Red Hook (39 page)

I got it out of my mother later on. Joe ran a vodka factory in Vladikavkaz near the river Volga. The peasants, shriveled and sickly from the war and malnutrition, were scared by Joe's size. They taunted
him. Said he was a monster, that his size was the devil's work. Uncle Joe was forty-two when he shot himself.

“Hey, you wanted to ask me something,” I said to Billy.

“It doesn't matter,” he said.

“Talk to me.”

Billy stopped walking.

“Artie, can I come live with you for good?” said Billy. “I can, right? I mean maybe not right now, but later, you know? I want to be like you so much. I think about it all the time. I could help you with cases and stuff, and we'd be together, like all the time.”

I didn't know what to say. He was home on leave. He would go back to Florida in a couple of weeks. It would be a long time until he was free. I didn't answer at first and then, because I wanted to see him happy, I said, “Sure.”

“Hey, I'll race you,” Billy said, and began running down to the water, kicking up sand with his black sneakers.

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Red Mercury Blues

Reggie Nadelson

‘Artie Cohen is the detective New York deserves: smart, wounded, emotional, haunted, and not as tough as he thinks. Reggie Nadelson's Cohen books get better and better.' Salman Rushdie

Presenting Artie Cohen, Reggie Nadelson's street-smart, good-looking New York cop, with a cast of characters including Artie's glamorous girl Lily Hanes, and his gnarly superior Sonny Lippert. Originally from Russia, Artie has a taste for girls and jazz and a secret past. In
Red Mercury Blues
he has scarcely returned from a month's leave and thoughts of quitting when he becomes involved with a case that drags him painfully back into that past.

His investigations take him first into the heart of the Brighton Beach Russian mafia, and then deeper into the terrifying world of atomic smuggling and the secrets of the lethal but elusive substance known as Red Mercury.

‘Red Mercury Blues
has everything going for it . . . The slickness and quality of Nadelson's writing, and her capacity to create atmosphere, the dialogue and the streets, apartments and dachas of New York and Moscow fairly zing with life.'
Daily Telegraph

‘A cracker of a story, original, well-written and fast-paced'
Sunday Times

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Bloody London

Reggie Nadelson

‘Artie Cohen is the detective New York deserves: smart, wounded, emotional, haunted, and not as tough as he thinks. Reggie Nadelson's Cohen books get better and better.' Salman Rushdie

As New York basks in a fine Indian summer, no one notices the feral teenagers in Central Park, or the homeless living by the river. Certainly no-one connects them to the Russian gangsters buying into respectability on the East Side, or to the dead Englishman in the swimming pool . . .

Thomas Pascoe, a super-rich, elderly investment banker, is found gorily murdered on the day he was due to return to London, floating in the pool of the most exclusive apartment block in town. As head of the ‘co-op' for the luxury apartments, where the residents own the shares, Pascoe had his say in who got to live in them, and who didn't. Could this be a motive for his murder?

‘Artie Cohen is the latest in a long line of slick, wise-cracking American private eyes. A worthy successor to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, he is a Philip Marlowe for our times.'
Daily Mail

‘Superlative storytelling, with writing so good that you hardly dare turn the page in case, between times, it goes off the boil. Rest assured it doesn't . . . Disquieting, timely, terrific.'
Literary Review

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Disturbed Earth

Reggie Nadelson

‘Reggie Nadelson's Cohen books get better and better.
Disturbed Earth
is the best yet.' Salman Rushdie

Winter 2003: war is looming and New York is paralysed by the worst blizzard in years. Artie Cohen is called in to investigate a case: a pile of blood soaked children's clothes have been found on the beach in Brooklyn. Almost against his will, Artie finds himself drawn into a case that involves the death of a child and the unaccountable disappearance of another, all against the back ground of a city already stricken by fear.

In his increasingly obsessive search for the missing child, Artie finds himself in the remote coastal suburbs of Brooklyn, among the Russian community he thought he had left behind him – and way out of his depth. Along the way he falls in love with one woman and is seduced by another, but little can calm his mind as his past comes back to haunt him . . .

‘Artie Cohen is one of crime fiction's most deeply and sensitively drawn cops.'
The Times

‘A brilliant, unexpected final twist resolves the suspense . . . The denouement is stunning.'
Daily Telegraph

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Uniform Justice

Donna Leon

Neither Commissario Brunetti nor his wife Paola have ever had much sympathy for the Italian armed forces, so when a young cadet is found hanged, a presumed suicide, in Venice's elite military academy, Brunetti's emotions are complex: pity and sorrow for the death of a boy, close in age to his own son, and contempt and irritation for the arrogance and high-handedness of the boy's teachers and fellow-students.

The young man is the son of a doctor and former politician, a man of an impeccable integrity all too rare in Italian politics. But as Brunetti – and the indispensable Signorina Elettra – investigate further into the doctor's political career and his familiy circumstances, no-one seems willing to talk, as the military protects its own and civilians – even the boy's parents – keep their own counsel. Is this the natural reluctance of Italians to involve themselves with the authorities, or is Brunetti facing a conspiracy of silence?

‘Brunetti . . . long ago joined the ranks of the classic fictional detectives.'
Evening Standard

‘Complex and thought-provoking and lingers in the mind.'
Sunday Times

‘Wonderfully familiar characters, a powerful sense of place and expert plotting . . . A page-turner with real psychological depth and a disturbing, quiet power.'
Guardian

‘Read it in the dusk, with a grappa.' Libby Purves in the
Good Book Guide

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Wilful Behaviour

Donna Leon

When a student visits Commissario Brunetti with a strange interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago, Brunetti thinks little of it. But when the girl is found stabbed to death, Claudia Leonardo suddenly becomes Brunetti's case, and no longer his wife's student.

Claudia seems to have no discernable living family – her only familial relationship is with an elderly Austrian woman, her grandfather's lover. Brunetti is both intrigued and stunned by the extraordinary art collection the old woman keeps in her small, unprepossessing flat, and when she in turn is found dead, the case seems to have been about to open up long buried secrets of collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews during the war, secrets few in Italy are happy to explore . . .

‘A classic example of detective-book murder . . . Leon whips up a briliant narrative storm'
Sunday Times

‘Compelling . . . This is a powerful story, brilliantly evoking Venetian atmosphere, and the characters of Brunetti and his family continue to deepen throughout this series'
The Times

‘Donna Leon's novels have become successively more subtle, more complex and perhaps more serious, without ever losing their compelling power as narratives. This is especially true of
Wilful Behaviour;
the story is wholly engrossing'
Evening Standard

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	Red Mercury Blues Reggie Nadelson	0 09 949783 2	£6.99
	Bloody London Reggie Nadelson	0 09 949779 4	£6.99
	Disturbed Earth Reggie Nadelson	0 09 946570 1	£6.99
	Uniform Justice Donna Leon	0 09 941517 8	£6.99
	Wilful Behaviour Donna Leon	0 09 941518 6	£6.99
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