The One by John Marrs

Finding your perfect match has never been easier.  Or more dangerous…

A page-turning psychological thriller with a difference, this is a truly unique novel which is guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat. 

Film and TV rights have been optioned by Urban Myth films.

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Del Rey / paperback original / 4th May 2017 £7.99. Also available as an e-book.

One simple mouth swab is all it takes.  One tiny DNA test to find your perfect partner – the one you’re genetically made for. 

A decade after scientists discover everyone has a gene they share with just one person, millions have taken the test, desperate to find true love.  Now, five more people meet their match.  But even soul mates have secrets. And some are more shocking – and deadlier – than others…

The One shares stories from the perspectives of these five individuals in this unputdownable novel with a most intriguing premise.

• "A compelling, dark read that gets you thinking." Sun
• "A fantastic read if you enjoy an unpredictable story with twists and turns." ***** OK!
• "Looking for a thrilling read? Then look no further." TV Extra Magazine, Sunday Star
• "A thrilling eBook!" ***** Sunday Express  

John Marrs is a freelance journalist based in London, who has spent the last 20 years interviewing celebrities from the world of television, film and music for national newspapers and magazines. He has written for publications including The Guardian's Guide and Guardian Online; OK! Magazine; Total Film; Empire; Q; GT; The Independent; Star; Reveal; Company and Daily Star.  His debut novel The Wronged Sons, was released in 2013 and in May 2015, he released his second book, Welcome To Wherever You Are. The One was initially self-published as an e-book in July 2016 under the title A Thousand Small Explosions.

#MatchYourDNA @johnmarrs1

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Bright Shiny Things by Barbara Nadel (Hakim & Arnold 5)

Allison & Busby / hardback / 20 April 2017 / £19.99 / crime fiction

A friend from the past asks for private investigator Lee Arnold’s help in tracing his son.  Fayyad al’Barri was last thought to be in Syria having embraced radical Islam, but a cryptic message has prompted his family to believe Fayyad has had a change of heart and is searching for a way back home. With fellow investigator Mumtaz Hakim’s help, they might be able to establish contact.

From the bright lights of the Western world, to shady boxing clubs and murky online jihadist recruitment, and while violence erupts close to home, Mumtaz and Lee are on an unknown path into the mind of a terrorist, journeying closer to danger than they ever imagined.

Part crime procedural, part thriller, part psychological mystery Bright Shiny Things is a page-turning read and a fascinating insight into radicalisation, ISIS and the East End of London.

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Praise for the Hakim & Arnold series

‘A gutsy tale, well grounded in local colour’ The Times

‘Bleak, brutal and timely’ Financial Times

‘Compelling.’ The Sunday Telegraph

‘This series has brilliantly established itself and this latest is another masterpiece.’ Crimesquad 

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About Barbara Nadel

Born in the East End of London, Barbara Nadel has a degree in psychology and prior to becoming a full-time author she worked in psychiatric institutions and in the community with people experiencing mental health problems.

Barbara won the CWA Silver Dagger for Deadly Web, part of her Inspector Ikmen series.  She is available for interviews, events and to write articles.

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The Wanderers by Meg Howrey

'Phenomenal. The Wanderers explores the dangers and necessities of venturing away from the familiar and finding home in the unknown. Howrey's expansive vision left me awestruck' - Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being

‘The Wanderers is a wonderful exploration of space, trust, and what it means to be a conscious creature, finely-tuned and funny from the first page to the last. I loved getting lost in Meg Howrey's off-kilter world of astronauts and their simulated fantasies.’ - Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive

Station Eleven meets The Martian in this brilliantly inventive novel about three astronauts training for the first-ever mission to Mars, an experience that will push the boundary between real and unreal, test their relationships, and leave each of them—and their families—changed forever.

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Scribner (Simon & Schuster) / 6 April 2017 / £12.99 / HB / Fiction

As they look to the stars, what are they missing back home?

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In four years Prime Space will put the first humans on Mars. Helen Kane, Yoshi Tanaka, and Sergei Kuznetsov must prove they’re the crew for the job by spending seventeen months in the most realistic simulation every created

Helen is an experienced astronaut with a NASA position and a struggling grown-up daughter who needs her but when, at the age of fifty-three, she is offered a place on the training programme for the first crewed mission to Mars, she cannot refuse a last chance to walk among the stars.

Her fellow astronauts are Sergei, a gruff Russian whose teenage sons are less mysterious to him than they’d like to think; and Yoshi, kind and focused, whose exhaustive carefulness has led him ever further from his wife.

The three will be enclosed for months in a tiny spacecraft, while outside their loved ones negotiate life on Earth. How far will the wanderers travel in the pursuit of endeavour, and what will it be like to come home?

The Wanderers is a brilliant, witty and sharply observed novel from an exciting new voice.

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“‘An expansive tale of the costs of human ambition, The Wanderers is unquestionably the work of a brilliant writer at the height of her powers.’”

— J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest

“‘The Wanderers is a stealthily brilliant novel… simple, gorgeous, and profoundly moving.’”

— Peter Nichols, author of The Rocks and A Voyage for Madmen

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Meg Howrey is a novelist and a former professional dancer and actor. Her non-fiction writing has been published in Vogue, and she is the author of two previous novels Blind Sight and Cranes Dance. The Wanderers is her UK debut.  She lives in Los Angeles.

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We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter

An extraordinary debut novel, drawn from author’s family history of survival in the Nazi Holocaust.

“Reading Georgia Hunter’s We Were the Lucky Ones is like being swung heart first into history … A brave and mesmerizing debut, and a truly tremendous accomplishment.”

— Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife

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14 February 2017 / Hardback / Allison & Busby / £14.99 / fiction 

‘By the end of the Holocaust, 90 per cent of Poland’s three million Jews were annihilated; of the more than 30,000 Jews who lived in Radom, fewer than 300 survived.’

The Kurc family shouldn’t have survived the Holocaust. In the spring of 1939 three generations are living relatively normal lives in Poland, despite the hardships Jews face. When war breaks out and the family is cast to the wind, the five Kurc siblings do everything they can to find their way through a devastated continent to freedom.

Addy, a musician, charms his way into possession of a Brazilian visa and into the first class piano lounge on a ship full of refugees bound for Rio; Jakob marries the love of his life in an abandoned house to a soundtrack of air sirens; Mila hides her daughter in a Catholic convent outside of Warsaw, only to return weeks later to find the convent in ruins; Genek endures a brutal winter in a Siberian gulag before embarking with his wife and newborn son on a yearlong exodus through Persia to fight for the Allies; and Halina attempts to flee over the Austrian Alps on foot – while pregnant. All this, across continents and often in ignorance as to the fate of the rest of their family, while the wheels of war turn.

We Were the Lucky Ones is a profoundly moving and memorable novel, and a gripping tale of bravery, based on the author’s family experiences.  It takes you on a journey through unimaginable darkness to a place of hope/ 

When Georgia Hunter was fifteen years old, she learned that she came from a family of Holocaust survivors. We Were the Lucky Ones was born of her quest to uncover her family’s staggering history. She lives in Connecticut, USA, and is available for interview and to write features.

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Talking points

Discovering her Polish / Jewish heritage, aged 15

Growing up, while Georgia was close to her grandparents, she had no idea she was a quarter Jewish, or that she came from a family of Holocaust survivors - it wasn’t a big secret, just a piece of her grandfather’s past he had chosen to put behind him.

 At a family reunion in 2000 she discovered the greater Kurc family saga.  Snippets of stories overheard include: a sister who walked over the Austrian Alps, pregnant; a cousin born in the Siberian gulag, where it was so cold his eyes would freeze shut in the mornings and his mother had to use the warmth of her breast milk to coax them open; a harrowing mother-daughter escape from the Radom ghetto; a secret wedding in a blacked-out house in Lvov.

Travelling through Europe, tracing her family’s footsteps

Georgia followed in the Kurc family’s footsteps, travelling the route her family travelled, through Poland, Austria, Italy, and Brazil.  Some of the most moving moments were wandering the streets of Radom, where she discovered a mezuzah - one of only 2 remaining - in the doorway to their old apartment building, and standing with her son on the train platform in Bari, where several relatives reunited after the war.

Researching her family story

The story came together through travel, extensive interviews and outside research, with key findings through the Shoah Foundation, the Hoover Institution at Stamford and the UK Ministry of Defence.

Fact to fiction

While the bones of the story are all true (e.g., who was where, when), Georgia’s goal in writing We Were the Lucky Ones was to put readers in the shoes of her relatives, which is why she chose to write the novel in the present tense - to help the story feel relevant, visceral, memorable.  When she finally allowed herself to fictionalize the details it helped to bring the story closer to the truth.

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Purged by Peter Laws

Debut crime novel, first in a series, by Baptist minister Peter Laws

Introducing Matt Hunter, a sociology professor, who also assists the police over religiously-motivated crimes…

“A tight and gripping story…Purged [is] a book that is nigh impossible to put down and will leave the reader hooked from start to finish…let’s welcome Matt Hunter to the world of macabre crime fiction. He’s a damaged, complicated and interesting man, and we’re looking forward to spending more time with him.”

— Starburst Magazine

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Purged by Peter Laws
Allison & Busby / 16 February 2017 / £12.99 / trade paperback 

Matt Hunter lost his faith a long time ago. Formerly a minister, now a professor of sociology, he’s writing a book that debunks the Christian faith while assisting the police with religiously motivated crimes. 

On holiday with his family in Oxfordshire, Matt finds himself on edge in a seemingly idyllic village where wooden crosses hang at every turn. The stay becomes more sinister still when a local girl goes missing, followed by further disappearances. Caught up in an investigation that brings memories to the surface that he would prefer stay buried deep, Matt is on the trail of a killer determined to save us all.

Peter Laws is an ordained Baptist minister with a taste for the macabre. He writes a monthly column in The Fortean Times and also hosts the popular podcast and YouTube show The Flicks That Church Forgot which reviews horror films from a theological perspective. He regularly speaks and preaches at churches and has spoken at movie premieres, beer tasting evenings and paranormal conferences. He lives with his family in Bedfordshire.  Unleashed, the next Matt Hunter novel, will be published in 2018.  He is currently writing a non-fiction book for Icon Books exploring why we are drawn to the morbid (to be published in 2018). He's travelling the country drinking with vampires, hunting werewolves and meeting the women who collect dead babies (in Reborn doll form). 

Follow Peter on twitter @revpeterlaws and find out more at www.peterlaws.co.uk.  
He is available for interview, events and to write features.

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Kill the Father by Sadrone Dazieri

Published in hardback by Simon & Schuster on 9 February 2017 at £12.99

• Introducing an exciting new author, Sandrone Dazieri, with a brilliant, original and compelling debut thriller.
• A bestseller throughout Europe
• First in a planned series featuring Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre

“Absolutely electrifying. Kill the Father is one of those rare treasures: a page-turning thriller—in every sense of the phrase—that is also brilliantly nuanced and rich with insight into the complex and compelling minds of those, good and bad, who inhabit its pages. This novel is the new definition of a one-sitting read.”

— Jeffery Deaver

Two people, each shattered by their past, team to solve a series of killings and abductions...

‘The world is a curving wall of grey cement.  The world has muffled sounds and echoes.  The world is a circle two times the length of his out-stretched arms.  The first thing the boy learned in that circular world were his new names.  He has two.  Son is the name he prefers.  He has a right to it when he does the right things, when he obeys, when his thoughts are clear and quick.  Otherwise, his name is Beast.  When he’s called Beast, the boy is punished.’

When a woman is beheaded in a park outside Rome and her six-year-old son goes missing, the police unit assigned to the case sees an easy solution: they arrest the woman’s husband and await his confession. But the Chief of Rome’s Major Crimes unit doubts things are so simple. Secretly, he lures to the case two of Italy’s top analytical minds: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli, a fierce, warrior-like detective still reeling from having survived a bloody catastrophe, and Dante Torre, a man who spent his childhood trapped inside a concrete silo. Fed through the gloved hand of a masked kidnapper who called himself “The Father,” Dante emerged from his ordeal with crippling claustrophobia but, also, with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and hyper-observant capacities.

All evidence suggests that the Father is back and active after being dormant for decades. Indeed, he has left tell-tale signs that signal he’s looking forward to a reunion with Dante. But when Columba and Dante begin following the ever-more-bizarre trail of clues, they grasp that what’s really going on is darker than they ever imagined.

SANDRONE DAZIERI is the bestselling author of more than fifty screenplays. Kill the Father, the first in a planned series featuring Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre, is his British debut.

Early Praise for Kill The Father

• 'Ingenious’ John Verdon
• 'A mind-bending, stunningly original page-turner’ - Jonathan Kellerman
• 'An intense, gripping, and entirely unforgettable story…A thriller of the highest order.’ - Christopher Reich
• '[A] dazzling U.S. debut.... Told in brutal, often wrenching detail, this is not an odyssey for the faint of heart.’ - Publishers Weekly
• 'A dark treat for mystery buffs.’ - Kirkus Reviews
• 'Don't be surprised if Kill the Father becomes the next Big Thing in international crime fiction.' - Booklist, starred review

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The Liberation by Kate Furnivall

Paperback original / Simon & Schuster / £7.99 / 3 November 2016

Author of internationally bestselling The Russian Concubine returns with an unforgettably powerful story of love, loss and the long shadow of war.

‘Set in Sorrento and Naples this is a thrilling roller-coaster of a read, seductive, mysterious and edgy. I LOVED it’  Dinah Jefferies

The Liberation is set in Italy in 1945 as British and American troops attempt to bring order to the devastated country and Italy’s population fights to survive. Caterina Lombardi is desperate – her father is dead, her mother has disappeared and her brother is being drawn towards danger. One morning, among the ruins of the bombed Naples streets, Caterina is forced to go to extreme lengths to protect her own life and in doing so forges a future in which she must clear her father's name. An Allied Army officer accuses him of treason and Caterina discovers a plot against her family. Who can she trust and who is the real enemy now? And will the secrets of the past be her downfall?

Detailed research and wonderfully drawn characters make this a powerful, gripping read.

Kate Furnivall is the author of eight novels, including the international bestseller The Russian Concubine. She lives in Devon.

Praise for Kate Furnivall

• ‘Wonderful . . . hugely ambitious and atmospheric’ Kate Mosse 
• ‘The definition of a terrifically well-written page-turner’ Dinah Jefferies
•  ‘A thrilling plot ... Fast-paced with a sinister edge.’ Times 
• ‘Gripping . . . poignant, beautifully written ...will capture the reader to the last’ Sun 
• ‘Truly captivating’ Elle  
• ‘Perfect escapist reading’ Marie Claire  
• ‘An achingly beautiful epic’ New Woman
• ‘A rollicking good read’ The Daily Telegraph 
• ‘Breathtakingly good’ Marie Claire  

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Mercy Killing by Lisa Cutts

Paperback original / Simon & Schuster / 20 October 2016 / £7.99

Award-winning writer and Detective Constable Lisa Cutts returns with gripping and authentic new series featuring Detective Inspector Harry Powell

‘I SO enjoyed Mercy Killing. Taut. Tense. Insider knowledge leaps from every page’ 
Simon Booker, author of Without Trace

'Brutal, harrowing and compelling…Lisa Cutts has a unique voice: empathetic, observant, incisive. ‘
Elizabeth Haynes, author of Into the Darkest Corner

Could you ever justify murder…?

‘Usually Friday nights were Albie Woodville’s favourite part of the week.  He went home to his second-floor flat, shut the door, and after a simple meal purchased from the reduced section of his local Co-op, he settled down in front of his television to watch the programmes he had recorded that week.  However, something was wrong this particular Friday...
Albie heard the noise of the wood breaking and instantly knew that today was the day.’

The death of a local sex offender places the police officers at East Rise incident room under immense pressure – they must treat this case like any other murder, but they know what Albie Woodville did and can feel little sympathy. Except, as the investigation progresses, it becomes clear this isn’t just a one-off killing – someone is out for revenge... 

Lisa Cutts is the author of two previous police procedural novels, based on her twenty years of policing experience. She works as a detective constable for Kent Police and has spent ten years in the Serious Crime Directorate dealing mostly with murders and other serious investigations.  Her debut novel, Never Forget, won the 2014 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for best thriller