New UK fiction for November

The only advantage of the Bookseller's poor decision to produce two "double" issues in August is that I can catch up on my backlog. The 6/13 August issue highlights new fiction (and non-fiction) to be published in the UK in November, so I'll mention a few highlights to add to my earlier post about new paperbacks due for the same month.

There aren't a great many titles of interest to me in the crime and thriller category, as it happens. Philip Kerr has a new book out, Field Grey (Quercus, £17.99), the seventh story about Bernie Gunther. This one is set in 1954 Berlin, and Bernie's job is to meet POWs returning from Germany. One of them is a French war criminal. I haven't read the first of this series yet, but this one sounds good so I must make a start sometime.

Set in France but written in English is Blood Counts by Martin O'Brien (Preface, £12.99), a former travel editor for Vogue magazine. This one is fifth in a series about Chief Inspector Daniel Jacquot of the Marseilles police. Another series to start, one day.

Among UK-set novels we can look forward to Borrowed Light by Graham Hurley (Orion, £12.99), the latest in the DI Joe Farraday series that seems from the blurb to be set in Portsmouth. It's about Middle East terrorism, the international property market and cocaine. I think I read the first one or two of this series years ago, but can't remember anything about the books except that I quite liked them.

The main output is from the USA. Karin Slaughter's Broken (Century, £12.99) is the biggest "name" (excepting the inevitable title by the dreaded JP), a Sara Linton investigation, therefore set in Georgia, Atlanta. I'm not sure whether I shall read this, given the increasingly slow pace and 'torture porn' content of her previous couple of books. Also there is From Blood by Edward Wright (Orion, £12.99), a political thriller by an author whose books win prestigious awards and great reviews, but whom I have yet to try; The Identity Man by Andrew Klavan (Corvus, £14.99) about a mysterious man who provides a petty criminal with a new identity; Indulgence in Death (Piatkus, £14.99), the nth of J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts)'s Eve Dallas series and one which I have long since stopped reading because the books are mildly diverting but all exactly the same as each other; The Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke (Orion, £14.99) about his series character Detective Dave Robicheaux; and one or two others - including Best American Mystery Stories 2010, edited by Lee Child (Corvus, £16.99). All in all, I think I get off lightly in November, not least because there is no translated fiction in this list, so I can make some inroads into the piles of books I have already.

 

Comments

[Norm]

I have Field Grey on order, and you do have the knack in these summaries of finding other books that interest me for instance the DI Faraday series set in Portsmouth.

[Margot Kinberg]

Maxine - Thanks, as always, for this summing-up. There are one or two titles I'm interested in, so it's good to be reminded of them. Of course, that means my own TBR list gets ever longer...... Ah, well... Norman is right; you do always have a way of piquing my interest.

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Thanks much for these links and your comments. I read two of Karin Slaughter's books and thought they were too gratuitously brutal and most of the violence happened to women, so that was that, and I stopped reading them.

[Dorte H]

I am doing my best to read book reviews with my eyes closed right now - I have made up my mind to do something about my own, relatively tiny TBR - and on days without internet my plan works to perfection!

[Maxine]

I have a vast tbr collection but yesterday afternoon (Sunday) I just could not find a book that appealed to me....eventually I did, but it was a close call.

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Am now reading Elly Griffiths' "The Janus Stone," as I liked her first book. Then the mystery starts of what to read next. No reserves yet a library, so I may have to buy a book!

[Bernadette]

That's two preview posts in a row that have left my bank balance alone. A record.

I know how you feel about not being able to find something that appeals even though you have a giant TBR. That happens to me occasionally. I either start several books and leave them all in a state of half-read-ness or do something other than read for a couple of days (I have some DVD collections specifically for such times).

Also agree about JD Robb - I read the first 3 or 4 of that series and then realised I couldn't tell one book from the other. I sometimes wonder whether anyone would notice if those kind of authors actually did release the same book under different names every year or two.

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Jim Kelly has a new books out, "Death Watch," reviewed at EuroCrime. His prior book about a pair of police detectives, "Death Wore White," is a good one, a locked-room-in-traffic gridlock and snow genre.