When criminals get on the move, that’s when things get wild, which is why we love nothing more than a road-trip novel and the Northern Irish author Stuart Neville has cooked up a doozy to get us rolling this week. Every book on the docket has some edge to it – there’s a reinvention of Vertigo, some NLP forensics, old school LA noir and another LA murder story that looks bang up to date, and creepy as hell.
Blood Like Mine by Stuart Neville
There’s a real buzz around Stuart Neville‘s latest stand alone thriller, out 6 August in the US and a week later in the UK. Blood Like Mine is set in the American west, where Rebecca Carter and her daughter, Monica – nicknamed Moonflower – are on a road trip like no other. They just keep moving, talking to no one, forever looking over their shoulders… and leaving a trail of bodies. FBI Special Agent Marc Donner has been on their tail for two years and seems no nearer to capturing the murderers who strike every few weeks. But the lines between hunted and prey are about to blur in a book which keeps the reader on the back foot every step of the way.
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Eye of the Beholder by Emma Bamford
Can you trust what you see? The question is asked and answered in this reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Maddy Wight is hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of renowned cosmetic surgeon Angela Reynolds. But as she works in Reynolds’ glass-walled house in the Scottish Highlands, Maddy becomes convinced that she’s being watched. The upside is that she meets Scott, and they become close. Back in London, a heartbroken Maddy learns that Scott is dead – which is why, when she spots him leaving an underground station months later, she has no choice but to follow him… Eye of the Beholder by Emma Bamford is out now in the UK, and publishes in the US on 6 August.
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Wordhunter by Stella Sands
Best-selling true crime author Stella Sands turns to crime fiction with Wordhunter, out 6 August in the US. Maggie Moore has tattoos, piercings and the uncanny talent for breaking down words and speech patterns to help solve crimes. She’s top of her forensic linguistics class, and when Maggie is called upon by the local cops to use her skills to decipher harrowing notes left by a stalker-turned-rapist she is zeroing in on the perpetrator. But when the daughter of the mayor in a rural Florida town is abducted, Maggie isn’t convinced that she’s the gal for the job – until she begins to work in tandem with a local detective, and the patterns she perceives in texts, emails and verbal tics bring her to a shocking conclusion.
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The Devil Raises his Own by Scott Phillips
Time to head back to the early days of movie making for The Devil Raises his Own by Scott Phillips, out on 6 August. It’s 1916, and in Los Angeles portrait photographer Bill Ogden finds himself brushing up against the early porn industry that’s blossoming in the shadows of the motion picture mainstream. His granddaughter Flavia acts as Bill’s assistant, and when a series of grisly murders occur in LA they are reluctantly drawn into the melee. Part thriller, part historical crime, prepare to meet dreamers, opportunists, washed-up former stars and starry-eyed newcomers in a cast of characters that are hard to forget.
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Whitesands by Johann Thorsson
We’re back in Los Angeles again for Icelandic author Johann Thorsson‘s supernatural thriller Whitesands, out on 8 August. Detective John Darke would do anything to find his daughter, who vanished two years ago. He’s a desperate man, and after overstepping the mark at work he was reprimanded and demoted. Now he has been inexplicably reinstated to the homicide team and put to work on the strange case of a man who killed his wife in their locked house and dressed the body up to resemble a deer. Days later a similar modus operandi is used in another murder and Darke is struggling to connect the dots, however a new lead in his daughter’s disappearance threatens to muddy the waters further.
Order now on Amazon or Bookshop.org