Murder in Pigalle, Cara Black

Aimee Leduc and Rene her partner at Leduc Detective have plenty of work. With Paris in the sweaty grip of world cup fever and Aimee feeling like a beached whale as she enters her second trimester, everyone keeps telling her to slow down. Aimee is doing the opposite.

A serial rapist is attacking young girls in their own homes and when he escalates to murder and Zazie, the daughter of the proprieter of Aimee’s favourite café goes missing, Aimee isn’t going to wait around like the flics. Zazie is running out of time, it may already be too late.

The Enchanted, Rene Denfeld

An unnamed prison, a death row inmate: who was a lifer before the ‘incident’ and used to spend all his free time in the prison library. He contrasts the brutality of prison life with the ability to roam through the literary images stored in his head.

Not all are prisoners. There are the fallen priest, the warden, the corrupt guard and the lady. The prisoner worries for the lady, her job is to exonerate death row inmates and her latest project is York, who thinks the world would be better without him in it.

The enchanted is a strangely beautiful little novel about life, death and redemption.

The Accident, Chris Pavone

Dawn in Manhattan and literary agent Isabel Reed just finished reading an explosive manuscript (author anonymous). An expose of a powerful man with equally powerful friends; friends who still stoop to any means to stop publication.

Some say it’s a hoax. Isabel is convinced that this is the real deal but even she never anticipated the shocking truths and lies exposed by the author.

Settle in for this literary thrill ride, from the author of The Expats.

Blood Will Out, Walter Kirn

Part 48 hours part memoir, Kirn details his fifteen year friendship with Clark Rockefeller. They first met when Kirn transported a hunting dog for Rockefeller and Kirn makes no bones that he wanted to cultivate the young and rather secretive banker from that famous family. He’d be great material but he had no idea how great.

At the time Kirn was an aspiring author ‘Up In the Air’ hadn’t happened yet and he helped out with the dog thing as a favour for some friends in his new home of Montana. When Clark asks if he can come to stay for a couple of weeks Kirn, now a new father with writing deadlines to meet turns him down and as we’ll see it’s a good job he did.

Knightley and Son, Rohan Gavin

Shrublands nursing home currently houses one of the world’s great detectives, Alan Knightley. Comatose for almost four years, his only regular visitor, his teenage son Darkus (aka Doc)

Darkus, now living with his mum Jackie and stepfather Clive (a TV presenter on a cut-price version of Top Gear) has been reading his dad’s case files, unknowingly adding ‘the knowledge’ to his already agile brain.

Knightley senior emerges from his coma just as The Code a new self-help release tops the best seller lists. The book has been having a weird effect on select members of the public, making them do bad, sometimes unspeakable things. Knightley, convinced that shadowy organization ‘the combination’ are behind it somehow, picks up his investigation right where he left off, except the hard drive containing his case files has vanished. The only copy is in Darkus’s head, which puts Knightley junior and his brainy stepsister Tilly right in the firing line as Alan Knightley keeps dozing off at the most inopportune moments. The pair take on ‘the combination’ with the help of Uncle Bill from SO42, Knightley’s housekeeper Bogna who wields a mean frying pan and is also a great cook and occasional help from Jackie and hindrance from Clive.

Unlike some middle reader books where the adults are ciphers, Knightley and Son has a cast of rich characters, fun, excitement and dangerous situations all served up with lashings of humour, more please!