Spring/Summer 2016

Close Your Eyes

Michael Robotham

When a former student bungles a murder investigation, clinical psychologist Joseph O'Loughlin steps in to face a ruthless killer.

A mother and her teenage daughter are found murdered in a remote coastal home, one defiled by multiple stab wounds and the other posed like Sleeping Beauty waiting for her prince. Joe O'Loughlin is drawn into the investigation when a former student, trading on Joe's reputation by calling himself "the Mindhunter," jeopardizes the police inquiry by leaking details to the media and stirring up public anger.

Joe discovers a link between the farmhouse murders and a series of vicious attacks in which the victims are choked unconscious and brutally scarred. Now, Joe must stop a ruthless and brash criminal who has apparently graduated to murder. Much to his surprise, he is ably assisted by his eldest daughter, now a keen and courageous observer of her own right. Together they must track and catch a hunter who seems to anticipates every move they make.

#1 International Bestseller "Close Your Eyes: the best Michael Robotham novel yet . . . impossible to put down." -- Stephen King

The Exiled

Christopher Charles

Can anyone ever truly outrun his past?

Back in the 1980s, Wes Raney was an ambitious New York City Narcotics Detective with a growing drug habit of his own. While working undercover on a high-risk case, he made decisions that ultimately cost him not only his career, but also his family. Disgraced, Raney fled-but history is finally catching up with him.

Now in his early forties, Raney has been living in exile, the sole homicide investigator covering a two-hundred-mile stretch of desert in New Mexico. His solitude is his salvation-but it ends when a brutal drug deal gone wrong results in a triple murder. Staged in a locked underground bunker, the crime reawakens Raney's haunted and violent past.

From the vast, unforgiving landscape of the American west to the mean streets of New York, The Exiled is at once a riveting murder mystery and a brilliant portrait of a man on the run from himself, an unforgettable thriller that is "impossible to put down" (Frank Bill).

The Night the Rich Men Burned

Malcolm Mackay

Oliver Peterkinney and Alex Glass, two friends from Glasgow's desperate fringes, become involved in one of the city's darkest and most dangerous trades: debt collection. While one rises quickly through the ranks, the other falls prey to the industry's addictive lifestyle, accumulating steep debts of his own.

Meanwhile, the three most powerful rivals in the business -- Marty Jones, ruthless pimp; Potty Cruickshank, member of the old guard; and Billy Patterson, brutal newcomer -- vie for prominence. And now Peterkinney, young and darkly ambitious, is beginning to make himself known.

Before long, violence will spill out onto the streets, as those at the top make deadly attempts to outmaneuver one another for a bigger share of the spoils. Peterkinney and Glass will find themselves at the very center of this war; as the pressure builds, each will find their actions -- and inactions -- coming back to haunt them. But it is those they love who will suffer most . . .

The Night the Rich Men Burned is a novel for our times, and Mackay's most ambitious work to date, proving that in Glasgow's criminal underworld, there's nothing so terrifying as money.

"Malcolm Mackay has created his own world." -- The Sunday Times [UK]"A sharp-edged morality play delivered with the relentless intensity of machine gunfire." -- Library Journal

SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Dragon

Don Mann

The North Korean government is days away from realizing its nuclear ambitions and only the heroes of SEAL Team Six can stop it.

Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Crocker of SEAL Team Six's Black Cell is in Las Vegas after conducting a training exercise in the desert with new members of the team. Lounging by the pool at Caesar's Palace, he witnesses an argument between hotel security guards and three Asian men in corporate attire that quickly turns physical. Giving chase, he soon corners the businessmen, who claim to be Chinese diplomats under the protection of diplomatic immunity. Except the men don't respond when the head of hotel security -- Crocker's old friend -- addresses them in Mandarin.

That night, someone hacks into the Nevada Power Company system, and Las Vegas goes completely dark. The businessmen set their hotel suite on fire and escape amidst the chaos. At the same time, James Dawkins, a brilliant scientist with top-secret clearance, disappears from a conference in Geneva and wakes to find himself in a North Korean bunker with instructions to solve an engineering problem that will enable North Korea to launch nuclear attacks on its enemies worldwide.

Chasing a trail of evidence that takes them from U.S. soil to international waters to China and North Korea, Crocker and the rest of SEAL Team Six find themselves in the middle of an international plot with dangerous geopolitical ramifications. The North Korean government will stop at nothing to realize its long-held nuclear ambitions -- but it'll have to get through some of America's most highly trained warriors first.

The Second Girl

David Swinson

He's a good detective...with a bad habit.

"One of the Year's Best Crime Novels"-The New York Times Book Review, Booklist

Frank Marr knows crime in Washington, DC. A decorated former police detective, he retired early and now ekes a living as a private eye for a defense attorney. Frank Marr may be the best investigator the city has ever known, but the city doesn't know his dirty secret.

A high-functioning drug addict, Frank has devoted his considerable skills to hiding his usage from others. But after accidentally discovering a kidnapped teenage girl in the home of an Adams Morgan drug gang, Frank becomes a hero and is thrust into the spotlight. He reluctantly agrees to investigate the disappearance of another girl -- possibly connected to the first -- but the heightened scrutiny may bring his own secrets to light, too.

Frank is as slippery and charming an antihero as you've ever met, but he's also achingly vulnerable. The result is a mystery of startling intensity, a tightly coiled thriller where every scene may turn disastrous. The Second Girl is the crime novel of the season, and marks the start of a refreshing series from an author who knows the criminal underworld inside and out.

We Were Kings

Thomas O’Malley

In 1950's Boston, the Irish Republican Army is running guns and killing witnesses. Cal and Dante are committed to stopping them.

When a body is discovered at the Charlestown locks -- tarred, feathered and shot to death -- it appears to be a gangland killing, and is almost immediately dismissed. However, Cal O'Brien's cousin, Boston PD detective Owen Lackey, recognizes the murder style as the typical retribution for IRA informers. Combined with a tip-off about a boat coming into Boston weighed down with stolen guns and ammunition, the body in the locks hints that much more may be at stake than a one-off hit.

Serpents in the Cold introduced us to Cal and Dante, whose previous investigation brought them to the highest ranks of Boston's political elite. This time, Cal and Dante descend into the city's shadowy underbelly -- a world of packed dance halls, Irish wakes, and funeral parlors. There they discover a terrorist plot that will shake the city to its core and bring them head-to-head not only with Cal's past, but with the IRA Army Council itself.

Underground Airlines

Ben H. Winters

The bestselling book that asks the question: what would present-day America look like if the Civil War never happened?

A New York Times bestseller; a Goodreads Choice finalist; named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Slate, Publishers Weekly, Hudson Bookseller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kirkus Reviews, AudioFile Magazine, and Amazon

A young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service in exchange for his freedom. He's got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four." On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn't right -- with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.

As he works to infiltrate the local cell of a abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines, tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he's hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who won't reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw's case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child -- who may be Victor's salvation.

Victor believes himself to be a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he has worked so hard to earn. But in pursuing Jackdaw, Victor discovers secrets at the core of the country's arrangement with the Hard Four, secrets the government will preserve at any cost.

Underground Airlines is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we'd like to believe.

Revolver

Duane Swierczynski

Three generations torn apart -- by bullets fired fifty years ago.

Philadelphia, 1965: Two street cops -- one black, one white -- are gunned down in a corner bar. One of the fallen officers, Stan Walczak, leaves behind a 12-year-old boy, Jimmy.

Philadelphia, 1995: Homicide detective Jim Walczak learns that his father's alleged killer, Terrill Lee Stanton, has been sprung from prison. Jim stalks the ex-con, hoping to finally learn the truth.

Philadelphia, 2015: Jim's daughter Audrey, a forensic science student, re-opens her grandfather's murder for a research paper. But as Audrey digs deeper, she comes to realize that Stanton probably didn't pull the trigger -- and her father may have made a horrible mistake...

Moxyland

Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes's frighteningly persuasive, high-tech fable follows four narrators living in a dystopian near-future.

Kendra, an art-school dropout, brands herself for a nanotech marketing program. Lerato, an ambitious AIDS baby, plots to defect from her corporate employers. Tendeka, a hot-headed activist, is becoming increasingly rabid. Toby, a roguish blogger, discovers that the video games he plays for cash are much more than they seem.

On a collision course that will rewire their lives, these characters crackle with bold and infectious ideas, connecting a ruthless corporate-apartheid government with video games, biotech attack dogs, slippery online identities, a township soccer school, shocking cell phones, addictive branding, and genetically modified art. Taking hedonistic trends in society to their ultimate conclusions, Lauren Beukes spins a tale of a utopia gone wrong, satirically undermining the idea of progress as society's white knight.

Zoo City

Lauren Beukes

A new edition of Lauren Beukes's Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novel set in a world where murderers and other criminals acquire magical animals that are mystically bonded to them.

Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. When a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, Zinzi's forced to take on her least favorite kind of job -- missing persons.

Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell's undertow. Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she'll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives -- including her own.