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Take a look at the brand new MORTALIS website. |
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Dear Readers,
As I write this, the temperature in New York is hovering just above freezing. So even though March has just begun, Spring seems as far away as ever. But wintertime is reading time, right? So maybe there's an upside to the arctic blasts.
Either way, here's a piece of exciting news: One of the outstanding novels featured in the inaugural season of our Mortalis international and historical suspense program has been nominated for an Edgar Award. David Corbett's BLOOD OF PARADISE is up for best paperback original novel of 2007. What’s more, another of our titles—this one a nonfiction title, Patrick Anderson's THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER—is up for best critical work. To see the complete list of nominees, go here: http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html. Winners will be announced at the Edgar Allen Poe Awards Dinner, hosted each year by the Mystery Writers of America. I will be there with David and I'll report back afterwards.
So what books will be up for next year's awards? Certainly some of the answers lie below. After all, March features one rookie and one seasoned veteran, while April features three long-time Ballantine favorites, so you can't miss.
Happy reading,
Mark
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Steven Thomas brings to the literature of larceny a great new voice and an appealing locale in CRIMINAL PARADISE. Robert Rivers is a crook: no excuses, no apologies. But he's a thief with honor, conducting choreographed heists where nobody gets hurt—except in the wallet. But then everything changes: During a job, Rob opens a strongbox packed with more than greenbacks: he finds a disturbing black-and-white photo of a beautiful young girl, naked and clearly in trouble. For Rob, it's a wake-up call: There are rules even he won't break. While it may be his one chance to do something good, it's also his one-way ticket into the underbelly of the underworld—a lethal landscape where honor is for fools, and trust is for suckers and nice guys don't finish at all...they just get finished off.
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Mary Daheim returns to her much loved series with THE ALPINE TRAITOR. It begins when Emma Lord hears the outrageous news: The Advocate is embroiled in a takeover bid. Worse, the ruthless acquisitioners are the heirs of Emma's longtime and tragically departed lover, Tom Cavanaugh. Soon, battle lines are drawn and war is declared. Then the first casualty is discovered facedown at the Tall Timber Motel. The town is shaken and Emma decides to get to the bottom of things.
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First up, bestseller Jonathan Kellerman offers a riveting new Alex Delaware nove (his 22nd!) with COMPULSION. It begins with Alex and his partner, Milo Sturgis, investigating a string of murders connected only by the killer's use of hot black cars. But soon enough, the brilliant duo amass enough evidence to detect a larger pattern—and just in time to put themselves directly in the path of danger.
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Finally, Anne Perry puts the skills of Detective Thomas Pitt to the test in his 25th adventure in BUCKINGHAM PALACE GARDENS. The monarchy shudders when a prostitute's body is found in a Buckingham Palace cupboard after a party and Pitt quickly turns his attention to the Prince of Wales and his friends, who were in attendance. But he soon learns that they had also joined forces on a major international project: a trans-African railway. Under the greatest pressure of his career, Pitt is forced to do his best work.
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And then comes the final installment in a beloved series: ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS announces the conclusion of Gillian Roberts's Amanda Pepper series. The end begins peacefully at Philly Prep, the private school in Philadelphia where Amanda Pepper teaches English. After all, surely the money missing from funds collected for hurricane victims Down South will turn up—won't it? And anyway, Amanda has other things on her mind. Her husband is helping his Louisiana kin reconstruct their post-hurricane lives and her friend Sasha's stepmother has just committed suicide—though Sasha says Phoebe would have killed herself. Amanda reluctantly agrees to help investigate. But when another woman is found dead in Phoebe's house, it becomes clear that something is indeed murderously amiss, and much closer to home than Amanda or anyone else could have imagined.
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Alex Carr follows up her Mortalis debut with THE PRINCE OF BAGRAM PRISON, a riveting and timely literary thriller that Publishers Weekly says "well deserves comparisons with the early John le Carré." It begins when Army Intelligence reservist Kat Caldwell receives an order from way up the ladder: Retired spy chief Dick Morrow needs to find a CIA informant who has slipped away from his handler in Spain and may be heading to Morocco. That informant, a young man named Jamal, was a prisoner Kat interrogated at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan—and she is now expected to discover his whereabouts. But when a soldier is murdered just as he is about to give testimony on the death of another Bagram detainee, Kat suspects that the real story here concerns the cover-up of U.S.-sanctioned torture. And when in desperation Jamal contacts his former CIA handler, he unwittingly rekindles a bitter struggle between the one man who can save him and the one who wants him dead.
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ALSO AVAILABLE IN TRADE PAPERBACK
AT SOME DISPUTED BARRICADE by Anne Perry (on sale 3/25)
WE SHALL NOT SLEEP by Anne Perry (on sale 3/25)
ALSO AVAILABLE IN MASS MARKET
OBSESSION by Johnathan Kellerman (on sale now)
THE SUCCESSOR by Stephen Frey (on sale now)
WRECKER'S KEY by Christine Kling (on sale now)
LAST BREATH by Mariah Stewart (on sale 3/25)
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