Books to Look Forward to from Orion Publishing Group

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July 2018

In the slums of Nairobi there is a place where the fires burn constantly and the stench of decay never fades. Dandora, the city's dumping ground, is filled with shadowy figures the world has left behind. Here too are rumours of the night runners - those said to be possessed by spirits, or the devil.  Detective Mollel understands what it means to be an outsider. Born in a Maasai village and forever at odds with the corrupt ranks of the city police, he is drawn to the case of a Fatima, a young girl who has gone missing in the slum. His search takes him deep into Nairobi's underworld, from rap clubs to voodoo healers, and to the lair of the self-styled overlord of Dandora. He learns that Fatima is not the first person to have disappeared, and to find out what has happened to her, Mollel must open his mind to things he cannot see...  Night Runners is by Richard Crompton

The White Devil is by Domenic Stansberry.  Vittoria, as she's known in Italy, is a small-time actress who left behind a dark past in her native Texas and followed her fading writer husband to the Eternal City.

Guided by her controlling, obsessive brother Johnny, Vittoria soon enters the upper circles of Roman society, becoming a paparazzi darling and mingling with shady cardinals and corrupt senators. Among them is Paolo Orsini, who quickly falls prey to Vittoria's charms. Too bad he's married; too bad his wife, an aging film icon, is murdered.  From the ravishing beauty of Rome - a city of dark secrets held within the frescoed walls of glamorous palazzos - to the pristine beaches of Malibu and the dangerous alleys of a mysterious South American city, Vittoria finds herself at the heart of a lethal chase, spiralling dangerously out of control...

EVERY STEP...  Paul Davis forgets things - he gets confused, he has sudden panic attacks. But he wasn't always like this.  TAKES YOU CLOSER...  Eight months ago, Paul found two dead bodies in the back of a co-worker's car. He was attacked, left for dead, and has been slowly recovering ever since. His wife tries her best but fears the worst...  TO THE TRUTH...  Therapy helps during the days, but at night he hears things - impossible things - that no one else can. That nobody else believes. Either he's losing his mind - or someone wants him to think he is.  Just because he's paranoid doesn't mean it's not happening...  A Noise Downstairs is by Linwood Barclay.

August 2018

A Double Life is by Flynn Berry.  Some wounds need more than time. They crave revenge.Claire's father is a privileged man: handsome, brilliant, the product of an aristocratic lineage and an expensive education, surrounded by a group of devoted friends who would do anything for him.  But when he becomes the prime suspect in a horrific attack on Claire's mother - an outsider who married into the elite ranks of society and dared escape her gilded cage - fate and privilege collide, and a scandal erupts.  Claire's father disappears overnight, his car abandoned, blood on the front seat.  Thirty years after that hellish night, Claire is obsessed with uncovering the truth, and she knows that the answer is held behind the closed doors of beautiful townhouses and country estates, safeguarded by the same friends who all those years before had answered the call to protect one of their own.  Because they know where Claire's father is.  They helped him escape.  And it's time their pristine lives met her fury.

How far would you go...  Gina Mills is desperate to be a newsreader, but her boss - the director of the struggling Channel Eight, won't help.  Walking home one night, Gina stumbles upon a dead body, and after calling the police, she makes the split-second decision to report the murder live.  When questioned by the police, Gina can't remember specific details about her discovery, but these memory gaps are explained away as shock.  ...to uncover your family's deadly secret?  But when Gina finds a second body, it's clear she's being targeted. But why?  And how is this connected to the death of Gina's younger sister so many years ago?  The Other Sister is by Elle Croft

Private Investigator Alma is caught up in another impossible murder. One of the world's four richest people may be dead - but nobody is sure which one. Hired to discover the truth behind the increasingly bizarre behaviour of the ultra-rich, Alma must juggle treating her terminally ill lover with a case which may not have a victim. Inspired by the films of Kubrick, this stand-alone novel returns to the near-future of The Real Town Murders, and puts Alma on a path to a world she can barely understand.   By The Pricking of Her Thumbs is by Adam Roberts.

September 2018

Anna Byrne is a jailhouse librarian. Most days, she loves her job and shares the life-affirming power of books to people who would have no hope without them. Often, she can get too close and forget some of these men are dangerous criminals.  But some of them never had a chance. Like Michael Hudson, who's been locked up awaiting trial before his sudden release. He's happy and relieved but can't shake the question preying on his mind: how comes the witness who put him behind bars is suddenly refusing to testify?  There's a man who might have the answer, but he wants something first. Phil Ornazian is a private investigator who moonlights as a petty criminal. He's not exactly proud of it, but times are hard in Washington D.C. People have to change to survive, or die trying.  But everything comes at a price and, at some point, everyone has to pay.  The Man Who Came Upstairs is by George Pelecanos.

John Rebus is not as young as he was, but his detective instincts have never left him. And after the daughter of a murder victim turns up outside his flat, he's going to need them at their sharpest. Enlisting the help of his old friend DI Siobhan Clarke, Rebus is determined to solve this cold case once and for all. But Clarke has problems of her own, problems that will put her at odds with her long-time mentor and push him into seeking help from his age-old adversary: 'Big Ger' Cafferty.This haunting story takes Rebus to places he has never been before, sets him and his long-time foe on a collision course and takes us deeper into one of the most satisfying conflicts in modern fiction.  Rebus: Long Shadows is by Ian Rankin and Rona Munro.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is one of the most beloved and notorious novels of all time. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of eleven-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner's full story for the very first time. Drawing upon extensive investigations, legal documents, public records and interviews with remaining relatives, Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita. Sally Horner's story echoes the stories of countless girls and women who never had the chance to speak for themselves. By diving deeper in the publication history of Lolita and restoring Sally to her rightful place in the lore of the novel's creation, The Real Lolita is by Sarah Weinman and casts a new light on the dark inspiration for a modern classic.

October 2018

In a house of lies, who can ever know the truth?  John Rebus might be retired, but he's far from finished. In this brand new mystery from the peerless Ian Rankin, the ex-DI returns alongside series stalwart Detective Siobhan Clarke in a case that will dredge up the secrets of the past and disrupt an even murkier present.  In a House of Lies is by Ian Rankin.

In a thrilling new partnership, Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly picks up the story of  detective Harry Bosch in the first novel in a new series, pairing Bosch’s talents with that of Renee Ballard, who made her entrance in the Ballard series-opener The Late Show.At the end of a long, dark night Detectives Renee Ballard and Harry Bosch cross paths for the very first time.  Detective Renee Ballard is working the graveyard shift again, and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours only to find that an older man has snuck in and is rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is none other than legendary LAPD detective Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch, working a cold case that has crept under his skin.  Unimpressed, Ballard kicks him out, but eventually Bosch persuades her to help and she reluctantly relents. Because Bosch is on the trail of a cold-case which refuses to stay buried; investigating the death of fifteen-year-old Daisy Clayton, a runaway who was brutally murdered. It’s a case that haunts Bosch - who crossed paths with Daisy’s devastated mother on a previous case. As Bosch and Ballard are drawn deeper into the mystery of her murder, they find there are more surprises awaiting them in the darkness.

Annie is the dream wife. Supportive, respectful, mild-mannered - everything her husband wants her to be. But underneath, she is so much more. Annie is a prisoner in her own life. Her finances, her routine and her contact with the outside world are all controlled by him. Only her love for her little boy keeps her sane, and at night she escapes into a dream world where she is free.  But Annie is about to do a very bad thing.  And you won’t believe how she is going to do it.  A Good Wife is by Louisa de Lange.

November 2018

Crimea, 1914.  When the Tzar's head of security is assassinated, Fandorin is called to investigate: the killer has been overheard mentioning a 'black city' so Fandorin and his trusty companion, Masa, head to Baku, the burgeoning capital of oil.  But as soon as they arrive, they are attacked and Fandorin almost drowns in an oil well. Saved by a stranger who hides him in the labyrinth of Baku's Old City, Fandorin begins to suspect the plot might be part of something larger - and much more dangerous.  With war brewing in the Balkans, and Europe's empires struggling to contain the threat of revolution, Fandorin must try and solve his difficult case yet before time runs out.  Black City is by Boris Akunin.

'It was the news they had all been dreading, confirmation of a fourth victim.'  When the body of a young woman is found by a Northumberland railway line, it's a baptism of fire for the Murder Investigation Team's newest detective duo: DCI David Stone and DS Frankie Oliver. The case is tough by anyone's standards, but Stone is convinced that there's a leak in his team - someone is giving the killer a head start on the investigation. Until he finds out who, Stone can only trust his partner.  But Frankie is struggling with her own past. And she isn't the only one being driven by a personal vendetta. The killer is targeting these women for a reason. And his next target is close to home….  The Insider is by Mari Hannah.

 

Dark Sky Island is by Lara Dearman.  DCI Michael Gilbert is called out to Sark - the world's first dark sky island - after bones are found on Derrible Bay. He is followed by journalist Jennifer Dorey, driven by a secret in her own past. The remains are decades old, but after a body is discovered Jennifer and Michael fear there may be a killer on the island. Together they follow a dark trail of bad blood and a conspiracy of silence.  Everyone on the island is under suspicion. No one is what they seem. And the murderer could strike again at any time... 

Lies Sleeping is by Ben Aaronovitch.  Martin Chorley, aka the Faceless Man, wanted for multiple counts of murder, fraud, and crimes against humanity, has been unmasked and is on the run. Peter Grant, Detective Constable and apprentice wizard, now plays a key role in an unprecedented joint operation to bring Chorley to justice.  But even as the unwieldy might of the Metropolitan Police bears down on its foe, Peter uncovers clues that Chorley, far from being finished, is executing the final stages of a long term plan. A plan that has its roots in London’s two thousand bloody years of history, and could literally bring the city to its knees.  To save his beloved city Peter’s going to need help from his former best friend and colleague–Lesley May–who brutally betrayed him and everything he thought she believed in.  And, far worse, he might even have to come to terms with the malevolent supernatural killer and agent of chaos known as Mr Punch…

December 2018

For The Missing is by Lina Bengtsdotter.  She must find Annabelle. Before it's too late.  When a teenage girl goes missing from a small town, the local police start to buckle under the pressure.  Enter Charlie Lager, the brilliant but conflicted Detective Inspector sent from Stockholm to solve the mystery of Annabelle's disappearance.  Her superiors don't know that Charlie grew up in this very town - and she's determined to keep it that way. But as she gets closer to the truth, cracks begin to form in her own lies.  Can Charlie find Annabelle before her darkest secrets are brought to light? FOR THE MISSING, time is running out

ONLY A MOTHER . Erica Wright lives a quiet, lonely life in her two-bed end of terrace. Her front door hasn't been graffitied in more than a year but that's soon about to change - her son, Craig, is being released from prison.  COULD BELIEVE HIM.  Local journalist, Luke Harding is determined to warn the public. As the person who covered the arrest and trial all those years ago, he knows the kind of predator Craig really is.  COULD BURY THE TRUTh.  Luke's worst fears are realised after a girl goes missing days after Craig's release and he becomes obsessed with trying to prove that Craig was behind it.  COULD FORGIVE WHAT HE HAS DONE.  Erica is worried, too - but how can a mother turn her back on her son? And how far will she go to protect him?  Only a Mother is by Elizabeth Carpenter.

January 2019

Only she knows what happened.  Only I can make her speak.  Alicia Berenson shoots her husband in the head five times, and then never speaks again.  Forensic psychotherapist Theo Faber must find a way to get Alicia Berenson to talk if he wants to treat her. Only then can he unravel the shocking events of that night five years before.  The Silent Patient is by Alex Michaelides.

I've been watching you DS Alice Parr.  I saw you trying to save the poor young woman you found in the park.  The woman I tried to kill.  I've been waiting for you to find her family. To find someone who cares about her.  But you can't can you?  You've never had a case like this.  I know everything about you. You know nothing about me.  Even though I'm the man you're looking for.  And you will never catch me...  To Catch a Killer is by Emma Kavanagh.

Domenic Stansberry on the Inspiration behind his new novel: The White Devil

John Webster’s The White Devil is not widely read in the U. S, nor is it often taught in the universities here. I discovered it through a newspaper review of theatrical production that was a sensation in New York. I could not make the trip to see it, but I read the play. Then read it again.

 It wasn’t till later I learned the roots of the story: how Webster had drawn his tale from the real life events surrounding a murderous love triangle that dominated the scandal sheets of the later Renaissance.  

I love Webster’s play. I love his dark vision. I love the startling modern feel, his portrayal of pervasive corruption, the forbidden sensuality, the erotic undertone.   I am especially drawn to the female character, Vittoria. Not because she is good—              because she isn’t.  She is an unfaithful wife, seduced by the promise of wealth, who plays willing inspiration to the murderous impulses of an unscrupulous lover. Vittoria is the moral center of the play, not because she seeks forgiveness, but rather because refuses to do so:  she will not to fall to her knees before authorities looking not for justice but a scapegoat: a way to hide their own corruption.

Though it would be severely anachronistic, it is tempting to label The White Devil as a prototypical noir tale, and to think of Vittoria as embodiment of a of noir heroine. 

I do most of my serious writing on a small, narrow desk facing the wall. I have a habit of tacking things onto that wall, news clippings, index cards with hand scrawled quotations, odd pages torn from magazines, photos, some of which stay up for years, yellowing, and which often (not always) find their way into my fiction in some form or the other.

 My first attempts —absurd in retrospect—at retelling The White Devil were historical fiction. I sketched out two timelines on colored paper, pinning them on that wall: one drawn from Webster’s play, the other from the historical events surrounding the real-life murders.  I likewise taped up Renaissance portraits of the real life principles—and later a magnificent photo of Geraldine McEwan, in the 1969 National Theater Production, in what is often referred to as the best dramatic staging of the play on a set designed by Fellini’s frequent collaborator, Piero Gherardi.

All this was marvelous stuff, but it only led me deeper off the path, into an impenetrable thicket.

Why retell a story that had already been so well rendered?

The answer, as it turned out, was already on my wall: a clipping I had torn from the San Francisco Chronicle—the story of Amanda Fox, an American exchange student sentenced to 25 years for brutally murdering her Italian roommate. It was a sensational case that caught the fervid imagination of the tabloids, never mind the conviction was eventually overturned.   The picture of Fox was black and white, a mug shot of a woman in her twenties, grainy, out of focus but nonetheless compelling, seductive and innocent all at once, oddly similar to the photos of McEwan in the stage role of Vittoria.

More so than the question of guilt and innocence, what struck me was the public howl surrounding Fox’s case. It so resembled the howl, more than four centuries earlier, which had enveloped Vittoria Accorombona. This led me to a realization that my story should not be set in the Renaissance, but in the here and now: in contemporary time. Likewise, my Vittoria was not Italian. She was American, AKA Vicky Wilson, an aspiring actress, an ex-patriot mingling with her scheming brother among the Roman glitterati.

I also realized that to tell this story I must—like any good crime novelist— visit the scene of the crime. So I wandered the streets of Rome, seeking out the places where Vicki might go, crashing parties at private palazzos (or trying to), ending each evening in the Campo De Fiori where, or so I imagined, my American Vicki now lived, in a tiny apartment, in a building many centuries old that had likewise been inhabited once upon by the real Vittoria and her cuckolded husband.

One evening in the Campo, I noticed a young couple, man and woman, who very much resembled each other, and might have been mistaken for brother and sister except for the overt way they fondled one another. As it turned out, they were Americans, and their conversation at the table behind me revolved around where they might go once they were done with Italy.

This didn’t strike me as significant at the time, but later made me realise that my American heroine—once under the gun, sought after by the Italian authorities for crimes real or imagined—would not seek refuge in Padua, as the original Vittoria had. No, she would head abroad, across the ocean—to the states maybe, to the coast—and then further on, to some foreign clime, in attempt to escape extradition.  I allowed myself to enter a story written some four hundred years ago, itself a transfiguration of underlying events, based in turn on source material questionably rendered, yet somehow informing the current moment, the yellow clippings, the old pictures, the fading type on the wall.

The White Devil by Domenic Stansberry (published by Orion) Out now,

In the hot, shadowy streets of Rome, Vicki Wilson’s lovers keep turning up dead. Vittoria, as she's known in Italy, is a small-time actress who left behind a dark past in her native Texas and followed her fading writer husband to the Eternal City. Guided by her controlling, obsessive brother Johnny, Vittoria soon enters the upper circles of Roman society, becoming a paparazzi darling and mingling with shady cardinals and corrupt senators. Among them is Paolo Orsini, who quickly falls prey to Vittoria's charms. Too bad he's married; too bad his wife, an aging film icon, is murdered.  From the ravishing beauty of Rome - a city of dark secrets held within the frescoed walls of glamorous palazzos - to the pristine beaches of Malibu and the dangerous alleys of a mysterious South American city, Vittoria finds herself at the heart of a lethal chase, spiralling dangerously out of control...