New releases - October 2020
CAN A KILLER EVER BE ABOVE THE LAW?
Deputy Stuart Kofer is a protected man. Though he's turned his drunken rages on his girlfriend, Josie, and her children many times before, the police code of silence has always shielded him.
But one night he goes too far, leaving Josie for dead on the floor before passing out. Her son, sixteen-year-old Drew, knows he only has this one chance to save them. He picks up a gun and takes the law into his own hands.
In Clanton, Mississippi, there is no one more hated than a cop killer - but a cop killer's defence lawyer comes close. Jake Brigance doesn't want this impossible case but he's the only one with enough experience to defend the boy.
As the trial begins, it seems there is only one outcome: the gas chamber for Drew. But, as the town of Clanton discovers once again, when Jake Brigance takes on an impossible case, anything is possible.
In another classic story of defending the underdog, this story sees the return of Jake Brigance from a Time to kill and Sycamore Row. An ‘old school’ legal thriller of the type Grisham excelled at in and since the nineties, partly motivated me to write my own legal thrillers – the Sasha Stace series. Like many heroes, Jake gets a case he doesn’t want and he’s only just off the back of another difficult one when the judge tells him he’s taking on Drew, whether le wants to or not!
'He's gone...'
When his daughter Samantha calls in the dead of night, John Rebus knows it's not good news. Her husband has been missing for two days.
Rebus fears the worst - and knows from his lifetime in the police that his daughter will be the prime suspect.
He wasn't the best father - the job always came first - but now his daughter needs him more than ever. But is he going as a father or a detective?
As he leaves at dawn to drive to the windswept coast - and a small town with big secrets - he wonders whether this might be the first time in his life where the truth is the one thing he doesn't want to find.
Rebus is having to pull his horns in a bit with his heavy drinking and smoking. He has what some will think is his own self-inflicted illness - Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and, with difficulties with airflow, struggles with physical movement such as to taking the stairs. But he hasn’t given up on working outside the normal conventions of police boundaries and readers will enjoy seeing reappearances of old characters including his old partner Siobhan Clarke and Malcom Fox who investigate their own case. As usual Rankin is extremely good at dropping you into places in Scotland so that when you’ve finished his books, it’s like you’ve made your own way there and back.
NEW RELEASE: 4 November 2020.
Five strangers in Florence, each with a dangerous secret. And an apocalyptic flood threatening to reveal everything.
A wife on the run, a student searching for stolen art, a cleaner who has lined more than his pockets, a policeman whose career is almost over, and a guest who should never have received a wedding invite. Five strangers, entangled in the forger’s wicked web.
In a race against time, and desperate to save themselves and all they hold dear, will their secrets prove more treacherous than the ominous floodwaters swallowing the historic city?
Dive into a world of lies and deceit, where nothing is as it seems on the surface.
This is the sixth book McKenzie’s features on www.kirstenmckenzie.com/books and is the second dealing with art after her horror story, Painted. The forger and the thief, set in Italy, 1966, tells of a time when a ravaging flood in Florence killed over 100 people and damaged or destroyed millions of art masterpieces. Five strangers in this story may remind some readers of characters drawn by the great Agatha Christie.
This is a well-written historical novel of flawed, and dark characters, particularly the men of those times and their superior-being attitudes. Art history and more recently art forgery have become of interest to many – even a former NZ High Court judge became an expert in the topic – so there’s plenty in this novel to appeal to a wide range of readers. Check out this Kiwi author who has also written a medical thriller and a series of three travel-through-time books which McKenzie calls, The old curiosity series.