Spring/Summer 2015

The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter

Malcolm Mackay

It's easy to kill a man. It's hard to kill a man well.

A twenty-nine-year-old man lives alone in his Glasgow flat. The telephone rings; a casual conversation, but behind this a job offer. The clues are there if you know to look for them. He is an expert. A loner. Freelance. Another job is another job, but what if this organization wants more?

A meeting at a club. An offer. A target: Lewis Winter, a necessary sacrifice that will be only the first step in an all-out war between crime syndicates the likes of which hasn't been seen for decades. It's easy to kill a man. It's hard to kill a man well. People who do it well know this. People who do it badly find out the hard way. The hard way has consequences.

How a Gunman Says Goodbye

Malcolm Mackay

The breathtaking, devastating second novel in the acclaimed Glasgow Trilogy, a Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year.

How does a gunman retire? Frank MacLeod was the best at what he does. Thoughtful. Efficient. Ruthless. But with his health failing him, how long before he's no longer of use to his employers? A new job. A target. But something is about to go horribly wrong. And up-and-coming hitman Calum MacLean will be called upon to pick up the pieces.

Most gunmen say goodbye to the world with a bang. Frank's still here. No longer in his prime, certainly. But with decades of experience at the top of his profession. Underestimating such a man could prove to be deadly.

The Sudden Arrival of Violence

Malcolm Mackay

Travel into the dark underworld of Glasgow, Scotland, in the suspenseful, award-winning organized-crime thriller series that the New York Times calls "habit-forming."

Hit man Calum MacLean has finally had enough of killing. And he's planning an unprecedented escape just as his employers need him the most -- Glasgow's biggest criminal organizations are gearing up for a final, fatal confrontation.

The panic over Calum's abrupt disappearance may finally give Detective Michael Fisher the chance he needs to close the case of a lifetime. But first, he must track down a man who has become a master at staying in the shadows.

Don't pick up a Mackay book unless you've got spare time. They're habit-forming." -- Janet Maslin, The New York Times "It's been a long time since so many pages went by so fast . . . Mackay is a natural storyteller [with] a voice to which we're happy to surrender. Surprisingly rewarding . . . a thriller trilogy that thrills. " -- Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post "Bracing . . . remarkable." -- Adam Woog, Seattle Times

When We Were Animals

Joshua Gaylord

In this chilling Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novel, a small, quiet Midwestern town is unremarkable save for one fact: when the teenagers reach a certain age, they run wild.

When Lumen Fowler looks back on her childhood, she wouldn't have guessed she would become a kind suburban wife, a devoted mother. In fact, she never thought she would escape her small and peculiar hometown.

When We Were Animals is Lumen's confessional: as a well-behaved and over-achieving teenager, she fell beneath the sway of her community's darkest, strangest secret. For one year, beginning at puberty, every resident "breaches" during the full moon. On these nights, adolescents run wild, destroying everything in their path.

Lumen resists. Promising her father she will never breach, she investigates the mystery of her community's traditions and the stories erased from the town record. But the more we learn about the town's past, the more we realize that Lumen's memories are harboring secrets of their own. A gothic coming-of-age tale for modern times, When We Were Animals is a dark, provocative journey into the American heartland.

Nominated for the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel

The Doll Maker

Richard Montanari

Detectives Byrne and Balzano return to the streets of Philadelphia to put an end to a macabre succession of murdered children.

A quiet Philadelphia suburb. A woman cycles past a train depot with her young daughter. There she finds a murdered girl posed on a newly painted bench. Beside her is a formal invitation to a tea dance in a week's time.

Seven days later, two more young victims are discovered in an abandoned house, posed on painted swings. At the scene is an identical invitation. This time, though, there is something extra waiting for Detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano: a delicate porcelain doll.

It's a message. And a threat. With the killers at large, Detectives Byrne and Balzano have just seven more days to find the link between the murders before another innocent child is snatched from the streets.

Hard Freeze

Dan Simmons

Revenge has never been served so cold.

Joe Kurtz, former investigator and convicted felon, is on parole. But the years he spent in Attica didn't make his old haunts any safer. Back on the streets of Buffalo, he's already marked by a local Mafia don.

As if watching his back weren't enough work, Kurtz has also been hired by a gravely ill John Frears, whose daughter met a grisly fate at the hands of a murderer. Frears wants one thing before he dies: for Kurtz to find the fiend that the authorities couldn't. But the calculating killer -- a master at changing identities -- has a little unfinished business of his own. Dodging a contract on his head and tracking a serial killer on the loose, Kurtz plunges headfirst into the icy waters of revenge as both victim and avenger.

SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Fox

Ralph Pezzullo

In war-torn Syria, the heroes of the SEAL Team Six series defuse an ISIS warlord's explosive plot.

On the way to a meeting with a CIA source in Istanbul, Chief Warrant Officer Crocker noticed he's being tailed. He suspects the men tracking his movements are members of Syria's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat - their presence a sign of the region's increasing volatility.

Syria's government is unraveling, with ISIS dangerously in the mix. Mohammad al-Kazaz, aka the Fox, leads the most threatening of the ISIS factions. The Fox has obtained a shipment of chemical weapons that would bring devastation to an already crumbling region. Crocker and his squad must set off deep into enemy territory with limited intel, no chance of rescue, and only one shot at saving thousands of lives.

Written in the Blood

Stephen Lloyd Jones

See the girl. Leah Wilde is twenty-four, a runaway on a black motorbike, hunting for answers while changing her identity with each new Central European town.

See the man, having come of age in extraordinary suffering and tragedy in nineteenth-century Budapest: a witness to horror, to love, to death, and the wrath of a true monster. Izsv°k still lives in the present day, impossibly middle-aged. He's driven not only to hunt this immortal evil but to find his daughter, stolen from an Arctic cabin and grown into the thing Izsv°k has sworn to kill.

See the monster, a beautiful, seemingly young woman who stalks the American West, seeking the young and the strong to feed upon, desperate to return to Europe where her coven calls.

Written in the Blood is the epic thriller of the year, a blazing and dexterous saga spanning generations, and threading the lives of five individuals driven by love, by sacrifice, by hunger and by fear. They seek to save a race -- or to extinguish it forever.

The Silkworm

Robert Galbraith

Private investigator Cormoran Strike must track down a missing writer -- and a sinister killer bent on destruction -- in this "wonderfully entertaining" mystery (Harlan Coben, New York Times Book Review) that inspired the acclaimed HBO Max series C.B. Strike.
 
When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days -- as he has done before -- and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
 
But as Strike investigates, he discovers that Quine's disappearance is no coincidence. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were published, it would ruin lives -- meaning that almost everyone in his life would have motives to silence him.
 
When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, Strike must race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any he has encountered before . . .
 
A compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn, The Silkworm is the second in J. K. Rowling's highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant, Robin Ellacott.

Broken Monsters

Lauren Beukes

A criminal mastermind creates violent tableaus in abandoned Detroit warehouses in Lauren Beukes's genre-bending novel of suspense.

Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit's standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams?

If you're Detective Versado's geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you're desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story. If you're Thomas Keen, known on the street as TK, you'll do what you can to keep your homeless family safe -- and find the monster who is possessed by the dream of violently remaking the world.

If Lauren Beukes's internationally bestselling The Shining Girls was a time-jumping thrill ride through the past, her Broken Monsters is a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.

"Scary as hell and hypnotic. I couldn't put it down...I'd grab it if I were you." -- Stephen King

Paradise Sky

Joe R. Lansdale

A rollicking novel about Nat Love, an African-American cowboy with a famous nickname: Deadwood Dick.

Young Willie is on the run, having fled his small Texas farm when an infamous local landowner murdered his father. A man named Loving takes him in and trains him in the fine arts of shooting, riding, reading, and gardening. When Loving dies, Willie re-christens himself Nat Love in tribute to his mentor, and heads west.

In Deadwood, South Dakota Territory, Nat becomes a Buffalo Soldier and is befriended by Wild Bill Hickok. After winning a famous shooting match, Nat's peerless marksmanship and charm earn him the nickname Deadwood Dick, as well as a beautiful woman. But the hellhounds are still on his trail, and they brutally attack Nat Love's love. Pursuing the men who have driven his wife mad, Nat heads south for a final, deadly showdown against those who would strip him of his home, his love, his freedom, and his life.

White Crocodile

K.T. Medina

Set in the shadowy Killing Fields of Cambodia, this gripping military thriller follows Tess Hardy as she works to unravel the mystery of how her husband, and many others, keep disappearing and turning up dead in the mine-laden backwaters of Southeast Asia.

Tess Hardy thought she had put Luke, her violent ex-husband, firmly in her past. Then he calls from Cambodia, where he is working as a mine-clearer, and there's something in his voice she hasn't heard before: Fear. Two weeks later, he's dead.

Against her better judgment, Tess is drawn to Cambodia and to the killing fields. Keeping her relationship to Luke a closely guarded secret, Tess joins his team of mine clearers, who are shaken to the core by Luke's sudden death. Even in their grief, the group remains a tightly knit and tightly wound community in which almost everyone has something to hide.

At the same time, the circle of death begins to expand. Teenage mothers are disappearing from villages around the minefields, while others are being found mutilated and murdered, their babies abandoned. Everywhere there are whispers about the White Crocodile, a mythical beast that brings death to all who meet it. Caught in a web of secrets and lies, Tess must unravel the truth, and quickly. The crocodile is watching, and Tess may be its next victim.

Combining the technical expertise of military suspense with a richly drawn sense of place, White Crocodile forges new ground in the thriller genre. Medina's internationally acclaimed debut announces the arrival of a prodigiously talented novelist whom readers will be discussing for years to come.

The Insect Farm

Stuart Prebble

An eerie debut suspense novel that explores how little one man may know his own brother -- and his own mind.

The Maguire brothers each have their own driving, single-minded obsession. For Jonathan, it is his magnificent, talented, and desirable wife, Harriet. For Roger, it is the elaborate universe he has constructed in a shed in their parents' garden, populated by millions of tiny insects. While Jonathan's pursuit of Harriet leads him to feelings of jealousy and anguish, Roger's immersion in the world he has created reveals a capability and talent which are absent from his everyday life.

Roger is known to all as a loving, protective, yet simple man, but the ever-growing complexity of the insect farm suggests that he is capable of far more than anyone believes. Following a series of strange and disturbing incidents, Jonathan begins to question every story he has ever been told about his brother -- and if he has so completely misjudged Roger's mind, what else might he have overlooked about his family, and himself?

The Insect Farm is a dramatic psychological thriller about the secrets we keep from those we love most, and the extent to which the people closest to us are also the most unknowable. In his astounding debut, Stuart Prebble guides us through haunting twists and jolting discoveries as a startling picture emerges: One of the Maguire brothers is a killer, and the other has no idea.

Crooked

Austin Grossman

Award-winning novelist Austin Grossman reimagines the Cold War as an epic battle against the occult waged by the ultimate American antihero: Richard Nixon.

Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all?

Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up. What if our nation's worst president was actually a pivotal figure caught in a desperate struggle between ordinary life and horrors from another reality? What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest?

In Crooked, Nixon finally reveals the secret history of modern American politics as only Austin Grossman could reimagine it. Combining Lovecraftian suspense, international intrigue, Russian honey traps, and a presidential marriage whose secrets and battles of attrition were their own heroic saga, Grossman's novel is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.

Hard as Nails

Dan Simmons

If you're going to shoot Joe Kurtz, you'd better shoot to kill.

Ex-PI Joe Kurtz's survival is on the line when an ambush leaves him badly wounded and his parole officer, Peg O'Toole, clinging to life. Their respective professions have ensured that neither suffers from a shortage of enemies, so narrowing down the suspects isn't easy. But Kurtz knows who's at the head of his list: Angelina Farino Ferrara, the lethal beauty who leads the Farino crime family, and her mob rival, Toma Gonzaga.

The odd thing is, each would rather hire Joe Kurtz than fire at him. Someone's causing trouble beneath the gray skies of western New York, and it's drawn the notice of the mobs and the cops. Kurtz is caught in the middle along with the rest of them, and no one knows who's tightening the vise.