BookTalk
BookTalk
Book Talk
with Smiffs book & card store, Nerja
Roy Grace devotees will be
looking forward to reading
Find Them Dead (h) the latest
in the series by Peter James. A
Brighton gangster is on trial
for conspiracy to murder,
following the death of a rival
crime family boss. As the jury
file into Lewes Crown Court,
twelve anonymous people
selected randomly from fifty,
there is one person sitting in
the public gallery observing
them with keen interest, and
secretly filming them... When
Roy Grace is called in to
investigate a murder that has
links to the accused and the
trial, and the suspicion that
an attempt has been made to intimidate jurors, he finds the
reach and power of the accused’s tentacles go higher than he
had ever imagined.
believes his years as an agent
runner are over. He is back in
London with his wife, the
long-suffering Prue, but with
the growing threat from
Moscow Centre, the office has
one more job for him. Nat is
to take over The Haven, a
defunct substation of London
General with a rag-tag band
of spies. The only bright light
on the team is young
Florence, who has her eye on
the Russia Department and a
Ukrainian oligarch with a
finger in the Russia pie. A
chilling portrait of our time,
now heartbreaking, now
darkly humorous, told with
unflagging tension by the
greatest chronicler of our age.
Night Boat To Tangier (p) by
Kevin Barry is the Booker-
longlisted novel, drenched in
sex, death and narcotics, in
sudden violence, old magic
and the mysteries of love,
from the winner of the
IMPAC Award and the
Goldsmiths Prize. It’s late one
night at the Spanish port of
Algeciras and two fading Irish
gangsters are waiting on the
boat from Tangier. A lover
has been lost, a daughter has
gone missing, their world has
come asunder - can it be put
together again?
Find Them Dead leads off
this month’s Soltalk Hotlist of
titles, some entirely new,
others moving into small
paperback format for the first
time or being reissued,
sometimes after years out of
print. All are due for
publication on dates in May,
with availability in print this
month or in early June. The
Hotlist helps readers to
budget for and plan book
ordering.
In Fair Warning (h) by
Michael Connelly, Jack
McEvoy, the journalist who
never backs down, tracks a
serial killer who has been operating completely under the
radar - until now. Veteran reporter Jack McEvoy has taken
down killers before, but when
a woman he had a one-night
stand with is murdered in a
particularly brutal way,
McEvoy realises he might be
facing a criminal mind unlike
any he’s ever encountered.
McEvoy investigates - against
the warnings of the police
and his own editor - and
makes a shocking discovery
that connects the crime to
other mysterious deaths
across the country.
Prayer for the Living (p) by
Ben Okri, is playful,
frightening, even shocking - the stories in this collection blur
the lines between illusion and reality. This is a writer at the
height of his power, making
the reader think, making
them laugh, and sometimes
making them want to look
away while holding their gaze.
Stories here are set in
London, in Byzantium, in the
ghetto, in the Andes, in a
printer’s shop in Spain. The
characters include a
murderer, a writer, a
detective, a man in a cave, a
man in a mirror, two little
boys, a prison door, and the
author himself. There are
twenty-three stories in all.
Each one will make you
wonder if what you see in the
world is all there is...
In Agent Running in the Field
(p) by John Le Carre, Nat, a 47
year-old veteran of Britain’s
Secret Intelligence Service,
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