and one of the group is brutally murdered. John has his suspicions but he can’t prove anything. He senses that Aida has some hold over the girl and he offers her a place of refuge in his home. But the past haunts Anna in the most chilling of ways. And all too soon John realises he’s made a terrible mistake… Gollancz Jack Glass by Adam Roberts. Published: July 2012 Golden Age SF meets Golden Age Crime from the author Kim Stanley Robinson thinks should have won the Booker. Jack Glass is the murderer. We know this from the start. Yet as this extraordinary novel tells the story of three murders committed by Glass the reader will be surprised to find out that it was Glass who was the killer and how he did it. And by the end of the book our sympathies for the killer are fully engaged. Riffing on the tropes of crime fiction (the country house murder, the locked room mystery) and imbued with the feel of golden age SF, JACK GLASS is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the reader, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain. JACK GLASS has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping HowDunnits and comes with liberal doses of sly humour.
Black Opera by Mary Gentle. Published: August 2012 An astonishing new historical epic fantasy from the author of ASH. Conrad Scalese is a writer of librettos for operas in a world where music has immense power. In the Church, the sung mass can bring about actual miracles like healing the sick. Opera is musicodrama, the highest form of music combined with human emotion, and the results of the passion it engenders can be nothing short of magical.?In this world of miracles, Conrad is an atheist - he sees the same phenomena, but sees no need to attribute them to a Deity... until his first really successful opera gets the opera-house struck by the lightning bolt of God’s disapproval...?... And Conrad comes to the attention of the Prince’s Men, a powerful secret society, who are trying to use the magic of music to their own ends - in this case, an apocalyptic blood sacrifice.?Life is about to get interesting for Conrad. Alcatraz by Brandon Sanderson. Published: September 2012 An omnibus of four books by the best selling author of the MISTBORN and WHEEL OF TIME series.
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and mother. The Librarians, of course, immediately steal the bag of sand from him.?This sparks a chain of events which leads Alcatraz to realize that his family is part of a group of freedom fighters who resist the Evil Librarians-the secret cult who actually rule the world. Alcatraz’s grandfather shows up and tows him off to infiltrate the downtown library to steal back the mystical bag of sand. The ensuing story involves talking dinosaurs, sentient romance novels, and a dungeonlike labyrinth hiding beneath the innocent-looking downtown library. The Red Knight by Miles Cameron. Published: September 2012 A violent, fastpaced and compelling debut fantasy novel, in a world where heroes and monsters are not quite as they seem ... This is a world dominated by The Wild.?Man lives in pockets of civilisation claimed from The Wild. Within men’s walls life is civilised, the peace punctuated by tournaments, politicking, courtly love and canny business. Beyond those walls men are prey - vulnerable to the exceptionally powerful and dangerous creatures which populate the land, and even more vulnerable to those creatures schemes.?So when one of those creatures breaks out of The Wild and begins preying on people in their homes, it takes a specialist to hunt it down or drive it out . . .
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On his thirteenth birthday, Alcatraz-a foster child-gets a bag of sand in the mail which purports to be his “inheritance” sent from his father