Search results for ""bitter lemon press""

For Inspector Hunkeler the New Year begins with a most unwelcome phone call. He is summoned back to Basel from his holiday to unravel a gruesome killing in a gardening allotment on the city's outskirts. An old man known as Anton Fluckiger has been shot in the head and found hanging from a butcher's hook from the roof of his garden shed - like butchers hang the carcasses of dead animals. Hunkeler must deal not only with the quarrelsome tenants of the allotment but with the challenges of investigating a murder that has taken place outside his jurisdiction, across the French border in Alsace. The clues lead to the Emmental in Berne, and then events from the last weeks of the Second World War in Alsace come to light, the wounds of which have never healed in the region.

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Helsinki, June 1953, at the heart of the Cold War. Hella, now a reluctant private investigator, has been asked by her former boss at the Helsinki murder squad to do a background check on a member of the Finnish secret services. Not the type of job Hella was hoping for, but she accepts it on the condition that she is given access to the files concerning the roadside death of her father in 1942, at a time when Finland joined forces with Nazi Germany in its attack against the Soviet Union. German troops were sent to Finland, the Gestapo arrived in Helsinki and German influence on local government was strong, including demands for the deportation of local Jews.Colonel Mauzer, his wife and other family members were killed by a truck in a hit and run incident. An accident, file closed, they said. But not for Hella, whose unwelcome investigation leads to some who would prefer to see her stopped dead in her tracks.Praise for Katja Ivar:'A captivating first novel… ‘My dear girl,’ her patronizing boss instructs, ‘justice in a cold climate is not a natural phenomenon’. But the stubborn and resourceful Sgt. Mauzer seems just the police officer to deliver it.' — Wall Street Journal'The misdirection and manipulation of the evidence is worthy of Agatha Christie, but the quirky humour is Katja Ivar’s own. Ultimately, though, it is her portrait of Helsinki — 'a city of lost souls’ — that is most impressive.' — The Times

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The third in Olguin’s Buenos Aires thriller series starring the gutsy, raunchy investigative reporter Veronica Rosenthal.Haunted by nightmares of her past, Veronica is soon involved in a new investigation. Darío, the sole survivor of a car accident that supposedly killed all his family, is convinced that his wife and child have in fact survived and that his wife has abducted their child. Then a truck searched in the port of Buenos Aires on suspicion that it is carrying drugs, is revealed to be transporting human body parts. These seemingly separate incidents prove to be tied in a shadowy web of complicity involving political and religious authorities. This is a dazzling thriller but also a story about the possibilities of love, in which jealousy, eroticism, humour and even elusive moments of happiness make an appearance.

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One spring afternoon, defence attorney Guerrieri is confronted with an unexpected spectre from his past. In her youth, Lorenza had been a beautiful and unpredictable girl with dazzling charm. A changed woman faces him in his office that day. The ensuing years have ravaged her appearance and embittered her mind. As if that weren’t enough, her son Jacopo, a small-time delinquent, stands convicted of the first-degree murder of a local drug dealer. Her trial lawyer has died, so, for the appeal, she turns to Guerrieri as her last hope. Guido is not convinced of the innocence of Lorenza’s son, nor does he have fond memories of the way their relationship ended two decades earlier. Nevertheless, he accepts the case; perhaps to pay a melancholy homage to the ghosts of his youth. His old friend Carmelo Tancredi, a retired police inspector, and his girlfriend, the charming investigator Annapaola Doria are once again by his side. A masterful, compassionate novel, striking a balance between a straightforward trial story –some say the purest distillation of human experience – and the sad notes of time as it passes and exhausts itself.

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The story takes place in the suffocating atmosphere of a social housing estate in the south of France. Sixteen-year-old Celine and her sister Jo, fifteen, dream of escaping to somewhere far from their daily routine, far from their surly, alcoholic father and uncaring mother, both struggling to make ends meet. That summer Celine falls pregnant, devastating news that reopens deep family wounds. Those of the mother Severine whose adolescence was destroyed by her early pregnancy and subsequent marriage with Manuel. Those of Manuel, grandson of Spanish immigrants, who takes refuge in alcoholism to escape the open disdain of his in-laws. Faced with Celine's refusal to name the father, Manuel needs a guilty party and Said, a childhood friend of the girls and conveniently Arab, seems to fit the role perfectly. In the suffocating heat of summer Manuel embarks on a drunken mission of revenge. A dark and upsetting account of an ailing society, filled with silent and murderous rage.

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Jonas thought about what it would mean to cross a border in a place like this. He might have followed a trail laid down by others, but this time there would be no searchlights, no sirens, no soldiers in greatcoats. Philby had been disappointed by Moscow. Jonas suspected he would feel the same about Raqqa. Jonas is a spy with a problem. His quiet life spent writing reports for British intelligence is turned upside-down when his father is kidnapped by ISIS, and he soon finds himself dangerously out of his depth in Beirut, struggling to put into action the most audacious plan imaginable. As events hurtle towards a confrontation with the kidnappers, and the British government realises the full horror of what he is planning, Jonas is forced to decide how far he is willing to go to see his father again.

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An impressive and very funny collection of stories by Teresa Solana but the fun is very dark indeed. The oddest things happen. Statues decompose and stink out galleries, two old grandmothers are vengeful killers, a prehistoric detective on the verge of becoming the first religious charlatan trails a triple murder that is threatening cave life as the early innocents knew it. The collection also includes a sparkling web of Barcelona stories--connected by two criminal acts--that allows Solana to explore the darker side of different parts of the city and their seedier inhabitants.

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This personal and well informed selection and description of the most interesting towns and individual buildings and archaeological sites in Turkey is the definitive guidebook for the discerning traveler. The author has been visiting Turkey for nearly fifty years and is the perfect companion for those who want to know about more than the obvious attractions. This book will immeasurably enhance any thoughtful traveler's visit, but can also be read at home as an aid to planning, or recalling, a trip, or simply as a guide to the astonishing and multi-faceted artistic and architectural riches of that most fascinating country.

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Ever since 1066 there has been a substantial French presence in London. It is now said to be the sixth most populous French city and this book illustrates, explains, and exposes how this came about over more than a 1000 years. Full of individual stories and overlooked details covering a common history, from William the Conqueror, via the Huguenots (e.g. David Garrick's family), and the emigres of the French Revolution ( such as the families of Joseph Bazelgette, Augustus Pugin and Isambard Brunel), and on to London, the capital of the Free French during WWII. It is also a guide book to those streets, museums, monuments, churches and art dedicated to the French of London. Voltaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Foch and dozens of others are all honoured by plaques or statues. Traces and stories of those escaping the French Revolution and the Commune are remembered. Talleyrand, Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael all lived in London during those turbulent years.

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Kati owns Istanbul's only mystery book store and, as usual, gets involved in a case that is none of her business. Every day, a beautiful woman lunches alone in the restaurant next to the bookstore. When the woman is found dead in her apartment, Kati immediately recognizes the stranger from the restaurant in images in the newspaper photos. Although the police believe it was an accident, Kati suspects something more sinister has happened. Sani Ankaraligil was an attractive young woman, in the middle of a divorce from her wealthy husband and a politically active ecologist. So who would benefit from her death? The industrial companies Sani had accused of polluting the rivers of Western Turkey, or her jealous husband seeking revenge through an honour killing, or a Thracian separatist group? The investigation pulls Kati into the murkiest of waters.

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Our world view has changed from a flat earth under the dome of heaven to a planet spinning in the universe. We perceived the world as a body, like ours, then as a tree, a pyramid, an altar, and finally as a veil which became a window through which we peered only to discover ourselves on a sphere, a bubble which might burst at any moment. Our changing views are interpreted through iconic images of the remote and more recent past: the Venus of Willendorf, the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal, the Scream, Sydney Opera House, and the Guggenheim, Bilbao.

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It is the first night of Ramadan. At Shivaji Nagar in the heart of Bangalore, a young male prostitute is killed and burnt alive. It would have stayed as yet another unsolved murder, but for Inspector Borei Gowda, the investigating officer. As bodies begin to pile up one after the other, and it becomes clear that a serial killer is on the prowl, Gowda recognizes a pattern in the killings which no one else does. Even as he negotiates serious mid-life blues, problems with his wife and son, an affair with an ex-girlfriend, and official apathy and ridicule, the killer moves in for the next victim...Steeped in the lanes and atmosphere of the city of Bangalore, A Cut- Like Wound introduces to the reader a host of unforgettable characters and is a brutal psychological thriller unlike any in world fiction.

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A woman on the run from her past. A child on the run from reality. A man on the run from himself. Carofiglio confronts the dark side of the human soul in this captivating story of fall and redemption. Every week, Roberto Marias crosses Rome on foot to arrive at his psychiatrist's office. There, he often sits in silence, stumped by the ritual - but sometimes crucial memories come to the surface. He remembers when he was a child and used to surf with his father. He remembers the treacherous years he spent working as an under-cover carabinieri, years that taught him how cynicism and corruption are not merely external influences, but also exist within us. He has lived an intoxicating and crushing life, but now his psychiatrist's words, the hypnotic strolls through Rome, and a meeting with a woman named Emma - who like Roberto is ravaged by a profound guilt - are beginning to revive him. And when eleven-year-old Giacomo asks Roberto to help him conquer his nightmares, Roberto at last achieves a true rebirth.

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This is a portrait of a wife betrayed, at first desperate to save her marriage but then intent on violent revenge, also an unrelenting dissection of family life among the Argentine middle class. Ines is convinced that every wife is bound to be betrayed one day, so she is not surprised to find a note in her husband's briefcase with a heart smeared in lipstick crossed by the words All YoursA" and signed Your true loveA". She follows him to a park on a rainy winter evening and witnesses a violent quarrel he has with another woman. The woman collapses; Ernesto sinks her body in a nearby lake. When Ernesto becomes a suspect in the case she provides him with an alibi. After all, hatred can bring people together as urgently as love. But Ernesto cannot bring his sexual adventures to an end so Ines concocts a plan for revenge from which there is no return.

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Kati Hirschel, in her thirties, is the proud owner of Istanbul's only crime bookshop. When the German director of a film starring an old school friend is found murdered in his hotel room Kati cannot resist the temptation to start her own maverick investigation. After all her friend Petra is the police's principal suspect and reading all those detective novels must have taught Kati something. This is a crime story but also a wonderful book about Istanbul and Turkish society. It uses humour, social commentary and even erotic fantasy to expose Western European prejudices about Turkey as well as Turkish stereotyping of other Europeans.

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Equal parts wartime political intrigue, detective story, psychological thriller and religious mystery, Pastor's debut follows a German army captain and a Chicago priest as they investigate the death of a nun in Nazi-occupied Poland. Stunned by the violence of the occupation and by the ideology of his colleagues, Bora's sense of Prussian duty is tested to the breaking point.

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A writer is murdered at the Ritz on the night she wins an important literary prize, battered to death with the trophy she has just won. A satire of the Catalan literary scene dressed up as a hilarious murder mystery

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A nine-year-old boy is found murdered at the bottom of a well near a popular beach resort in southern Italy. In what looks like a hopeless case for Guido Guerrieri, counsel for the defence, a Senegalese peddler is accused of the crime. Faced with small-town racism fuelled by the recent immigration from Africa, Guido attempts to exploit the esoteric workings of the Italian courts. More than a perfectly paced legal thriller, this relentless suspense novel transcends the genre. A powerful attack on racism, and a fascinating insight into the Italian judicial process, it is also an affectionate portrait of a deeply humane hero.

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Counsel for the defence Guido Guerrieri is asked to handle the appeal of Fabio Paolicelli, who has been sentenced to sixteen years for drug smuggling. The odds are stacked against the accused: not only the fact that he initially confessed to the crime but also his past as a neo-Fascist thug. It is only the intervention of Paolicelli's beautiful half-Japanese wife that finally overcomes Guerrieri's reluctance. Matters are further complicated when Guerrieri ends up in bed with her.

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Nadia and Susanne have just met. They look uncannily alike, practically doppelgangers, but one is filthy rich, with a husband and a lover, and the other dirt poor and single. When Nadia eventually asks Susanne to spend the weekend with her husband how can she refuse the outrageous fee on offer? Nadia wants to spend a few days with her lover and convinces Susanne that the subterfuge will work. Nadia and her husband barely speak to each other, sleep in separate bedrooms, and he will be working in the office most of the weekend. So Susanne changes her hairstyle and clothes and, one Friday afternoon, drives Nadia's wine-red Alfa to her beautiful suburban villa with its indoor pool, glass doors opening on to the sloping lawn. What appears to be a harmless game becomes a deadly web of lies.

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Studer investigates when the director vanishes and a child murderer escapes from an insane asylum in Bern, an environment Glauser knew all too well from personal experience. Set in the 1920s, the novel explores the no-man's-land between reason and madness where Matto, the spirit of insanity, reigns. Dubions psychological theories and therapies abound and the asylum darkly mirrors the world outside.

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Borei Gowda is a splendidly grumpy, hard-drinking cop, an Indian Rebus with a complicated love life. When Professor Mudgood is found dead in his decaying Bangalore house, it is considered a natural death; after all, he was 82 years old, but Gowda isn''t so sure. All the evidence points to a political murder since the professor was a fervent critic of right-wing forces in India. But as Gowda launches a parallel investigation, he stumbles upon a secret and murky world where there are no rules or mercy. When Gowda''s hand is forced, he takes a calculated risk and infiltrates the sinister domain to bring the truth out into the open. Will he succeed? And at what price?

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This personal, and wonderfully well informed, selection of the most rewarding towns, cities, villages and individual monuments in Italy is the definitive guidebook for the discerning traveller. The author has been visiting Italy, for study, for work and for pleasure, for over fifty years, and is the perfect companion for those who want to know about more than the obvious attractions. As well as comprehensively covering the finest sights in the major tourist centres of Rome, Florence, Venice and elsewhere, Russell discusses and describes the neglected, or little known, masterpieces that are still to be found the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula. In a book that will educate and astonish the expert as surely as it will guide and inform the first-time visitor, the author chooses and explores palaces and gardens, city squares and lonely churches, frescoes and altarpieces, great museums and tiny ruins that together provide a richly textured portrait of a country where the history and patterns of civilization lie more thickly than anywhere else on earth.

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Havana's Chinatown is not his usual beat, but when Conde is asked to take a murder case by the sultry, perfectly proportioned Police Lieutenant Patricia Chion, a frequent object of his nightly fantasies, he can’t resist. Pedro Cuang is found hanging naked from a beam in the ceiling of his dingy room. One of his fingers has been cut off, and the outline of two arrows was carved with a knife on his chest. Was this a ritual Santería killing or a just a sordid settling of accounts in a world of drug trafficking beginning to infiltrate Cuba in the 1980s? Soon Conde discovers unexpected connections, secret businesses and a history of misfortune, uprooting and loneliness that affected many immigrant families from China. The Barrio Chino was once one of the largest Chinatowns in the West. Now it feels like a ghetto of uprooted families, with its derelict cemetery and boarded-up shops. The story is soaked in atmosphere: African spells cast by babalao sorcerers, deliciously smoke-filled bars, deep friendships, and beautiful women. Especially the exotic Afro-Chinese Patricia Chion.

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From applying to be a choirboy at St Paul's Cathedral, through failing his driving test, to interviews for appointment as Professor of fine Art at one of New England's most famous universities, or a fellow of a Cambridge college, Vaughan Grylls has perfect recall of the foibles, the prejudices and the occasionally apparent insanity of his interviewers, and the result is an endlessly entertaining, but simultaneously salutary read.

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A woman’s body scrawled with religious texts is found in a Helsinki apartment. Jewish homicide inspector Ariel Kafka investigates. What begins as an investigation of Christian religious lunatics shifts into a hunt for a perpetrator who is more damaged than dangerous, the victim of institutionally countenanced paedophilia at a boarding school. Ariel Kafka finds himself investigating a series of crimes leading to the enigmatic Brotherhood of the Sacred Vault, founded at the school. The brotherhood’s former members have gone on to become Oxford professors and important CEOs, all reluctant to recall their school days. But before Kafka can solve the puzzle, more than one person must pay for past sins with his life. The final twist takes the investigation in a different direction – the ultimate motivation for the crimes is money, with the mentally unstable alleged perpetrator being used as bait.

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A severed head is found on the Greek border near a wall planned to stop Middle Eastern immigrants crossing from Turkey. Intelligence Agent Evangelos wants the truth about the murder, human trafficking into Greece, and about the corruption surrounding the wall's construction. It is a mystery novel and a political thriller but more importantly it evokes the problems of the West incarnated in Greece: isolationism, fear of immigration, economic collapse and corruption. While dark, it is also poetic and paints an indelible portrait of Athens, with its mixed fragrances of eucalyptus, freshly baked bread and cigarette smoke.

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How is twelve-year-old Nandita's disappearance connected to the murder of a well-known lawyer? What services has college student Rekha been persuaded to perform by her 'boyfriend'? Who is the mysterious crime lord lurking just out of sight? And who, just who, is Krishna?It begins as a search for a missing girl, but the case takes a more sinister turn when Inspector Gowda finds himself embroiled in Bangalore's child-trafficking racket. Negotiating insensitive laws, indifferent officials, uncooperative witnesses, not to mention wife, son and lover on the home front, Gowda must race against time to a finish line he can't yet see.

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When Judge Larocca is the subject of corruption allegations, Guerrieri goes against his better instincts and takes the case. After all they had been at school and university together. Helped by Annapaola Doria, a motorbike-riding bisexual private detective who keeps a baseball bat to hand for sticky situations, he discovers the judge's links to the mafia. Larocca is blind to the immorality of his actions but Annapaola makes sure that justice is done, perhaps not in the most orthodox way. Of course Guerrieri cannot stop himself from falling for Annapaola's exotic charms. The novel takes the form of a suspenseful legal thriller but it is much more. It is the story of a judge who , to quote Brothers Karamazov, "...lies to himself and listens to his own lies, so gets to the point where he can no longer distinguish the truth, either in himself or around himself." A man always looking to justify his evil and corrupt behaviour, perhaps an apposite metaphor for Italy itself.

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There are two Jewish cops in all of Helsinki. One of them, Ariel Kafka, a lieutenant in the Violent Crime Unit, identifies himself as a policeman first, then a Finn, and lastly a Jew. Kafka is a religiously non-observant 40-something bachelor who is such a stubborn, dedicated policeman that he's willing to risk his career to get an answer. Murky circumstances surround his investigation of a Jewish businessman's murder. Neo-Nazi violence, intergenerational intrigue, shady loans - predictable lines of investigation lead to unpredictable culprits. But a second killing strikes closer to home, and the Finnish Security Police come knocking. The tentacles of Israeli politics and Mossad reach surprisingly far, once again wrapping Kafka in their sticky embrace.

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Rome, 1944. While the Allies are fighting their way up the Italian peninsula, Rome lives the last days of Nazi occupation. Their world falling apart, the Germans continue to vie for power while holding glittering and debauched parties. But this is also a time of Italian partisan attacks, arrests and mass executions. Baron Martin von Bora, an officer in the Wehrmacht, has the complex and delicate task of solving not one, but three murders. With Italian police inspector Sandro Guidi at his side, Bora sets off to establish the truth.

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Baghdad, November 2003. The US occupation is not yet a disaster but the CPA has disbanded the Iraqi army and decimated the police in its policy of de-Ba'athification of Iraqi society. Inspector Muhsin al-Khafaji is a mid-level Iraqi cop who deserted his post back in April. Khafaji has lived long enough in pre- and post-Saddam Iraq to know that clinging on to anything but poetry and his daughter, Mrouj, is asking for trouble. Nabbed by the Americans and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib, Khafaji is offered only one way out - he has to work for the CPA to rebuild the Iraqi Police Services. But it's only after US forces take Mrouj that he figures out a way to make his collaboration palatable, and even rewarding. Soon, he is investigating the disappearance of young translators working for the US Army.

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The head of the Nigerian fraud squad is evacuated from Lagos by secret-service operatives. Meanwhile a junior prosecutor in Nice probes the mysterious death of the wife of a powerful banker and a crusading journalist in St Petersburg pursues a corrupt oligarch and his criminal business empire. The paths of all three cross in London, where they find themselves embroiled in violent events obviously linked to financial and political interests and hunted by the oligarch's men, the Western secret services and goons sent by Nigerian oil magnates. A satirical, intelligent and fast-paced thriller set in the world of high finance and low politics, "The Eyes of Lira Kazan" is co-written by Eva Joly, once a prominent prosecuting judge in Paris, then a candidate in the 2012 French Presidential elections.

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Italy, autumn 1943, the Italian government has switched sides and declared war on Germany. Italy is divided, the North controlled by the fascists, the South liberated by Allied forces slowly fighting their way up the peninsula. Having survived hell on the Russian Front, Wehrmacht Major and aristocrat Martin Bora is sent to Verona. He is ordered to investigate the murder of a prominent local fascist: a bizarre death, threatening to discredit the regime's public image. Against the backdrop of relentless anti-partisan warfare and the tragedy of the Holocaust, a breathless chase begins.

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Superintendent Lascano is a detective working under the shadow of military rule in Buenos Aires in the late 1970s. He is sent to investigate the discovery of two bodies but when he arrives at the roadside crime scene he finds three. Two are clearly the work of the junta's death squads, and so should not be investigated by the police, but the other one seems different. Lascano follows the trail, leading the reader on a tour of a Buenos Aires poisoned to the core by the military regime. Lascano must navigate gingerly among characters symbolic of an Argentina that has lost its way: Amancio, whose privileged upbringing makes him unable to deal with the collapse of his fortunes; Biterman, the miser, embittered beyond hope by his experiences in Nazi Germany; Eva the young radical, condemned to a life on the run, death or exile, but forced to take refuge with a cop; Giribaldi, the army major, quick to help old friends, but cruel and contemptuous of everyday civilians. Buenos Aires, corrupted by the military regime, is as important a character as any other. Lascano must uphold the law among the people and turn a blind eye to the actions of the regime, trying to bring justice to an unjust society, where some crimes are for investigation, others are not. Of course, the crime he investigates in Needle in a Haystack turns out to be one of those he should not.

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When Martina accuses her ex-boyfriend – the son of a powerful local judge – of assault and battery, no witnesses can be persuaded to testify on her behalf and one lawyer after another refuses to represent her. Guido Guerrieri knows the case could bring his legal career to a premature and messy end but he cannot resist the appeal of a hopeless cause. Nor deny an attraction to Sister Claudia, the young woman in charge of the shelter where Martina is living, who shares his love of martial arts and his virulent hatred of injustice.

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Albert Savelkoul, the Public Prosecutor of Antwerp, has everything: power, money, magnificent horses, a family and a high-maintenance mistress. Despite problems with the mistress and his prostate he's convinced that he is invincible, his power untouchable. And so it goes until everyone seems to turn on him. Albert's wife, a member of the Belgian nobility, has set her sights on a title for her son. Opus Dei promises to help her if she transfers all her wealth to the secretive organisation. They stop at nothing in hounding Albert. A tale of blackmail and murder follows, leavened by Albert's interludes with his loving Polish maid, sadly soon deported by the frigid uber-Catholic wife.

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Another day in Barcelona, another slimy politician's wife is suspected of infidelity. Lluis Font discovers a portrait of his wife in an exhibition that leads him to conclude he is being cuckolded by the artist. Concerned only about the potential political fallout, he hires twins Eduard and Pep, private detectives with a supposed knack for helping the wealthy with their 'dirty laundry'. Their office is adorned with false doors leading to non-existent private rooms, a mysterious secretary who is always away and a broken laptop computer picked up on the street. The case turns ugly when Font's wife is found poisoned by a marron glace from a box of sweets delivered anonymously. This is a deftly plotted, bitingly funny mystery novel. It is a satire of Catalan politics and a fascinating insight into the life and habits of Barcelona's inhabitants, diurnal and nocturnal.

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Cora Bender killed a man. But why? What could have caused this quiet, lovable young mother to stab a stranger in the throat, again and again, until she was pulled off his body? For the local police it was an open and shut case. Cora confessed; there was no shortage of proof or witnesses. But Police Commissioner Rudolf Grovian refused to close the file and began his own maverick investigation. A slow unravelling of Cora''s past, a harrowing descent into a woman''s private hell.

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Why must the festive dinner in the Hirschen Inn be interrupted? A murder puts an end to the wedding celebration of Studer's daughter. A man is found with a sharpened bicycle spoke embedded in his back, and a suspect is quickly arrested - a bit too quickly, thinks Studer. Property speculation, usury and betrayed love find their way into this tightly written mystery novel that calls on Studer's intuitive, often absurd, yet efficient police methods. "The Spoke", a European crime classic, was first published in 1937. It has been translated into six languages. This is its first publication in English.

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A brutally mutilated body is discovered washed up in the bay of Havana. The body of Miguel Forcade Mier, head smashed in by a baseball bat, genitals cut off by a dull knife. Forcade, once an official in the Cuban government responsible for the confiscation of the belongings of the bourgeoisie fleeing the revolution, was an exile in Miami. Had he really returned to Havana just to visit his ailing father? Conde immerses himself in the dark history of expropriations of works of art, paintings that have vanished without trace, corrupt civil servants and old families that lost much, but not everything. Here is the disillusion of Padura's generation, many of them veterans of the war in Angola, dealing with the catastrophe that followed the collapse of Russian aide in the 1990's and now discovering the corruption of those that preceded them. Yet a eulogy of Cuba, its life of music, sex and the great friendships of those who elected to stay and fight for survival.

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Some favours simply cannot be refused. Tonio agrees to write a love letter for Dario, a low-rent Paris gigolo. When Dario is murdered, a single bullet to the head, Tonio finds his friend has left him a small vineyard somewhere east of Naples. The wine is undrinkable but an elaborate scam has been set up. The smell of easy money attracts the unwanted attentions of the Mafia and the Vatican, and the unbridled hatred of the locals. Mafiosi aren't choir boys, and monsignors can be very much like Mafiosi. A darkly comic, iconoclastic tale.

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Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, philosophers have pondered on the nature and purpose of the arts, but artists have gone on making them and audiences enjoying them regardless of these musings. None of their theories have met with universal or even popular acceptance. But here is theory that places the arts - all the arts - firmly and squarely within everyone's everyday experiences. Summers of Discontent goes to the heart of the arts. It's an examination of why artists create them in the first place and why we all feel the need for them. Tallis thinks the arts spring from our inability as humans fully to experience our experiences; from our hunger for a more rounded, more complete sense of the world. Tallis's thesis is original and fresh, down-to-earth and life-enhancing. Above all it is practical and intelligible. It will inspire anyone who feels the creative urge today, or anyone who wants to understand why and how the arts enrich their lives and those of others.

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Maria has money problems, two children from a failed marriage and a depressive boy friend. When she gets pregnant she decides not to keep the baby and then the letters start to arrive. Threatening letters, from pro-life activists she thinks at first, but then she begins to suspect others, eventually her own boyfriend. She flees to her family home where her sister now lives. Isolated, set in the dunes of the Dutch coast, redolent with memories of a childhood she does not want to revisit. As the death threats follow her to her hiding place, Maria begins to fear not only for her life but her own sanity. This is relentless suspense writing: a description of Maria's hellish descent into a world of induced paranoia which ends with a narrow escape from a carefully planned murder.

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The attempted robbery of the armoured car in the back streets of Montevideo is a miserable failure. A lucky break for the intrepid Ursula Lopez who manages to snatch all the loot, more hindered than helped by her faint-hearted and reluctant companion Diego. Only now, the wannabe robbers are hot on her heels. As is the police. And Ursula's sister. But Ursula turns out to be enormously talented when it comes to criminal undertakings, and given the hilarious ineptitude of those in pursuit, she might just pull it off.She is an irresistible heroine. A murderess with a sense of humour, a lovable criminal with an edge and she is practically invisible to the men who dominate the deeply macho society of Uruguay.Praise for Crocodile Tears:'Fast, slick and acerbically funny: buckle up and enjoy the ride.' — Guardian'Rosende smoothly combines dark humor and farce with moving depictions of the grimmer aspects of life. Elmore Leonard fans will look forward to the sequel.' — Publishers Weekly

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