Visar resultat för..."Bitter Lemon Press"

Retired Havana police inspector Mario Conde is back. A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author.

The novel is set in the Pantanal, the vast untamed Brazilian lowlands bordering Bolivia. One bright Sunday, alone on the banks of the Paraguay River, the narrator witnesses the fatal crash of a small 'plane. He finds a kilo of cocaine in the dead pilot's backpack. After but a moment's hesitation he pockets the coke and the pilot's expensive watch. Thus begins the protagonist's long slide into corruption. When the crash site is located several days later, the pilot's body is missing and remains unfound for months despite a large-scale police search. Our hero gets involved in a busted cocaine deal and ends up owing a Bolivian drug gang so much money that blackmailing the wealthy family of the dead pilot seems to be the only way out. The family secretly agrees to pay serious money to recover the body of their son. Our hero doesn't have the pilot's body so someone else's will do. Or so he thinks.

The latest in the Guido Guerrieri series. The setting is Bari in Southern Italy. Against his own instincts, defence attorney Guerrieri takes on an appeal against what looks like an unassailable murder conviction. The alleged perpetrator is the son of a former lover. A taught legal thriller and a meditation about the ravages of time.

A desolate apartment in a Japanese city, a man and a woman about to spend their last night together. Each believes the other to be a killer, and is determined to extract a confession. Two people desperate to unlock the truth. A psychological thriller told in two voices, giving very different versions of the same events.

A brutally mutilated body is discovered washed up in the bay of Havana. The body of Miguel Forcade Mier, head smashed in by a baseball bat, genitals cut off by a dull knife. Forcade, once an official in the Cuban government responsible for the confiscation of the belongings of the bourgeoisie fleeing the revolution, was an exile in Miami.

Lieutenant Mario Conde is asked to investigate the disappearance of Rafael Morin, a high-level business manager in the Cuban nomenklatura. He remembers Morin from their student days that Morin always got what he wanted, including Tamara the girl he was after. While pursuing the case, Conde confronts his lost love for Tamara and his dreams.

Twenty-four year old Lissette Delgado was beaten, raped, and then strangled with a towel. Marijuana is found in her apartment and her wardrobe is suspiciously beyond the means of a high school teacher. This novel presents a eulogy of Cuba, its life of music, sex and the great friendships of those who elected to stay and fight for survival.

In an exclusive resort in a dark, threatening pine forest on the coast of Tuscany, the rich and famous are gathering at their second homes for Christmas. On the morning that a husband and wife from one of the heavily-guarded villas go missing, a certain Count Delaude is washed up, battered to death, on the seashore.

Disgraced British spy August Drummond is on his way to Istanbul when he sees a passenger throw away directions to a cemetery just before being arrested. August can’t resist the temptation to go in his place. But when he is confronted by a terrifying figure from Islamic State, he realizes he’s about to face the greatest challenge of his career.

British spy Leonard Flood is asked to investigate the poisoning in London of Willa Karlsson, a retired secret service officer suspected of being a Russian agent. British intelligence is terrified by the possibility that Moscow poisoned her upon her retirement since she was no longer useful to them.

A haunting work, reminiscent of Albert Camus, which portrays with exquisite psychological detail the emotional crisis in the life of a young Swiss schoolteacher. His father's prodigious vitality and virility had crushed his family and ruined his son's childhood. Even after his death the parental ogre haunts his son, sucking him into a vortex of despair. Fits with the contemporary success of autobiographical novels, focused on a tormented childhood, parental persecution and the loneliness of the outlier. Chessex's book is based on the character of his own father, his totalitarian and austere Calvinist upbringing and his escape to the sensual world of serial seduction. These motifs and the meditation on death have informed most of his fiction, especially "The Tyrant", his most successful book by far with 450,000 copies sold.

On an early autumn morning in 1988, on the outskirts of an unnamed Algerian city, a local shepherd stumbles across the dead body of Zakia Zaghouani, a beautiful nightclub singer who ran away from her hometown and family, seeking a brighter future.

RUSSIA UNDER STALIN, THE MEXICO OF FRIDA KAHLO, TROTSKY'S ASSASSINATION, AND CONTEMPORARY CUBA, ALL IN A PRIZE WINNING HISTORICAL NOVEL.

Havana, 2003, 14 since Mario Conde retired from the police force and much has changed in Cuba. He makes a living trading in antique books bought from families selling off their libraries in order to survive. In the house of Alcides de Montes de Oca, a rich Cuban who fled after the fall of Batista, Conde discovers an extraordinary book collection.

A young transvestite is found strangled in a Havana park. Mario Conde's first investigation into a young man's violent murder exposes the equally disturbing death of his beloved Cuba.

*Longlisted for theCWA Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger Award 2020*

Devoted to her six-year-old son Noe, Vanda lives with him in a derelict shed on a beach near Marseilles. "The two of them against the world", as she says. But when Noe's father shows up after a seven-year absence, the tension becomes unbearable, both parents fully capable of extreme violence.

In this new crime title from Padura, Cuba’s most celebrated living author, Police InspectorMario Conde investigates a murder in the Barrio Chino, the rundown Chinatown of Havana.

Kalmann is the self-appointed sheriff of Raufarho¨fn, a sleepy town in northern Iceland. He hunts Arctic foxes and lays shark bait in the sea. But inside Kalmann’s head, the wheels sometimes spin backward. One winter, after he discovers a pool of human blood in the snow, the swiftly unfolding events threaten to overwhelm him.

A nine-year-old boy is found murdered at the bottom of a well near a popular beach resort in southern Italy. In what looks like a hopeless case for Guido Guerrieri, counsel for the defence, a Senegalese peddler is accused of the crime. Guido attempts to exploit the esoteric workings of the Italian courts.

Rio de Janeiro. A family hotel whose clients reflect Brazilian society, multi-racial, with starkly contrasting backgrounds, and destitute. Rio is the perfect backdrop with its dictatorships, drug wars, child gangs and violent policing tactics. The first victim is found decapitated in bed, the head lying on the floor of his room. An eerie Mona Lisa smile on the victim's face and no evidence of a struggle indicate a murderer received as a friend. Other hotel guests are eventually killed, all decapitated. A classical crime novel in one way but really an opportunity for the author to describe Brazilian society, especially those left behind. Fascinating back stories are told such as that of the maid who dreams of making it in television soaps, and the female pimp who has survived incestuous rape, wrapped in a suspenseful intrigue that could have been thought up by Ruth Rendell.

Stella works miracles. Literally. She heals the sick and the paralysed, just like in the Bible. The Vatican is overjoyed imagine, a real saint in the 21st century, and in Georgia, the heart of the American South.The only hitch? Her method: she heals the people she sleeps with in her motorhome. And she sleeps with a lot of people, it's what she does for a living. And that's precisely what's bothering the Vatican. For Luis Molina of the Savannah News, this story smells like a Pulitzer for sure. For the Vatican, it smells more like trouble. A saintly hooker isn't exactly presentable. A martyred saint, on the other hand, has a conveniently rewritten past. That's a job tailor-made for the Bronski twins the best contract killers in the business.Provided, of course, they manage to get their hands on innocent little Stella. America is a big place. Joseph Incardona sets his new story in a dusty, wacky United States. He excels in its film noir atmosphere: travelling funfairs on the outskirts of small towns forgotten by everyone, lost motels, freaks and the disenfranchised. It's reminiscent of the Coen brothers, Tarantino and del Toro, but also a homage to the novels of Harry Crews.

The return of Kalmann, the oddball hero of the successful novel of the same name. Set in the US during the 2021 riots at the Capitol Building and then in Iceland, Kalmann, the philosopher Sheriff of Raufarhöfn, solves murders leading back to the US involvement in Iceland in the Cold War.

When Martina accuses her ex-boyfriend the son of a powerful local judge of assault and battery, no witnesses can be persuaded to testify on her behalf and one lawyer after another refuses to represent her. Guido Guerrieri knows the case could bring his legal career to a premature and messy end but he cannot resist the appeal of a hopeless cause. Nor deny an attraction to Sister Claudia, the young woman in charge of the shelter where Martina is living, who shares his love of martial arts and his virulent hatred of injustice.

Tito Ihaka, the unkempt, overweight Maori cop was demoted to Sergeant due to insubordination and pigheadedness. He investigates the unsolved killing of 17 year old girl at an election night party in a ritzy villa near Auckland. Ihaka is also embroiled in a very personal mystery. A freelance journalist has stumbled across information that Ihaka's father Jimmy, a trade union firebrand and renegade Marxist, didn't die of natural causes. The stories weave themselves into an exciting climax in an atmosphere of political maneuvering and intrigue surrounding the USA's confrontation with New Zealand over its anti-nuclear stance.

Ines, realistic about the state of her marriage, is not surprised to find a note to her husband with a heart smeared in lipstick and the words All YoursA". When Ernesto becomes a suspect in the murder case of his lover she provides him with an alibi. But when he continues his sexual adventures Ines plans a diabolical revenge.

The latest thriller from South America's best-selling crime writer.When a Buenos Aires industrialist is found dead at his home in an exclusive gated community, the novelist Nurit Iscar - Betty Boo to her admirers-is invited to cover the story by her former lover, now the editor of a national newspaper. Working with the paper's veteran, but recently demoted, crime reporter and his hapless junior, Nurit uncovers a trail of murders that will lead all three to the highest echelons of power in Argentina. In Betty Boo Claudia Pineiro combines a chilling story of murderous revenge with a warm and funny portrait of friendship and love in middle age.

Cuban investigator Mario Conde pursues a mystery spanning centuries of occult history. He is asked to track down a stolen statue of the Virgen de Regla-a black Madonna. A quest that spans twenty-first century Havana as well as the distant past, as he delves as far back as the Crusades in an attempt to uncover the true provenance of the statue.

1903, Ropraz, a small village in the Jura Mountains. The virginal daughter of a local judge dies of meningitis. On a howling December day a lone walker discovers her tomb recently opened, her body violated, left hand cut off, sex mutilated and heart torn out. Horror in the nearby villages, the return of atavistic superstitions, mutual suspicion in the heart of winter. Garlic and crucifixes are again brandished in this Protestant region. Then two more bodies are violated. Now a suspect must be found. Fevez, a stable boy with blood-shot eyes is arrested. He is convicted, subjected to psychiatric treatment and then vanishes in 1915. Chessex takes this true story and weaves it into a lyrical tale of fear and cruelty. This portrait of late 19th century country folk still in the thrall of vampirism sheds new light on our early 21st century urban obsessions with multiple rapists and psychopathic serial killers.