Returning to the Paris hotel where he spent his honeymoon six years earlier, he decides to take what seems like the only way out - suicide. But a chance encounter with a Russian in a similar predicament leaves Nick with an unlikely obligation to fulfil, one that will take him to Italy, and offer him a chance at something like redemption. www.kevinwignall.com

    So when the senior partner of one of the premier legal firms in Grand Rapids approaches Hardin about a job protecting his niece from her soon-to-be ex-husband for a couple of days, Hardin isn't exactly eager to take on the job. However, Hardin finds that the fee offered to too great to pass up. After a hatchet attack, a house burnt down, and a few violent encounters with some crooked cops, Hardin can hardly wait for the case to be over. But when the husband is found murdered, the niece attempts suicide, and Hardin is brought in on a trumped-up warrant for the crime, it is no longer a case that he is willing to walk away from -- even if he could.

    Beat him to death with a tree branch after he threatened to rape her. But what started as self-defense became problematic for two reasons. First, she killed Robert Sims after he’d been rendered completely defenseless. And second, she inadvertently left her fingerprints at the scene. Allie is young, beautiful, the smartest person in any room. But she’s also been diagnosed as clinically insane. As her past catches up with her and her marriage starts to crumble, Allie is determined to survive at all costs. Size Matters is a taut, compelling novel that teaches us never to underestimate a woman with nothing to lose. PRELIMINARY REVIEWS: “Size Matters is so full of twists and turns and surprises I couldn’t have flipped the pages faster if you paid me! This novel surprised and delighted and kept me shaking my head time and again. Fans of Donovan Creed should be aware that he and Callie make a brief appearance that furthers their saga.” “‘I’ve done bad things,’ says Allie McPherson, ‘but that doesn’t make me a bad person.’ Well, that’s one opinion!” “This book is crazy! There are twists and turns on virtually every page! While I consider myself an expert on Locke novels, I have to admit he took me on a wild ride that made me guess wrong every single time.” “Size Matters is a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino. From start to finish I was shocked, surprised, and hopelessly entertained.”

    Their friends say he's obsessed with her. Maybe he is. He wants to give her the world. Counting on a lucrative promotion, he bought a multi-million dollar home in Silicon Valley for her. It's all good because Jenna adores him. He's a lucky guy.Jenna loves Devon, loves her job, and loves nice things.Now, the economy's gone south, the promotion is delayed, and Devon and Jenna are desperate to hide their sky-rocketing debt.When a childhood friend confronts them about the money they owe, jealousy and secrets erupt in violence.Buried By Debt - A Suburban Noir love story.

    At a party, the narrator, a screenwriter, rescues a young woman who staggers with drunken determination into the Pacific. He is living far from his wife in New York and long ago shed any illusions about the value of his work. He just wants to be left alone. And yet without really meaning to, he gets involved with the young woman, who has, it seems, no illusions about love, especially with married men. She’s a survivor, even if her beauty is a little battered from years of not quite making it in the pictures. She’s just like him, he thinks, and as their casual relationship takes on an increasingly troubled and destructive intensity, it seems that might just be true, only not in the way he supposes.

    Once again, local butcher Bob is playing the dame, but the whole production is put under threat when someone sabotages his business. Libby Sarjeant recruits Fran Wolfe to help find the culprit and restore the Steeple Martin pantomime.

    Second Hand Smoke is the story of Mila's sons, Issac and Duncan, the one secretly abandoned in Poland, and the other, American-born, raised as an avenging Nazi hunter, poisoned with rage.Told in bursts of fractured realism and dark comedy, Second Hand Smoke is a postmodern mystery of great lyrical power, deep insight, and emotional resonance.

    A master of Norwegian literature critiques contemporary society with wry wit.It is Christmas Eve, and 55-year-old Professor Pål Andersen is alone, drinking coffee and cognac in his living room. Lost in thought, he looks out of the window and sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment across the street. Professor Andersen fails to report the crime. The days pass, and he becomes paralysed by indecision. Desperate for respite, the professor sets off to a local sushi bar, only to find himself face to face with the murderer.Professor Andersen's Night is an unsettling yet highly entertaining novel of apathy, rebellion and morality. In flinty prose, Solstad presents an uncomfortable question: would we, like his cerebral protagonist, do nothing?

    In the dark forests of Sandviken, Sweden, a hiker makes a shocking discovery that disrupts the lives of four families, bound by memories of joyous summer vacations, but confronted by a dark secret they long believed to be a relic of the past.For over thirty years, a serial killer has lived among them, hunting innocent young girls and using them for his perverted pleasures.The investigation is slow, and the inspectors assigned to the case are confronted not only with a cunning, calculated and ruthless killer but also with their own personal demons.It’s only a matter of time before he strikes again.Will they be able to stop him this time?And at what price?Keywords: mystery, detective, suspense.

     *Includes a free extract from Katherine Heiny’s debut novel, Standard Deviation* 'Just as Jane Austen believed that four people cannot comfortably walk abreast, Charlene believes that three people cannot amicably move one person's belongings. At least not when two of the people used to be married to each other, and the marriage resulted in a bitter divorce in order for one of them to marry the third person' When Forrest's ex-wife Barbara calls on him to help her move out of the home they once shared, his second wife Charlie finds herself carrying not only dozens of boxes, but also the weight of their shared past. Barbara and Charlie first met twenty years ago when they volunteered at a suicide crisis hotline, and one night in particular is seared into Charlie's memory…From the author of Standard Deviation comes a wryly tender story of crises and cardboard boxes; of marriage and moving on.

    a college professor named nicolson found an old book and a map. so he is taking a break from his teaching life and going for an adventure journey to the mercury island.

    

    A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down—that she wants to be found. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation betrays both sense and one’s senses. Tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective’s quest into a territory overrun with the primitive excesses of Capitalism—accumulation and expulsion, corruption and cruelty—though the lessons of her journey are more experiential than moral: that just as love can fly away, sometimes unloving flies away as well. That sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.

    I am not skittish by nature, but I know the sound of a hammer being cocked when I hear it. This one was a large calibre automatic, which meant it wasn't a cop. I turned my head as slowly and non-threateningly as I could. It was my friend with the square jaw, and his friend the .45. "Hi," he said.It was a simple enough case, but don't they always start out that way? When a pair of His and Hers private detectives get involved, the sparks start to fly and the blood begins to spill in earnest. With every shot that's fired, the hole digs a little deeper, and the list of people our sparring shamuses can trust gets shorter and shorter.Fans of Decoder Ring Theatre's long-running full-cast audio series Black Jack Justice will delight in the very first meeting between Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon, girl detective. New readers will appreciate the fast tempo, the noir banter and the classic hard-boiled feel of Black Jack Justice!

    In the foreground is a caper story; in the background, a poetically expressed, apocalyptic history of Liverpool." —The Daily TelegraphThat woman with the grey hair and the specs and the kind face and the accent all like his grandmother, his nain in hospital and when she can talk that is what she sounds like. Don'thitmepleasedon'thitme. These women falling, sliding off this earth and not just from violence but the one commonality that turns life to a wreck—age.After their botched and brutal mission to punish a one-armed man in a small Welsh village, Darren and Alastair head back to Liverpool to report to their mob boss. On the way home, Darren robs a rural postal office in Wales that serves as a bank and needlessly cracks the skull of a little old postal lady. Darren's eyes are full of fire. "We're rich, Alastair!" But Alastair sees his own nain in this elderly woman and falls victim to his conscience. Darren has finally gone too far.As Alastair and Darren weave their way through the lowlife milieu of Liverpool, we hear many voices: the alky, the crack addict, the busman, the whores, the gangsters, and Darren's many victims. But we also hear the voices of their ancestors going back generations of unthinkable grief and poverty.A fascinating sequel to Niall Griffiths' Stump, which Irvine Welsh calls "a magnificent novel of loss and obsession . . . [by] a major talent."