Beaumaris Books Staff Picks

Stalin’s Russia, 1953. In a time when the only crimes acknowledged are those against the state, one man is determined to uncover the truth behind a series of murders the government denies.

Inspired by real-life serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, nicknamed the Butcher of Rostov, Child 44 is a thrillingly dark literary debut by 29 year-old Cambridge graduate Tom Rob Smith.

Drawing from elements of Chikatilo’s life, including his traumatising childhood growing up during the famine caused by Stalin’s agricultural policies, and his luring of victims from train stations into nearby woods before killing and mutilating them, this debut literary thriller will keep you on the edge of your seat while enveloping you in the claustrophobic and paranoid Russia that existed under Stalin’s rule.

When Leo Demidov, one of the country’s most loyal Security Ministry officers starts to question the State cover-up of crimes, his comfortable life takes a dramatic turn. Forced by senior officials to dismiss the horrific murder of a young boy and witnessing the torture of an alleged spy Leo knows is innocent, he chooses to give up his protected life to save his marriage, already on the brink of collapse. His decision leads them to a town deep in the Ural Mountains where he uncovers the murder of another child, a murder which bares a frightening resemblance to a child murder he was forced to deny.

With a killer on the loose, murdering children and dumping their bodies near train tracks all over the country, Leo and his wife set off on a wild hunt across Russia, risking disgrace, torture and death to hunt down the killer.

Capturing to incredible poverty and the terrifying world the Russian people endured under Stalin’s rule, Child 44 is thrilling and horrifying, an intense detective story that will haunt you long after you’ve read the last page.

Product Details
UK TRADE ORIGINALS, March 2008
TRADE PAPER BACK, 400 pages
ISBN-10: 1-847-37127-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-8473-7127-0

The Company of the Dead
by David Kowalski

“He could feel it. The flutter of butterfly wings that would herald a brighter, better world. He looked out to the flat, calm ocean, the moonless night. Beyond the ship’s illumination the dark waters rose up so that he felt as if he and the ship lay at the centre of a vast opaque bowl. Then, at a distance, under the starlight’s dim flicker, he saw it. First, a jagged edge, then two irregular peaks, riding black against the black night sky.”

Conspiracies linking events as disparate as the sinking of the Titanic and the assassination of JFK have played themselves out in dark and unforeseen ways.

The Cold War between Greater Germany and Imperial Japan is drawing to a close.

America, divided and scarred, will be the final battleground in a world distinctly different, yet disturbingly familiar to our own.

Six people have the means to avert the apocalypse.

Welcome to the secret history of the twentieth century.

Author information:

David Kowalski is an obstetrician and gynaecologist practising in Western Sydney. He has been published in professional medical journals but this is his first work of fiction. The Company of the Dead took David seven years to write.

Not Dead Enough
James, Peter
ISBN:  9780230014695
Subject: Crime & Mystery
Published: 01-08-2007
Price: A$32.95

Synopsis

The latest spine-tingling murder case for Detective Superintendent Roy Grace – from the bestselling author of Dead Simple and Looking Good Dead.

On the night Brian Bishop murdered his wife, he was 60 miles away, asleep in bed at the time. At least, that’s the way it looks to Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who is called in to investigate the kinky slaying of beautiful young Brighton socialite, Katie Bishop.

Soon, Grace starts coming to the conclusion that Bishop has performed the apparently impossible feat of being in two places at once. Has someone stolen his identity, or is he simply a very clever liar? As Grace digs deeper behind the façade of the Bishops outwardly respectable lives, it becomes clear that all is not as it first seemed. And then he digs just a little too far, and suddenly the fragile stability of his own troubled, private world is facing destruction…

Highly customized accessories, esthetic electronics and extraordinary engines are presented in over 400 pages of this beautifully illustrated book. From private submarines to diamond-encased USB sticks and MP3 players, the highly personalized characteristics of each object is what gives it that luxury aura. The Most unique luxury products created exclusively for those status-seeking consumers where money is no object are showcased in this stunning book.

Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini

Description :
The highly anticipated and breathtaking new novel by the author of the internationally best-selling novel The Kite Runner.

This is the story of an unusual and lifelong friendship between two Afghan women, spanning from the idyllic mid 1950s to post-September 11 Kabul. Bound by tragedy and fate, by political circumstance and custom, the two women live through the Soviet war, the harrowing days of the Afghan civil war and the rule of the Taliban. Yet even as their world unravels around them and innocence is shattered, they find that there, amidst the ruins, is the possibility for hope, meaning and unexpected grace.
About the Author :
Khaled Hosseini was born in Afghanistan and his family received political asylum in the USA in 1980. He is author of the internationally best-selling novel The Kite Runner. Khaled is a doctor and lives in California.

ISBN : 9780747582977
Australian Price : $32.95 Inc. GST
Number of pages : 384
Publication Date : June, 2007
Subject : Fiction - Adult

Set in seventeenth-century Iran, THE BLOOD OF FLOWERS is the powerful and haunting story of a young girl’s journey from innocence to adulthood.The novel begins in the 1620s in a remote village where the narrator (whose name, in the Iranian storytelling tradition, we are never to know) lives with her mother and rug-maker father. On the sudden death of her father our heroine and her mother fall upon hard times and are forced to travel to the bustling, beautiful, exotic city of Isfahan where relatives take them in. Everything is new: the grudging charity of her aunt, the encouragement of her uncle, one of the finest carpet-makers in the world, who begins to teach her his craft, the treacherous friendship of the daughter of rich neighbours. And there’s an adventure ahead which will introduce her to the sensual side of life as well as to the cruelty of betrayal and rejection before she finds her way to contentment and possibly, even, to happiness.

ISBN 0755334205 (978-075-533420-9)
RRP $32.95 May 2007
Headline Paperback Cut Down C

“Nobody can delve into the dark, twisted mind of a murderer better than a Scandinavian thriller writer” - Vogue

Description of book

In 1944, Daniel, a soldier legendary among the Norwegians fighting the advance of Bolshevism on the Russian front, is killed. Two years later, a wounded soldier wakes in a Vienna hospital. He becomes involved with a young nurse, the consequences of which will ripple forward to the end of the century.

1999: Harry Hole, working alone having caused an embarassment in the line of duty, has been promoted to inspector and is lumbered with surveillance duties. He is assigned the task of monitoring neo-Nazi activities; fairly mundane until a report of a rare and unusual gun being fired sparks his interest. Ellen Gjelten, his partner, from his police officer days makes a startling discovery. Then a former soldier is found with his throat cut. In a quest which takes him to South Africa and Vienna, Harry finds himself perpetually one step behind the killer. He will be both winner and loser by the novel’s nail-biting conclusion.

THE REDBREAST, won the Glass Key for best Nordic crime novel when it was published in Norway, and was subsequently voted Norway’s best crime novel. THE DEVIL’S STAR, Nesbo’s first novel featuring Harry Hole to be translated into English, marked Nesbo as a voice to watch in the ever-more fashionable world of Nordic crime.

Reviews

‘Meaty, engrossing Nordic crime. Driven by a plot with more hooks than a bait and tackle shop it’s essential reading for all crime fans.’ Good Reading Magazine

Ben Elton’s first historical thriller now in paperback. The first casualty of war is truth.

Flanders, June 1917: A British
officer is shot dead. A young English soldier is arrested and, although he protests his innocence, charged with his murder. Douglas Konig is sent to France in order to secure a conviction. Forced to conduct his investigations amidst the hellish backdrop of war, Konig soon discovers that both evidence and witnesses are quite literally disappearing into the mud that surrounds him.

Release: 01/06/06 ISBN: 9780552773362

Imprint: Black Swan

You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.

After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s tropical island, only one white person stays behind. Mr Watts wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley. The kids call him Pop Eye. But there is no one else to teach them their lessons. Mr Watts begins to read aloud to the class from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr Dickens.

Soon Dickens’ hero Pip starts to come alive for Matilda. She writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun.

But Matilda is not the only one who believes in Pip. And, on an island at war, the power of the imagination can be a dangerously provocative thing.

Praise for Mister Pip

‘Mister Pip is a rare, original and truly beautiful novel. It reminds us that every act of reading and telling is a transformation, and that stories, even painful ones, may carry possibilities of redemption.’
Gail Jones

‘As compelling as a fairytale—beautiful, shocking and profound.’
Helen Garner

‘Roll the drums. Flourish the trumpets. Release the pigeons. Yes, the fanfare accompanying Lloyd Jones’ new novel is well-deserved…It reads like the effortless soar and dip of a grand piece of music, thrilling singular voices, the darker, moving chorus, the blend of the light and shade, the thread of grief urgent in every beat and the occasional faint, lingering note of hope…Jones is matchless…Read this novel and Mr Watts, and perhaps Matilda, will migrate instantly into your heart.’
Age

About the Author
Lloyd Jones was born in New Zealand in 1955. He is the author of nine previous novels and collections of stories, which include the award-winning The Book of Fame, Biografi, a New York Times Notable Book, Choo Woo, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance and Paint Your Wife. Lloyd Jones lives in Wellington.

Paperback (C format) | ISBN: 1 921145 57 9 | RRP: $29.95 | 256pp

Stone’s debut novel is elegant, horrifying, and chillingly suspenseful. He has produced a supremely satisfying international spy thriller of the highest order that traverses from Venice to London to Washington, D.C.

An international spy thriller of the highest order that traverses from Venice to London to Washington, D.C. Micah Dalton is not paid to ask questions. He’s the man the CIA sends to clean up the mess when something goes wrong-an agent gets in trouble, or worse. But when his colleague and friend Porter Nauman turns up dead in an idyllic Tuscan hill town, as a result of an apparent and unimaginably gruesome suicide, Dalton can’t help but ask questions. And when Nauman’s family is subsequently slaughtered back home in London, Dalton can sit back no longer. Moving from Venice to London to Washington, D.C., to the unbearably beautiful mountains of the American West, Dalton tracks the specter who, with a penchant for intricate knifework influenced by Native American mysticism, is killing a disparate group of agents, former agents, and contract men-all of whom seem to have a connection to ECHELON, a mysterious company operation. The murders appear to be acts of retribution, but for what? Elegant, horrifying, and chillingly suspenseful, “The Echelon Vendetta” will keep you enthralled, through its final, supremely satisfying twist.

Binding: Hardcover  ISBN: 0399154086    EAN: 9780399154089

Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group