On the Radar – Today we bring you an impressive mixture ranging from the primary colour pulp and slapstick shocks of All Due Respect, along with two journeys into worlds where magic and fantasy meet crime, the fifth in a popular procedural series, and the final Jack Ryan book by Tom Clancy. Final, that is, until someone decides to take up the late author’s metaphorical pen, which is what’s happened with another of this week’s releases. Yes, there’s a new Lord Peter Wimsey story…
Chain Reaction by Diane Fanning
This is the fifth in the series featuring Virginia homicide cop Lucinda Pierce. When a bomb explodes in a nearby high school, it’s a job for the homicide division. The caretaker has been killed, along with another person – as yet unidentified. With the whole country on alert for acts of terrorism, the FBI is soon called in, and Pierce is sidelined. She remains convinced that the perpetrators are rather closer to home, and this seems to be borne out when another fatality occurs. Diane Fanning is also well regarded as a writer of true crime books, but this, her latest work of fiction is, out today.
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The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Welsh
It seems everyone is resurrecting detectives. We have had Marlowe, Holmes, Spenser and Frost rising from their fictional tombs. One of the early progenitors of the trend was Jill Paton Walsh when she completed an authentic but unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane story – Thrones, Dominations – in 1998. Three more recreations of the Dorothy L Sayers characters followed, and now she has added a fourth. Once again set within the hallowed lawns and quadrangles of academia, the story finds Wimsey in Oxford. He has now inherited a dukedom and one of his first duties is to intervene in a bad tempered dispute at one of the colleges. When several of the opposing litigants die, Wimsey is perturbed to find that the circumstances of their deaths are uncannily similar. Has the killer been reading his wife’s crime novels? Released on 5 December.
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Silent Echo by JR Rain
JR Rain has self published many eBooks, some of them fantasy novels, some featuring Jim Knighthorse and others centred around Samantha Moon. Now JR Rain, an ex-PI himself, has written a story about a detective called Jim Booker. Booker was given just months to live, but has already exceeded his doctors’ expectations. Has he the energy for one final case? He drags himself away from home and hearth and the solitary contemplation of his own mortality to do a favour for an old friend. As their mutual past is raked over, he discovers the case is far more complex and dangerous than is good for his declining health. Published on 1 December on Kindle.
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Command Authority by Tom Clancy
Sadly, the best selling author of the Jack Ryan stories died in October 2013. Fans of the series will remember that Ryan became president in the 1998 novel Debt of Honour. In this final book by Clancy, President Ryan must face up to a new and belligerent Russian leader who is intent on restoring his country’s fearsome political and military reputation. The Russian iron-man, Valeri Volodin, has a dark secret however, with its roots in Jack Ryan’s past as a CIA operative. Now, Ryan’s son, Jack jr, is an intelligence officer like his father and, as the action rolls between Ukraine, Russia, the UK and the USA, both father and son find they have a pivotal role in preserving world peace. Out on 5 December.
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City of Lost Dreams by Magnus Flyte
Magnus Flyte is the pseudonym of an author whose biographical details are as fantastical and as dazzling as his novels. Flyte is actually the American writing team of Meg Howrey and Christina Lynch. Their debut story, City of Dark magic, was released in 2012. Readers of that book can expect the same genre-bending mixture of fantasy, romance, crime and mystery. The action darts between Prague, Vienna and London, and includes resurrected dead saints and alchemists, the desperate search for a cure for a terminally ill girl, and a genuinely malicious and thoroughly unpleasant villain. City Of Lost Dreams is out now.
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All Due Respect edited by Chris Rhatigan
This is a collection of short stories featuring work by pulp purveyors Chris F Holm, Mike Miner, Todd Robinson, Renee Asher Pickup, Travis Richardson, Walter Conley, and Paul D Brazill. Those who appreciated the previous collections from Needle Publishing, Pulp Ink1 and Pulp Ink2 can expect the same manic, funny, tragic and Tarantino-like mayhem as before, and shouldn’t be disappointed. The eclectic mix of story subjects includes some Connecticut thugs, what happens when mafia meets yoga, and a dark tale of revenge. For those who are interested in the history of crime fiction, there is also a close look at the groundbreaking crime publisher Hard Case Crime. Out now.
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The Midas Murders by Pieter Aspe
This Flemish Belgian author’s books have proven very popular in French, and now publisher Pegasus is bringing them to English-speaking audiences in the US and UK. The Midas Murders is from the Inspector Van In series. Set in Bruges, the book beings with the death of an executive. It looks as though it was the drink that killed him, but when his friend is questioned and then dies in a house fire, Van In smells a rat. Are these mysterious deaths linked to an explosion in the tourist quarter of Bruges? The city will be held by the bombers in a reign of terror unless Van In can solve the case. Out 7 December in the US, and 3 January in the UK.
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