Susan Parry – Tracks in the Dark, £9.99 paperback
One teenage girl strangled in an isolated Dale, a walker lost on the Herriot Way, and a cyclist who has disappeared. Three unsolved cases in the Yorkshire Dales that need investigating, and solving quick! So how can the DI Miriam Abbot and the Regional Unsolved Crime Unit track down the truth in just two months? Follow the leads they meticulously uncover and watch them solve the tracks in the dark.
Armistead Maupin – Mona of the Manor, £20.00 hardback
The tenth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series. When Mona Ramsey married Lord Teddy Roughton to secure his visa—allowing him to remain in San Francisco to fulfil his wildest dreams—she never imagined she would, by age 48, be the sole owner of Easley House, a romantic country manor in the UK. Now, with her adopted son, Wilfred, Mona has opened Easley’s doors to paying guests to keep her inherited English manor afloat. As they welcome a married American couple to Easley, Mona and Wilfred discover their new guests’ terrible secret. Instead of focussing on the imminent arrival of old friend Michael Tolliver and matriarch Anna Madrigal, Mona will need to use her considerable charm, willpower and wiles to set things right before Easley’s historic Midsummer ceremony. The result is a glittering and addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.
Sonia Purnell – A Woman of No Importance, £9.99 paperback
In September 1941, a young American woman strides up the steps of a hotel in Lyon, Vichy France. Her papers say she is a journalist. Her wooden leg is disguised by a determined gait and a distracting beauty. She is there to spark the resistance. By 1942 Virginia Hall was the Gestapo’s most urgent target, having infiltrated Vichy command, trained civilians in guerrilla warfare and sprung soldiers from Nazi prison camps. The first woman to go undercover for British SOE, her intelligence changed the course of the war – but her fight was still not over. This is a spy history like no other, telling the story of the hunting accident that disabled her, the discrimination she fought and the secret life that helped her triumph over shocking adversity.
Kate Morgan – Murder: The Biography, £9.99 paperback
Murder: The Biography is a gruesome and utterly captivating portrait of the legal history of murder. The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction. There’s Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people – victims, killers, lawyers and judges, who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws. Join lawyer and writer Kate Morgan on a dark and macabre journey as she explores the strange stories and mysterious cases that have contributed to UK murder law. The big corporate killers; the vengeful spouses; the sloppy doctors; the abused partners; the shoddy employers; each story a crime and each crime a precedent that has contributed to the law’s dark, murky and, at times, shocking standing.
Andrew O’Hagan – Caledonian Road, £20.00 hardback
An irresistible, unputdownable, state-of-the-nation novel – the story of one man’s epic fall from grace. May 2021. London. Campbell Flynn – art historian and celebrity intellectual – is entering the empire of middle age. Fuelled by an appetite for admiration and the finer things, controversy and novelty, he doesn’t take people half as seriously as they take themselves. Which will prove the first of his huge mistakes. The second? Milo Mangasha, his beguiling and provocative student. Milo inhabits a more precarious world, has experiences and ideas which excite his teacher. He also has a plan. Over the course of an incendiary year, a web of crimes and secrets and scandals will be revealed, and Campbell Flynn may not be able to protect himself from the shattering exposure of all his privilege really involves. But then, he always knew: when his life came tumbling down, it would occur in public.
Anne Youngson – Meet Me At The Museum, £8.99 paperback
This story begins with a letter from a housewife to the gentle curator of an extraordinary museum where lies peacefully, an ancient exhibit that holds the key to everything we are. Meet Me at the Museum tells of a connection made across oceans and against all the odds. Through intimate letters of joy, despair, and discovery, two people are drawn inexorably towards each other, until a shattering revelation pushes their friendship to the very edge. This deeply affecting debut novel by seventy-three year-old Anne Youngson won the Paul Torday Memorial Prize and was dramatized on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour. It is tender, wise and very moving,