Books to look forward to from Simon and Schuster

JANUARY 2016

Joe Goldberg came to Los Angeles to start over, to forget about what happened in New York. But in a darkened room in Soho House everything suddenly changed. She is like no one he's ever met before. She doesn't know about his past and never can. The problem is, hidden bodies don't always stay that way.  Hidden Bodies is by Caroline Kepnes.

The Sign of Fear is by Robert Ryan.  The skies above London hum with danger. And in the Channel enemies lie in wait...  Autumn, 1917. London is not the city that Dr John Watson and Sherlock Holmes once bestrode like giants. Terror has come from the sky and Londoners are scurrying underground in fear. Then a twin tragedy strikes Watson. An old friend, Staff Nurse Jennings, is on a boat-ambulance torpedoed in the Channel with no survivors. And his concert-going companion, Sir Gilbert Hardy, is kidnapped. Then comes the gruesome ransom demand, for Sir Gilbert and four others, which will involve terrible mutilation unless the demands are met. Help comes from an unlikely source when Watson finds himself face-to-face with his old ruthless adversary, the "She Wolf" Miss Pillbody. She makes him a remarkable offer and so an unlikely partnership is formed - the enemy spy and Sherlock Holmes's faithful companion, a detective duo which will eventually uncover a shocking case of state-sponsored murder and find Watson on board a German bomber, with a crew intent on setting London ablaze.

A time of turbulence 1975. A summit has been arranged between the Rhodesian government and various nationalist leaders, and is due to take place in railway dining car 49, midway along Victoria Falls Bridge. But Matthew Charamba, a key player in the battle for majority rule in Rhodesia, is hiding a deadly secret. A time of terror Claire and Erik are living in Stockholm, raising their son, Ben. But their quiet life is about to unravel in explosive fashion. Each have hidden pasts, to which the other is oblivious, and those pasts have come back to find them. Time for Paul Dark to take action. When his family is kidnapped, Paul Dark, the most resourceful and dangerous double-agent of the 20th Century, must take action or lose the most precious people in his universe.  Spy Out the Land is by Jeremy Duns.

APRIL 2016

The Amber Shadows by Lucy Ribchester. Bletchley Park typist Honey Deschamps spends her days at a type-x machine in Hut 6, transcribing the decrypted signals from the German Army, doing her bit to help the British war effort. Halfway across the world Hitler's armies are marching into Leningrad, leaving a trail of destruction and pillaging the country's most treasured artworks, including the famous Amber Room - the eighth wonder of the world. As reports begin filtering through about the stolen amber loot, Honey receives a package, addressed to her, carried by a man she has never seen before. He claims his name is Felix Plaidstow and that he works in Hut 3. The package is postmarked from Russia, branded with two censors' stamps. Inside is a small flat piece of amber, and it is just the first of several parcels. Caught between fearing the packages are a trap set by the authorities to test her loyalty or a desperate cry for help, Honey turns to the handsome enigmatic Felix Plaidstow. But then her brother is found beaten to death in nearby woods and suddenly danger is all around...

MAY 2016

Berlin 1943. August Schlegel lives in a world full of questions with no easy answers. Why is he being called out on a homicide case when he works in financial crimes? Why did the old Jewish soldier with an Iron Cross shoot the block warden in the eye then put a bullet through his own head? Why does Schlegel persist with the case when no one cares because the Jews are all being shipped out anyway? And why should Eiko Morgen, wearing the dreaded black uniform of the SS, turn up and say he has been assigned to work with him? Corpses, dressed with fake money, bodies flayed beyond recognition: are these routine murders committed out of rage or is someone trying to tell them something...  The Butchers of Berlin is by Chris Petit.

JUNE 2016

The Lost Swimmer by Anne Turner.  Rebecca Wilding, an archaeology professor, traces the past for a living. But suddenly, truth and certainty are turning against her. Rebecca is accused of serious fraud, and worse, she suspects - she knows - that her husband, Stephen, is having an affair. Desperate to find answers, Rebecca leaves with Stephen for Greece, Italy and Paris, where she can uncover the conspiracy against her, and hopefully win Stephen back to her side, where he belongs. There's too much at stake - her love, her work, her family. But on the idyllic Amalfi Coast, Stephen goes swimming and doesn't come back. In a swirling daze of panic and fear, Rebecca is dealt with fresh allegations. And with time against her, she must uncover the dark secrets that stand between her and Stephen, and the deceit that has chased her halfway around the world.

Lucy Ribchester on Choosing Your Weapon:Selecting a fictional detective…

©Kuba Kolinski

Today’s guest blog is by author Lucy Ribchester who is a dance and fiction writer based in Edinburgh. Her debut novel The Hourglass Factory is set around the suffragette movement.

It’s often hard to remember what sets you off on a particular story. For me it’s usually the setting that comes first, not necessarily time-period specific but more of a general atmosphere or impression. In the case of The Hourglass Factory it was music halls and suffragettes that hooked me in – a hazy image of ballsy, brassy women getting their bloomers out on trapezes and vandalising the Houses of Parliament. Once I’d established this was the Edwardian era (Edwardian in historical terms commonly goes up until the start of World War I) I had to pick a year. 1912, for reasons apparent in the prologue, was the obvious choice. And once you’ve made the decision to write a crime novel, that’s when the brain has to kick into action and get you thinking about who the most important person skulking around this world will be; your fictional detective.

Detective might be a bit of a misnomer. As Agatha Christie knew, sometimes the greatest criminal-pinching minds are found in the most unexpected places (imagine having Miss Marple as your next door neighbour, you’d never even dare nick a biscuit from the village hall coffee morning). It’s true that the most common fictional detectives are usually members of the police or some form of law-keeper (CJ Samson uses a lawyer, SJ Parris a spy), but sometimes this just isn’t possible. If you want your detective to be a woman and you’re a historical fiction writer aiming to keep some semblance of reality to the period, your professional options are somewhat limited. Victorian writer Andrew Forrester got round this by making his Lady Detective a private investigator working to select commissions. Ann Granger in her Lizzie Martin series cleverly uses a woman in a relationship with (and later married to) a police officer, who shares the brain work in her other half’s investigations. But when searching for a professional woman with access to - and an interest in - crime scenes, the obvious choice to me seemed to be a journalist.

Frankie George, Hourglass Factory protagonist, came kicking and stomping out of my head after I’d read about male impersonators, latch-key girls and those bastions of the sexist establishment, the Ladies’ Pages of Edwardian newspapers. I don’t feel, looking back on it, as if I made many conscious decisions about her character, but I did need to decide how it was that she would have the resources and the reasons to investigate a crime. Putting her into the most frustrating position imaginable for a woman who wants to be taken seriously was the starting point, thus Frankie writes for the London Evening Gazette’s Ladies Page and is only given more serious journalistic fodder when a suffragette the men have never heard of comes to their attention – in other words, she is never allowed to forget that she is not just a journalist but a female journalist. This gave her a reason to want to get stuck into something juicier off her own bat, and the desire to keep at it come what may.

I’d come across the rise of the so-called “latch-key girls” in a couple of history books, but the best summary of their effect on society was in Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians. “Eadred Templecombe says England is going to the dogs”, says Lucy, Duchess of Chevron at one point. “It really looks like it, when girls like Viola can defy their own mothers and go off to live by themselves in London.” This showed me that there were young women making their own way, causing tension amongst traditionalists, and made it possible for me to create a self-reliant character who would feasibly generate her own income.

Frankie’s clothing I took liberties with – I never came across a woman who dressed in male

clothing when not on stage, apart from suffragette chauffer Vera Holme, who wore a man’s-style uniform. But I liked her as a style counterpart to orientalist Milly and corset-wearing Ebony so the trousers stuck.

When it comes to resources, Frankie doesn’t really have any, except her own tenacity, and here was where research into journalism came in handy. Elizabeth Banks’s 1902 Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl sees her running all over London in search of stories, going undercover in laundry houses and answering adverts for a parlour maid, all with the hope of flogging her scoops on spec to Fleet Street editors. Life was hard for freelancers of both genders but possible with a hand-to-mouth and a devil-may-care attitude. It was this that made me think that even if Frankie’s paper abandoned her – as happens in the book - she would be able to make her own inroads into a criminal investigation. In other words, she would be the detective up to the task of taking down the most dastardly of villains.  

More information about Lucy Ribchester and her work can be found on her website.  You can also follow her on Twitter @lucyribchester and find her on Facebook.

Books to Look Forward to From Simon & Schuster

The Fifth Gospel is by Ian Caldwell and is due to be published in March 2015.  In 2004, as Pope John Paul II's reign enters its twilight, a mysterious exhibit is under construction at the Vatican Museums.  A week before it is scheduled to open, its curator is murdered.  The same night, a violent break-in rocks the home of the curator's research partner, Father Alex Andreou, a Greek Catholic priest who lives inside the Vatican with his five-year-old son.  When the papal police fail to identify a suspect in either crime, Father Alex, desperate to keep his family safe, undertakes his own investigation.  To find the killer he must reconstruct the dead curator's secret: what the four Christian gospels - and a little-known, true-to-life fifth gospel known as the Diatessaron - reveal about the Church's most controversial holy relic.  But just as he begins to understand the truth about his friend's death, and its consequences for the future of the world's two largest Christian Churches, Father Alex finds himself hunted down by someone with vested stakes in the exhibit - someone he must outwit to survive.

Famous bestselling author, loving husband, generous friend -- Henry Hayden has it all, or so it seems.  What does it matter that his novels are in fact all written by his loving wife?  But when Henry's carefully constructed life is threatened, and his attempt to solve the problem leads to the death of his wife, it starts to look as if everything might fall apart.  As Henry weaves an increasingly complicated web of lies, half-lies and half-truths in a deception which is as entertaining as it is dark, he remains a compelling character, evading the consequence of every action as he plays off the police, his publisher, his friends and above all his past.  The Truth and Other Lies is a dark, clever, and hugely entertaining thriller by Sascha Arango and introduces readers to sociopath Henry Hayden.  It is due to be published in June 2015.

The year is 1917 and Major John Watson is held in a notorious prisoner of war camp deep in

Germany, there as Medical Officer for the British prisoners.  With the Allied blockade of Germany, food is perilously short in the camp and when a new prisoner is murdered all assume the poor chap was killed for his Red Cross parcel.  Watson, though, isn't so sure.  Something isn't quite what it seems and a creeping feeling of unease tells Watson there is more to this than meets the eye.  And when an escape plot is apparently uncovered in his hut and he is sent to solitary confinement, he knows he has touched a nerve.  If Watson is to reveal the heinous crimes that have occurred at the camp, he must escape before he is silenced for good.  All he needs is some long-distance help from Sherlock Holmes...  A Study in Murder is by Robert Ryan and is due to be published in January 2015.

  

Orient, seated at the toe of the north leg of Long Island, ebbs, and flows with the seasons.  When the days start to grow, the first SUVs begin to roll in, filled with beach towels, croquet sets, and the summering multitudes of nearby New York City.  But when the season reaches its close and the swell recedes, a town remains in its wake.  This is the real Orient, the one that stood on its lawn, gardening trowel hung low at its side, eyes squinting against the sun, as Mills Chevern rode into town in Paul Benchley's passenger seat on that last day of summer.  Who is this foster kid?  Where did he come from?  Why did Paul, that nice, lonely, middle-aged neighbour bring him here to our quiet streets?  It's not long after Mills rolls in that all hell breaks loose: the local handyman is found bloated to bursting in the bay, an elderly neighbour is discovered face-down in her garage, and a grotesque creature washes up on shore.  As the town swarms with fear, Mills (we're certain that's not his real name) finds himself the chief suspect in a riddle of violent deaths, one he must solve before his own time runs out.  Orient is by Christopher Bollen and is due to be published in April 2015.

  

The Hourglass Factory is by Lucy Ribchester and is due to be published in January 2014.  1912 and London is in turmoil...The suffragette movement is reaching fever pitch but for broke Fleet Street tomboy Frankie George, just getting by in the cut-throat world of newspapers is hard enough.  Sent to interview trapeze artist Ebony Diamond, Frankie finds herself fascinated by the tightly laced acrobat and follows her across London to a Mayfair corset shop that hides more than one dark secret.  Then Ebony Diamond mysteriously disappears in the middle of a performance, and Frankie is drawn into a world of tricks, society columnists, corset fetishists, suffragettes, and circus freaks.  How did Ebony vanish, who was she afraid of, and what goes on behind the doors of the mysterious Hourglass Factory?  From the newsrooms of Fleet Street to the drawing rooms of high society, the missing Ebony Diamond leads Frankie to the trail of a murderous villain with a plot more deadly than anyone could have imagined...

In Place of Death is by Craig Robertson and is due to be published in May 2015.  A man enters the culverted remains of an ancient Glasgow stream.  Deep below the city it is decaying and claustrophobic, and gets more so with every step.  As the ceiling lowers to no more than a couple of feet above the ground, he finds his path blocked by another person.  But the person is has been murdered.  DS Narey leads the investigation to find out who the victim is and who killed him.  Photographer Winter begins an investigation of his own, through the shadowy world of urbexers, people who pursue a dangerous and illegal hobby, a world that Winter knows more about than he lets on.  Meanwhile, DI Derek Addison is trying to prevent an escalating drugs war, which has already left several casualties in its wake among the city's rival gangs.  A new face in town is upsetting the established order.  Against a backdrop of hauntingly atmospheric and dangerous buildings, the tangled links between the gangs and the urbexers who have strayed unwittingly into deadly territory draw all three investigations together.

Broadstairs, Kent, 1850.  Part sea-bathing resort, part fishing village, this is a place where people come to take the air, and where they come to hide...Delphine and her sister Julia have come to the seaside with a secret, one they have been running from for years.  The clean air and quiet outlook of Broadstairs appeal to them and they think this is a place they can hide from the darkness for just a little longer.  But this is a town with its own secrets, and a dark past.  And when the body of a young girl is found washed up on the beach, a mysterious message scrawled on the sand beneath her, the past returns to haunt the town, and they cannot escape what happened here years before...A compelling story of secrets, lies and lost innocence...  The Widow’s Confession is by Sophia Tobin and is due to be published in January 2015.

A family holiday takes a horrifying turn as one of the party is found dead. At first Emily believes it to be a terrible accident, but soon secrets emerge that throw suspicion on those closest to her … Here We Lie is by Sophie McKenzie and is due to be published in May 2015.