A quirky and funny series for fans of a good mystery and compelling characters. Can you solve the crime before our dressmaking duo?
After losing her job at an exclusive London hotel, Penny Slipper is only too happy to help when her grandma asks her to take charge at the Cozy Craft sewing shop in charming rural Suffolk.
With cousin Izzy on hand as the expert dressmaker and Penny’s head for business, what can possibly go wrong?
But Penny’s in town for less than a day when the local librarian is poisoned and Penny fears she might even be accidentally responsible. Penny and Izzy are forced to turn detectives to uncover the true cause of death, while finishing a costume commission for their first customer.
Matters take a further deadly turn when a second body is discovered.
Can Penny and Izzy unpick the mysteries of the past and sew the pieces of this puzzle together before it’s too late?
If you enjoy fast-paced mysteries, charming country towns and characters who you want to spend hours with then you’re going to love the Cozy Craft Mystery series.
2110 Earth is suffering major resource shortages, and the impact of climate change is peaking, with much of the planet’s equatorial regions turned to lifeless desert and populations displaced. Colonies have been established on Mars and the Moon, but these cannot hope to sustain any more than a scant population of hundreds of citizens.
Attention has turned to the need to discover an extra-solar colony world. European scientists, using discoveries made at CERN, have identified the means of creating a wormhole in the space-time continuum, which would allow interstellar travel. However, to do so they must first physically transport one end of the wormhole to where they want it to be, so setting up a wormhole will always rely on physical travel first of all.
A ship is sent to Mu Arae, earth-like planet discovered 10 years before. It is a journey that will take 80 years, the crew, who will eventually set up the wormhole on the planet, kept in suspended animation. But only a few years into the trip, catastrophe strikes and the ship blows up en route, killing all aboard.
2190 Eighty years after the starship set out.
Gordon Kemp is a detective working in the cold case department in London. Usually he works on cases closed ten, twenty-five years earlier. Now, however, he has been assigned a murder investigation closed, unsolved, over eighty years ago. What he unearths will change history and threatens everything we know about what the powers that be have planned for Earth.
The tragedy that befell the ship 80 years before is not what it seems and the past and the present are radically different to what everyone on Earth believes.
We made the journey. Why has it been kept a secret?
Author Bios
ERIC BROWN – Eric Brown is the BSFA award-winning author of more than 20 novels and as many novellas. He has had many short stories published in Interzone magazine and was, for many years, the SF and Fantasy reviewer for The Guardian
KEITH BROOKE – Keith Brooke is the Philip K. Dick award shortlisted author of more than a dozen novels for adults and teenagers. He was the editor for Infinity Plus magazine and has written non-fiction on the SF genre for Palgrave Macmillan.
PUBLICATION DATE: 16 FEBRUARY 2023 PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £9.99 | ORENDA BOOKS
Blurb
The shocking murder of a heavily pregnant woman throws the New Zealand city of Dunedin into a tailspin, and the devastating crime feels uncomfortably close to home for Detective Sam Shephard as she counts down the days to her own maternity leave.
Confined to a desk job in the department, Sam must find the missing link between this brutal crime and a string of cases involving mothers and children in the past. As the pieces start to come together and the realisation dawns that the killer’s actions are escalating, drastic measures must be taken to prevent more tragedy.
For Sam, the case becomes personal, when it becomes increasingly clear that she is no longer safe, and the clock is ticking…
The third in the series featuring Hella Mauzer, to follow on the success of Evil Things and Deep as Death. A Nordic Noir of the first-order set in Helsinki in 1953. A dark political thriller at the heart of the Cold War; a novel about ruthless ambition and betrayal, but also about the challenges of being a single professional woman in post-war Europe.
Helsinki, June 1953, at the heart of the Cold War. Hella, now a reluctant private investigator, has been asked by her former boss at the Helsinki murder squad to do a background check on a member of the Finnish secret services. Not the type of job Hella was hoping for, but she accepts it on the condition that she is given access to the files concerning the roadside death of her father in 1942, at a time when Finland joined forces with Nazi Germany in its attack against the Soviet Union. German troops were sent to Finland, the Gestapo arrived in Helsinki and German influence on local government was strong, including demands for the deportation of local Jews.
Colonel Mauzer, his wife and other family members were killed by a truck in a hit and run incident. An accident, file closed, they said. But not for Hella, whose unwelcome investigation leads to some who would prefer to see her stopped dead in her tracks.
Pub date: 13 October 2022 ISBN 13: 978-1-914585-32-6 EPUB: 978-1-914585-33-3 Price: £9.99
THE BOOK
When entrepreneur Flosi arrives home for dinner one night, he discovers that his house has been ransacked, and his wife Gudrun missing. A letter on the kitchen table confirms that she has been kidnapped. If Flosi doesn’t agree to pay an enormous ransom, Gudrun will be killed.
Forbidden from contracting the police, he gets in touch with Áróra, who specialises in finding hidden assets, and she, alongside her detective friend Daniel, try to get to the bottom of the case without anyone catching on. Meanwhile, Áróra and Daniel continue the puzzling, devastating search for Áróra’s sister Ísafold, who disappeared without trace. As fog descends, in a cold and rainy Icelandic autumn, the investigation becomes increasingly dangerous, and confusing.
Chilling, twisty and unbearably tense, Red as Blood is the second instalment in the riveting, addictive An Áróra Investigation series, and everything is at stake…
PUBLICATION DATE: 15 SEPTEMBER 2022 HARDBACK ORIGINAL | £16.99 | ORENDA BOOKS
Blurb
1899, Belle Époque Paris. Lucienne’s two daughters are believed dead when her mansion burns to the ground, but she is certain that her girls are still alive and embarks on a journey into the depths of the spiritualist community to find them.
1949, Post-War Québec. Teenager Lina’s father has died in the French Resistance, and as she struggles to fit in at school, her mother introduces her to an elderly woman at the asylum where she works, changing Lina’s life in the darkest way imaginable.
2002, Quebec. A former schoolteacher is accused of brutally stabbing her husband – a famous university professor – to death. Detective Maxine Grant, who has recently lost her own husband and is parenting a teenager and a new baby single-handedly, takes on the investigation. Under enormous personal pressure, Maxine makes a series of macabre discoveries that link directly to historical cases involving black magic and murder, secret societies and spiritism … and women at breaking point, who will stop at nothing to protect the ones
PUBLICATION DATE: 18 AUGUST 2022 | PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £9.99 | ORENDA BOOKS
Blurb
Detective Moralès returns in a breathtaking literary thriller set on the icy seas of Quebec’s Magdalen Islands, in the midst of a brutal seal hunt, where nothing is as it seems and absolutely no one can be trusted…
Fisheries officer Simone Lord is transferred to Quebec’s remote Magdalen Islands for the winter, and at the last minute ordered to go aboard a trawler braving a winter storm for the traditional grey seal hunt, while all of the other boats shelter onshore.
Detective Sergeant Joaquin Moralès is on a cross-country boat trip down the St Lawrence River, accompanied by Nadine Lauzon, a forensic psychologist working on the case of a savagely beaten teenager with Moralès’ old team in Montreal.
When it becomes clear that Simone is in grave danger aboard the trawler, the two cases converge, with startling, terrifying consequences for everyone involved…
Pub date: 21 JULY 2022 ISBN 13: 978-1-914585-20-3 EPUB: 978-1-914585-21-0 Price: £9.99
The small community of Akranes is devastated when a young man dies in a mysterious house fire, and when Detective Elma and her colleagues from West Iceland CID discover the fire was arson, they become embroiled in an increasingly perplexing case involving multiple suspects. What’s more, the dead man’s final online search raises fears that they could be investigating not one murder, but two.
A few months before the fire, a young Dutch woman takes a job as an au pair in Iceland, desperate to make a new life for herself after the death of her father. But the seemingly perfect family who employs her turns out to have problems of its own and she soon discovers she is running out of people to turn to.
As the police begin to home in on the truth, Elma, already struggling to come to terms with a life-changing event, finds herself in mortal danger as it becomes clear that someone has secrets they’ll do anything to hide…
Paperback, 406 pages Published May 16th 2019 by Gollancz (first published November 13th 2018)
The Faceless Man, wanted for multiple counts of murder, fraud, and crimes against humanity, has been unmasked and is on the run.Peter Grant, Detective Constable and apprentice wizard, now plays a key role in an unprecedented joint operation to bring Chorley to justice.
But even as the unwieldy might of the Metropolitan Police bears down on its foe, Peter uncovers clues that Chorley, far from being finished, is executing the final stages of a long term plan. A plan that has its roots in London’s two thousand bloody years of history, and could literally bring the city to its knees.
To save his beloved city Peter’s going to need help from his former best friend and colleague–Lesley May–who brutally betrayed him and everything he thought she believed in. And, far worse, he might even have to come to terms with the malevolent supernatural killer and agent of chaos known as Mr Punch.
My Review
I thought I’d read this one, but after finishing the audiobook of False Value I was checking the TBR pile and found it, so clearly I hadn’t. It wasn’t in my Audible library either (it is now) so I hadn’t listened to it instead. Why am I getting Lies Sleeping and False Value read, I hear you cry? Well, the latest Peter Grant novel, Amongst Our Weapons is published this month. It arrived in my Audible library today and I’m waiting for my special edition from Goldsboro Books to be delivered. It isn’t available until 14th April, but I’ll probably have listened to the audiobook by then. It’ll be nice and pristine on my bookshelf.
So what happens in Lies Sleeping? Peter et al. are hunting the Faceless Man. Still. He, Martin Chorley, has a cunning plan to ‘make it all better’, by killing Punch, the spirit of riot we first meet in Rivers of London. There’s an ancient sword, goat sacrifices and attacks on archaeological sites. To find out what all the fuss is about, Peter has to meet old gods, some dead Romans and try not to die, too much.
And Beverley is pregnant.
I enjoyed this book. I always enjoy the Peter Grant books; there are a lot of geeky in-jokes and references to Discworld, why wouldn’t I enjoy them? There are cynical comments about policing in London and the state of the country. I like Peter and the gang, and find the plots gripping.
I’ve been struggling a bit with my mental health because of that heritage project I wrote about a few weeks back, all the horror is taking a toll on my brain, so I’ve been resting, and today, after three quite busy days all I’ve had the energy to do is curl up on the chair with this book and get lost in Peter’s adventures. I find the predictable characters (predictable because I’m familiar with the characters and worldbuilding, not because they’re badly written) soothing. Like Discworld, Peter Grant’s version of London, built by Ben Aaronovitch on the real thing but with a fantasy twist, is a safe retreat. I know there will be explosions, Peter will get into trouble, Molly will feed everyone, Beverley and her sisters will do something entertaining, some major disaster will happen, or be averted by the skin of someone’s teeth, there will be satirical comments about policing and the Government, and references that only fantasy geeks will get. It’s easy to read, get lost for 400 pages and then come back with a more relaxed frame of mind.
I like this book, but you probably should read the other 6 first, or nothing will make sense.
A drowned man. A missing teenager. A deadly secret.
When Emmy Leach discovers the body of a drug addict, wrapped in a tent and submerged in the icy waters of a Cumbrian tarn, she causes more than one problem for investigating officer DCI Jude Satterthwaite. Not only does the discovery revive his first, unsolved, case, but the case reveals Emmy’s complicated past and opens old wounds on the personal front, regarding Jude’s relationship with his colleague and former partner, Ashleigh O’Halloran.
As Jude and his team unpick an old story, it becomes increasingly clear that Emmy is in danger. What secrets are she and her controlling, coercive husband hiding, from the police and from each other? What connection does the dead man have with a recently-busted network of drug dealers? And, as the net closes in on the killer, can Jude and Ashleigh solve a murder — and prevent another?
A traditional British detective novel set in Cumbria.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 