IN THE DARK by Cara Hunter

IN THE DARK Cara Hunter Viking (www.penguin.co.uk) £7.99 A crumbling wall leads to a gruesome discovery for a home renovator when he discovers that a young woman and a toddler are trapped in a dark room in the basement of the house next door. The old man who lives in the house, despite his belligerence […]

EMPIRE OF SILENCE by Christopher Ruocchio

EMPIRE OF SILENCE (SUN EATER BOOK 1) Christopher Ruocchio Gollancz (www.gollancz.co.uk) £16.99 Hadrian Marlowe, eldest son of the ruler of the planet Delos, is little more than an embarrassment to his father. A wannabe scholiast, he is far from the strong son who could rule with an iron fist in the event that Lord Alastair […]

STICKS AND STONES by Jo Jakeman

STICKS AND STONES Jo Jakeman (www.jojakeman.com) Harvill Secker (www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk) £12.99 Imogen Rochester is adapting to life as a single parent. Her ex-husband, Phillip, is not a nice man and Imogen is just glad that he’s no longer in the house with her and their young son, Alastair. Phillip, living in an ultra-modern barn conversion with […]

THE DEATH OF MRS WESTAWAY by Ruth Ware

THE DEATH OF MRS WESTAWAY Ruth Ware (www.ruthware.com) Harvill Secker (www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk) £12.99 Harriet “Hal” Westaway earns her living by telling peoples’ fortunes in a small booth on Brighton’s West Pier. It’s a business she has inherited from her mother, who died just before Hal turned eighteen. Now twenty-one, Hal is struggling to pay the lease […]

INFLUENCES: Rebecca by RUTH WARE

Name: RUTH WARE Author of: IN A DARK, DARK WOOD (2015) THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10 (2016) THE LYING GAME (2017) THE DEATH OF MRS WESTAWAY (2018) On the web: http://www.ruthware.com On Twitter: @ruthwarewriter When I started writing my fourth novel, The Death of Mrs Westaway, I knew I wanted to do […]

EXTRACT: THE HAND OF AN ANGEL by Mark Brownless

THE HAND OF AN ANGEL Mark Brownless (www.markbrownless.com) £1.99 Prologue 2013 Eighth International Congress of Clinical Psychology, Granada, Spain The printed A3 sheet clipped to a folding stand outside the lecture theatre announced the afternoon sessions. Shortlist lecture series: Elspeth Dickson Award for New Research Areas A list of research papers and their presenting authors […]

THE BELOVEDS by Maureen Lindley

THE BELOVEDS Maureen Lindley (maureenlindley.com) Titan Books (titanbooks.com) £7.99 Betty Stash is a woman for whom bad luck is the only luck. Her younger sister Gloria, on the other hand, is a Beloved, a person for whom everything falls just right and who, as the name suggests, is loved by everyone. When their mother dies, […]

EXTRACT: SHATTERMOON by Dominic Dulley

SHATTERMOON Dominic Dulley (dominicdulley.com) Jo Fletcher Books (www.jofletcherbooks.com) £16.99 MENDER Consciousness returned slowly. At first the familiar throb of a ship’s mass-inversion drive made Orry think she was in her cabin, but the smell wasn’t right. There was an antiseptic odour that brought to mind a hospital, but it was fighting with something earthier, a […]

MINE by Susi Fox

MINE Susi Fox Penguin (www.penguin.co.uk) £7.99 Sasha Moloney awakens from a general anaesthetic to discover that she has delivered a baby boy – not the girl she was convinced she was having – by caesarean section almost a month early. It takes a single glance at the child in the nursery to convince Sasha that […]

THE OUTSIDER by Stephen King

THE OUTSIDER Stephen King (stephenking.com) Hodder & Stoughton (www.hodder.co.uk) £20.00 When Frank Peterson’s young body is found, abused and mutilated, all of the eye-witnesses agree that the last time they saw him alive, he was with Terry Maitland, coach of Flint City, Oklahoma’s Little League team and all-round upstanding citizen. Forensic evidence also points to […]