend stalks him.
From the streets of Baltimore to the comunas of Medellín, the Mexican Sierras to Texas border towns, Wear Your Home Like a Scar shows that no matter how deep you cut, you’ll never truly leave your home behind.
Praise for the Stories by Nik Korpon:
“Nik Korpon’s stories read like Sonny Chiba and Don Winslow somehow made a literary baby, in that they will kick your ass, then kick you in the head, AND the heart.” —Todd Robinson, author of The Hard Bounce and Rough Trade
“There’s an electric charge to Nik Korpon’s stories. They crackle and pop and leave a mark. This is an entire book full of them. Why haven’t you bought it yet?” —Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse
The Buther’s Daughter
by Jane E. James
(Bloodhound)
Looking for a dark and compelling psychological thriller with a twist you won’t see coming?
Trust no one. Not even yourself.
When Natalie Powers returns home for the first time in thirteen years, she must convince everyone she has fully recovered from the mental illness, which has seen her institutionalised for most of her young life.
But instead of being welcomed back, Natalie enters a baffling world of deception. She must fight her way through the lies in order to discover the truth about her mother’s sudden disappearance sixteen years earlier. To do this, Natalie must also try to make sense of the hazy memories from the past that continue to haunt her.
In the village of Little Downey, everybody appears to harbour a mysterious secret, including her father, Frank, the village butcher, who refuses to discuss the circumstances surrounding Natalie’s mother’s disappearance, but who can Natalie trust if not her own father? Especially when it becomes clear her protector and confidante, Dr Moses, is not all he appears.
Meanwhile, a spate of unexplained clifftop suicides has seen the seaside resort go into decline. Are the villagers somehow involved or is something more sinister at work?
Determined to find out what happened to her mother, Natalie must make sure her own frailty and self-doubt does not catapult her back to the mental institution before she can uncover the truth…
Jane E. James is the author of the chilling thriller The Crying Boy. The Butcher’s Daughter is a compelling and beautifully written psychological thriller which will appeal to fans of authors like Sheryl Browne, Nuala Ellwood and Teresa Driscoll.
Death and the Harlot
by Georgina Clarke
(Canelo)
A gripping historical crime debut from an exciting new voice.
‘It’s strange, the way fortune deals her hand.’
The year is 1759 and London is shrouded in a cloak of fear. With the constables at the mercy of highwaymen, it’s a perilous time to work the already dangerous streets of Soho. Lizzie Hardwicke makes her living as a prostitute, somewhat protected from the fray as one of Mrs Farley’s girls. But then one of her wealthy customers is found brutally murdered… and Lizzie was the last person to see him alive.
Constable William Davenport has no hard evidence against Lizzie but his presence and questions make life increasingly difficult. Desperate to be rid of him and prove her innocence Lizzie turns amateur detective, determined to find the true killer, whatever the cost.
Yet as the body count rises Lizzie realises that, just like her, everyone has a secret they will do almost anything to keep buried…
Fair Game
by Annette Dashofy
(Henery Press)
Paramedic Zoe Chambers hoped a week at the Monongahela County Fair, showing her horse and manning the ambulance, would provide a much-needed diversion from recent events that continue to haunt her. An old friend, a bossy nemesis, and a teenage crush from her 4-H days fail to offer the distraction she had in mind. But ever the caregiver, she soon bonds with a troubled teen and a grieving father.
Back in Vance Township, a missing woman turns up dead, leading Police Chief Pete Adams into a journey through her mysterious final hours. With each new clue, the tragic circumstances of her death grow increasingly muddied.
A cryptic phone call leads Pete to join Zoe for an evening at the fairgrounds where the annual school bus demolition derby concludes with a gruesome discovery and a new case that may or may not be connected to the first. Pete’s quest for the motive behind two homicides–and Zoe’s stubborn determination to reunite a family–thrust them both onto a collision course with a violent and desperate felon.
When He Vanished
by T.J. Brearton
(Joffee Books)
WHEN HE VANISHED
A HEART-POUNDING THRILLER WITH A STUNNING TWIST
WHAT IF YOUR HUSBAND DISAPPEARED AND THE POLICE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT HAVE KILLED HIM?
Jane Gable returns from her shift at the hospital one night to find her two children asleep in bed and her husband gone, his phone and wallet left behind.
John has long been a responsible and dependable man, maintaining a predictable schedule. He is a former alcoholic, and so Jane fears he has relapsed and may be in trouble.
An ‘old friend’ of John’s, Bruce Barnes, turned up on their doorstep the day before his disappearance.
Jane’s son Russ had seen a mysterious blonde woman at the house.
An SUV keeps showing up. Jane feels watched and under threat.
Then John’s abandoned car is found with blood on the steering wheel and Jane fears the worst. And there is a revelation that will make her question her own sanity.
Jane desperately begins investigating on her own. Suspects include her ex-husband, her stepbrother, and the mysterious blonde.
Is she being framed? Can she even trust herself?
HOW FAR WILL SHE GO TO SAVE HER FAMILY?
Perfect for fans of Rachel Cain, Harlan Coben, or Julianne MacLean.
All the Dirty Secrets
by Marian Lanouette
(Lyrical Underground / Kensington)
It’s a shocking blast from the past when homicide detective Jake Carrington finds himself investigating the last woman he’d suspect of murder . . .
Recovering from a stab wound to the gut, and dealing with the news that his sister’s killer might beat the system, Lieutenant Jake Carrington needs some downtime. But that’s cut short by a very sensitive case: the murder of the police commisioner’s wife. The crime scene—a dive hotel, complete with provocative, incriminating photos—suggests the victim was having an affair. But Jake finds that hard to believe—as hard to believe as the #1 suspect . . .
Jake hasn’t seen his highschool sweetheart, Melinda Mastrianni, since the day his sister, Eva, died. He’d turned down Eva’s request for a ride so he could go see Melinda, and the guilt has never left him. Now Melinda’s a local photographer, mostly shooting weddings and graduations. Definitely not the kind of pics that led him to her doorstep. But when Melinda disappears, and more prominent women turn up dead, Jake will have to navigate through a twisted blackmailing scheme to find out if the girl he once knew is long gone—or if she’s a killer’s next target . . .
“Tense and authentic—a suspenseful page-turner!”
—Leo J. Maloney on All the Pretty Brides
Cardinal Sin
by J.R. Ripley
(Lyrical Underground / Kensington)
Birds & Bees owner Amy Simms will need help from her fine-feathered friends when an uncommon bird sighting plunges her into a hornet’s nest of black magic and murder most foul . . .
Amy’s enjoying a rare moment of relaxation when a customer shows up seeking her expertise in ID-ing an unusual bird she’s seen flying around her wooded cabin at the edge of town. Ruby Lake, North Carolina, newcomer Yvonne Rice resembles an exotic bird herself—apparently the kind that doesn’t fly. When she’s found shot to death in her locked cabin, the only witness found is a statue of a voodoo deity staring down from the mantel.
Does the rare yellow cardinal Yvonne spotted hold any clues to her demise? What about the Ouija board spelling out the words I am murdered? As Amy delves deeper into Yvonne’s life and meets her strangely secretive neighbors, she’s determined to stop a fowl-hearted murderer from migrating to a new killing ground . . .
Till Death Do Us Part
by Stephen Edger
(Killer Reads)
The wedding vows are exchanged, then the nightmare begins…
‘A heart-in-the-mouth, tense and incredibly gripping read that kept me awake until the small hours’ Carol Wyer, author of The Birthday
It was supposed to be the happiest day of her life…
Alice Tandy has dreamed of her wedding since she was a little girl. The perfect venue, the perfect dress, the perfect groom. It’s all going exactly to plan.
But then her whole world comes tumbling down. Just as she and her new husband Ben are cutting their wedding cake, three policemen storm in and arrest Ben. Alice looks on in horror, unable to comprehend what is happening. Did they say murder?
The next day, Ben is released on bail, but for Alice, the nightmare is only just beginning. And as more details about the murder of Kerry Valentine emerge she starts to realise that everyone around her is keeping secrets. Can she trust anyone? And who really killed Kerry?
Perfect for fans of Louise Jensen, Kerry Wilkinson and K. L. Slater
Permanent Removal
by Alan S. Cowell
(Rare Bird Books)
‘‘They will use the flashing patrol light to force the sky-blue Honda to pull over―an old trick, but it often worked. They will manacle their captives and switch license plates. They will drive the four men back toward the dunes. In the first instance, there will be knives and bludgeons. Then gasoline to incinerate the bodies and the Honda. Dirty work, but someone had to do it.”
Permanent Removal is a beautifully written political thriller focusing on the nature of justice, truth, betrayal, socio-political and ethical quandaries, complicity and moral agency. The novel introduces readers to a cast of players whose destinies intertwine in a particularly gruesome murder. The novel is set in apartheid South Africa and fictionalizes the events leading up to the assassination of the Cradock Four. South African security forces set up a roadblock to intercept a car near the city of Port Elizabeth. Two of the four anti-apartheid activists in the car were secretly targeted for assassination. The police abducted the four and murdered them in cold blood. Their burnt bodies were found later near the Port Elizabeth suburb of Bluewater Bay. These murders are one of apartheid’s murkiest episodes. On the day of the funeral of the Cradock Four, President PW Botha declared a State of Emergency. It was the beginning of the end. Permanent Removal is an intriguing fictionalized exploration of political executions and culpability/loss during the apartheid heyday.
A Shattered Lens
by Layton Green
(Seventh Street Books)
A detective investigates the murder of a teenage golden boy that has rocked a small town–and the chief suspect is the victim’s mother.
Annalise Stephens Blue is a Creekville high school student with plans to become a world-famous filmmaker. As she begins filming an exposé of the town called Night Lives, she uncovers more than she bargained for: on the very first night of filming, she stumbles upon a murder in the woods, and flees the scene steps ahead of the killer.
Detective Joe “Preach” Everson is called to investigate the murder. The victim, David Stratton, is the town’s golden boy and high school quarterback. A modern version of what Preach used to be. Not only that, the boy’s mother is Claire Lourdis, a beautiful divorcée who Preach fell for in high school. She is also the main suspect in her son’s murder.
Despite the cloud of suspicion hanging over her, old feelings resurface between Claire and Preach, straining the detective’s relationship with his girlfriend Ari, a prosecutor in nearby Durham. As Preach delves into the secrets lurking beneath the surface of the town and searches for a missing girl who may have witnessed the crime, he must put his own feelings aside and pursue the answer to a terrible question: is a mother capable of murdering her own child?
Praise for the Preach Everson Series
“5/5 … This smart mystery by Layton Green [is] a real page turner.” – San Fancisco Book Review
“Dostoevsky and Poe would be proud” – Knoxville News Sentinel
Library Journal Starred Review
Poisoned Pen Fresh Fiction Selection
MysteryPeople bookstore Pick of the Month
“Written with Profound Elegance” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Starred Review
“A page-turner” – Publishers Weekly
“Smart, tense, and mystifying … one of the best new mysteries I’ve read this year.” – Critical Mass Blogspot
“A fascinating new protagonist” – Kirkus Reviews
“A smart page-turner, as dark and deep as the Carolina woods.” – Gordon McAlpine, author of the Edgar-nominated Woman with a Blue Pencil
“Fast-paced and braided with twists, it’s terrific entertainment.” – Andrew Pyper, bestselling author of The Only Child and The Demonologist
Murder on the Left Bank
by Cara Black
(Soho Crime)
The eighteenth mystery in the New York Times bestselling Parisian detective series!
A dying man drags his oxygen machine into the office of Éric Besson, a lawyer in Paris’s 13th arrondissement. The old man, an accountant, is carrying a dilapidated notebook full of meticulous investment records. For decades, he has been helping a cadre of dirty cops launder stolen money. The notebook contains his full confession—he’s waited 50 years to make it, and now it can’t wait another day. He is adamant that Besson get the notebook into the hands of La Proc, Paris’s chief prosecuting attorney, so the corruption can finally be brought to light. But en route to La Proc, Besson’s courier—his assistant and nephew—is murdered, and the notebook disappears.
Grief-stricken Éric Besson tries to hire private investigator Aimée Leduc to find the notebook, but she is reluctant to get involved. Her father was a cop and was murdered by the same dirty syndicate the notebook implicates. She’s not sure which she’s more afraid of, the dangerous men who would kill for the notebook or the idea that her father’s name might be among the dirty cops listed within it. Ultimately that’s the reason she must take the case, which leads her across the Left Bank, from the Cambodian enclave of Khmer Rouge refugees to the ancient royal tapestry factories to the modern art galleries.
The Vinyl Detective – Flip Back
by Andrew Cartme
(Titan Books)
The fourth book in the hilarious and enthralling Vinyl Detective mystery series. “Like an old 45rpm record, this book crackles with brilliance.” David Quantick on Written in Dead Wax
At the height of their success, the electric folk band Black Dog invited journalists to a desolate island for an infamous publicity stunt: the burning of a million dollars. But the stunt backfired and the band split up, increasing the value of their final album vastly. It’s this album that Tinkler’s got his eye on, and he hires none other than the Vinyl Detective and Nevada to hunt a copy down.
Narrowly avoiding a killing spree, negotiating deranged Black Dog fans, and being pursued by hack celebrity Stinky Stamner and his camera crew, the Vinyl Detective and Nevada discover that perhaps all was not as it seemed on the island–and that in the embers of that fire are clues to a motive for murder…
White Gold
by David Barker
(Urbane Publications)
Sim Atkins, Overseas Division agent, returns to Earth, having saved the Moon base from a deadly terrorist plot (see Rose Gold). All Sim can think about is finding the criminals responsible. But his fury and lust for revenge are put on hold when a nuclear warhead is stolen by Terra Former leader Matthias Larsson. Can Sim and his colleagues track down the terrorist cell and disarm the device in time? White Gold is the gripping finale in the compellingly original Gaia Trilogy, page-turning thrillers that provoke as well as excite.