Faber & Faber Crime

Faber held an event to promote their growing crime list last week.  Here's a schedule of what's coming over the next few months, followed by some information on new authors and new novels (mainly based on Faber's PR material):

Jan 09: And Then There Was No One by Gilbert Adair; A Vengeful Longing (pb) by R. N. Morris.

Feb 09: An Expert in Murder (pb) by Nicola Upson.

March 09: The Last Train to Scarborough by Andrew Martin; Quiver (pb) by Peter Leonard (the hb is published this month).

April 09: The Black Monastery by Stav Sherez; Death on a Branch Line (pb) by Andrew Martin; The Private Patient (pb) by P. D. James.

May 09: Suffer The Children by Adam Creed; The Bellini Card (pb) by Jason Goodwin.

June 09: The Last Fix by K. O. Dahl; The Salati Case by Tobias Jones; My Last Confession by Helen Fitzgerald.

July 09: Secrets of the Dead by Nicola Upson; Shadow of the Assassin by Brent Ghelfi.

Aug 09: A Visible Darkness by Michael Gregorio.

For lovers of an Italian setting, Tobias Jones sets The Salati Case "in the fog of a northern Italian winter" and introduces "a new and memorable detective" in Castagnetti (Casta) "an orphan who has pulled himself up from the mean streets".  Casta is a private detective hired by a pompous notary to verify that a missing person is "presumed dead" so that her estate can be passed to other family heirs.  Casta smells a rat and is soon exposing family secrets and skeletons in the cupboard. 

Jones may be British (half Welsh as you might suspect from the name) but he emigrated to Italy in 1999 and knows the country well.  He became the best selling author of The Dark Heart of Italy in 2003.  He's now back in the UK and settled in Bristol.

Stav Sherez's The Black Monastery is "a blistering portrait of a paradise gone wrong".  Set on the Greek island of Palassos, people used to visit to see the historic ruins but now they come to "take drugs and party all night".  Found in the grounds of an old monastery, a boy has been the subject of an "horrific ritual murder" bringing back memories of two similar deaths in the 1970s.  The novel throws together three characters: Nikos the police chief; Jason, an aspiring writer (with a secret of his own) and Kitty Carson, a best selling crime writer "on a break from the pressures of work and her strained marriage".

Sherez said that he wants Greece to be as much of a character in the novel as the humans.  He has one previous novel published (by Penguin) - The Devil's Playground.

Adam Creed has started a series with his novel Suffer the Children.  Set in London, it features D. I. Will Wagstaffe, known as "Staffe".  When a paedophile is found brutally murdered in his own home, to protect other known offenders the police have to haul in the families of their victims for questioning.  Where the boundaries between right and wrong are blurred, "the main question remains: just how far would you go to protect your children?"

Finally and briefly, others coming up:

R. N. Morris's Porfiry Petrovich series continues in Jan 2010 with A Razor Wrapped in Silk.

K. O. Dahl's The Last Fix (June 09) concerns the murder of a former prostitute who was on the verge of completing a spell in drug rehab.

Helen Fitzgerald's My Last Confession (June 09) has Krissie from Dead Lovely working as a parole officer and convinced that a miscarriage of justice has been done for one of her clients.

Comments

[cfr]

I grabbed one copy of Dark Heart of Italy, Norm, and I thought of you (for after I'd read it). Then a conversation with an old family friend who had recently returned from her holiday in Italy had me hearing these words "I'd like to read it again" as well as, in relation to Jones's foray into fiction, "I will have to let my friend X know about it".

Tobias Jones is popular, isn't he? And an authority on Italy...

[Norm]

I will be looking forward to the Tobias Jones venture into fiction. His non fiction Dark Heart of Italy reads like an exciting but very worrying crime fiction novel.