'Preserve the Dead is storytelling of the highest order from one of Irish crime writing's most unassuming masters' - Irish IndependentDetective Sergeant Lucy Black is visiting her father, a patient in a secure unit in Gransha Hospital on the banks of the River Foyle. He's been hurt badly in an altercation with another patient, and Lucy is shocked to discover him chained to the bed for safety. But she barely has time to take it all in, before an orderly raises the alarm - a body has been spotted floating in the river below...The body of an elderly man in a grey suit is hauled ashore: he is cold dead. He has been dead for several days. In fact a closer examination reveals that he has already been embalmed. A full scale investigation is launched - could this really be the suicide they at first assumed, or is this some kind of sick joke? Troubled and exhausted, Lucy goes back to her father's shell of a house to get some sleep; but there'll be no rest for her tonight. She's barely in the front door when a neighbour knocks, in total distress - his wife's sister has turned up badly beaten. Can she help? In Preserve The Dead, Brian McGilloway weaves a pacy, intricate plot, full of tension to the very last page. DS Lucy Black's third outing since the bestselling Little Girl Lost, confirms her as one of the decade's most original female detectives: strong, sensitive and ever determined.
Lucy Black must protect the young and vulnerable . . . but can she protect herself?Late December. A sixteen-year-old girl is found dead on a train line. Detective Sergeant Lucy Black is called to identify the body. The only clues to the dead teenager's last movements are stored in her mobile phone and on social media - and it soon becomes clear that her 'friends' were not as trustworthy as she thought.Lucy is no stranger to death: she is still haunted by the memory of the child she failed to save, and the killer she failed to put behind bars. And with a new boss scrutinizing her every move, she is determined that - this time - she will leave no margin for error.Hurt is a tense crime thriller about how, in the hands of a predator, trust can turn into terror.Praise for Little Girl Lost:'Effortlessly blending Black's personal woes into her professional life, McGilloway weaves a taut police procedural in an unadorned style that belies the stories complexity.' Irish Times. 'Cleverly constructed, packed with vibrant and believable characters . . . It confirms him as one of the most original voices in the notably expanding field of Irish crime fiction .' Irish Independent. 'Assured and grittily realistic tale from an author who is being compared to James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin.' Sunday Business Post.
It's the summer of 1604 and the Spanish are in London. Many years after the ill-fated Armada, they are negotiating a peace treaty with the English. Nick Revill's acting company is given a ceremonial role at the celebrations. But not everybody welcomes this outbreak of peace. In the shifting world of the court there are factions. In the Tower of London sits that implacable enemy of the Spanish, Sir Walter Raleigh, and he has friends on the outside who may try to sabotage the negotiations. Nick, meanwhile, is trying to get on with his playing. Invited by Shakespeare's rival, Ben Jonson, to take part in a masque at Somerset House where the Spanish are lodged, Nick is caught up in a conspiracy. During a rehearsal the courtier Sir Philip Blake dies an apparently accidental death when he tumbles from a 'Deus ex machina' chair which is lowering him to the stage. But this is only the first of a series of suspicious deaths, and Nick must look for the murderer among those around him. And Nick has other distractions besides. There is his growing attraction to his landlady, the widowed Ursula Buckle. And then there is that new French girl at the Mitre brothel...
When the Black Death strikes London, all the theatres are closed down by order of the Privy Council. The Chamberlain's Men, the theatre company Nick Revill is part of, takes up an invitation to play in Oxford. However, it seems that the plague has followed them - but not all deaths are as they seem.
On a foggy morning in 1602, a boyhood friend of Nick Revill arrives in London. When Peter Agate announces that he wants to try his hand at acting, what can Nick do but offer him a part with his own company, the Chamberlain's Men, who are putting on a private production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida for the lawyers of Middle Temple.Yet within days Peter Agate is dead, stabbed to death at Nick's lodgings - the beginning of a sequence of violent deaths, each somehow implicating Nick himself. To avoid the hangman's noose Nick must discover the real murderer among a cast of suspects, including an aristocratic brother and sister, a troublemaker from a rival company and an ex-actor who once saw the Devil himself on stage...
'Quirky and colourful' Times Crime Club'An absolute delight' L C Tyler'This intriguing but charming murder mystery is packed with psychological depth and wonderfully-drawn characters' Eleanor RayLiterary fame beckons for Olga Pushkin, Railway Engineer (Second Class), when her self-help manual for hard-working women is published at last. In the meantime, however, Olga still has a household to support, a hedgehog to feed, and railway tracks to maintain from her tiny Siberian village of Roslazny, which has just become the target for Russian Railways budget cuts. Worse still, her beloved sergeant of police, Vassily Marushkin, has reunited with his long-lost wife Rozalina. And soon Rozalina is forcing Vassily to consider moving away...Matters aren't helped when Olga's scheming superior, Boris Andreyev, forces her to babysit a special Romanov-themed murder mystery steam train doing the rounds of the local towns. Parked in a siding near Roslazny, the players deliver the first of several intended performances - only for a staged murder to become very real. Vassily starts a homicide investigation in conjunction with his boss, the mercurial Captain Zemsky, but both are baffled when another murder follows on the heels of the first. Old-school Zemsky bans Olga from joining the investigation - but she soon makes vital discoveries that point towards something deeper and more worrying than the murders alone. Further afield, a rival author emerges to steal Olga's crown, while back in Roslazny Olga begins to suspect that Vassily's wife Rozalina might be hiding secrets of her own. With chaos striking Roslazny, can Olga solve the murders, save her literary career, and settle Rozalina's identity before she loses Vassily forever?Praise for C J Farrington'The book is an absolute delight, evocative equally of the frozen steppes, bad vodka and worse sausage, and full of larger than life characters. Olga Pushkin is an endearing protagonist, who is hopefully set for a series as long as the Trans Siberian Railway.' L C Tyler'Written with a warmth that would thaw Siberia, this intriguing but charming murder mystery is packed with psychological depth and wonderfully-drawn characters. It also features the best hedgehog I've met in a novel.' Eleanor Ray
A new and definitive edition of Coming up for Air, introduced and annotated by Orwell's prize-winning biographer. With additional content from Orwell himself.
A new and definitive edition of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, introduced and annotated by Orwell's prize-winning biographer. With additional content from Orwell himself.
A new and definitive edition of Burmese Days introduced and annotated by Orwell's prize-winning biographer.
A new and definitive edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, introduced and annotated by Orwell's prize-winning biographer. With additional content from Orwell himself.
A new and definitive edition of Animal Farm, introduced and annotated by Orwell's prize-winning biographer. With additional content from Orwell himself.
A new and definitive edition of Burmese Days introduced and annotated by Orwell's prize-winning biographer.
Don Black is the man behind some of the late twentieth century's greatest musical numbers and one of Andrew Lloyd Webber's frequent collaborators - this is his memoir.
The Unstable Boys is the first novel from legendary rock critic Nick Kent.
From the author of the Scott and Bailey series, Quiet Acts of Violence is a novel about family and betrayal, injustice and poverty, the ties that bind and those that break us.
The latest mystery featuring teenage sleuth Su Lin, from award-winning Singaporean writer Ovidia Yu
The latest mystery featuring teenage sleuth Su Lin, from award-winning Singaporean writer Ovidia Yu
'Immersive from the start and satisfying to the finish, a faultless tale from one of our best writers of historical crime fiction' JESS KIDDIn the darkness, her face glimmered like polished bone, white, but with a bluish tinge. Her lips were dry and cracked. I saw them move; a black tongue pass over them as if she was trying to speak, but she made no sound.A plague is coming to London. Dreaded more than the Devil himself, cholera - the 'blue death' - spares no one. As fear grows across the city, Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain are called to the bedside of a dead man, murdered, and with his throat torn out, in the back room of a brothel. When an innocent man is taken to Newgate, Jem and Will have until execution day to save him. The search for the identity of the corpse, and the killer, takes them to the gates of Blackwater Hall, home to the secretive, and corrupt Mortmain family. With the approach of autumn, no one is safe, for the fog brings with it an evil and poisonous sickness - the perfect shroud for murder.When family secrets are prised out into the open, people begin dying. But who, or what, is the cause? Searching for answers, Jem and Will are driven underground, to the passages and tunnels beneath the city's teeming streets. Here, their adversary proves to be more elusive, and more deadly, than ever.PRAISE FOR UNDER GROUND'From the outset every image, every metaphor and simile reflects the central themes of corruption and disease, poverty and decadence.The plot is complex and substantial and the final denouement has a feeling of perfect inevitability' ALIS HAWKINS'Immersive'SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
Praise for Under Ground'From the choleric streets of the Fleet Ditch to the genteel surroundings of Hampstead; from the toshers making a living from scouring the mud on the Thames to a wealthy family with more than a few secrets, E. S. Thomson takes us on a rip-roaring adventure through London of the mid 1850s. Meticulously researched, magnificently atmospheric, and written with Dickensian charm, this intriguing novel proves that sometimes the best stories lie hidden under ground' Abir Mukherjee'E. S. Thomson has done it again. A cast of vivid characters, gorgeously gritty settings and a rollicking plot, all backed up by meticulous research worn lightly. There is much to love in a Flockhart novel and Under Ground is no exception. Immersive from the start and satisfying to the finish, a faultless tale from one of our best writers of historical crime fiction. Jess Kidd'In this book of superlatives, the chief brilliance is its characters. It's not only the main protagonists, Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain, who delight but the familiar minor characters of Mrs Roseplucker and her enforcer Mr Jobber, and the family of the murdered man, the egregious but aptly named Mortmains. Add the Toshers of the sewers, Thimble, Fox and Badger and Under Ground abounds with satisfyingly Dickensian characters' Alis Hawkins
Prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev för att få fantastiska erbjudanden och inspiration för din nästa läsning.
Genom att registrera dig accepterar du vår personuppgiftspolicy.
