Pendulum
Adam Hamdy
(UK: Headline, 2016; USA: Quercus, 2017)

You wake. Confused. Disorientated… A noose is round your neck… You are bound, standing on a chair… All you can focus on is the man in the mask tightening the rope… You are about to die.

John Wallace has no idea why he has been targeted. No idea who his attacker is. No idea how he will prevent the inevitable. Then the pendulum of fate swings in his favour. He has one chance to escape, find the truth and halt his destruction.  The momentum is in his favour for now. But with a killer on his tail, everything can change with one swing of this deadly pendulum…

Recommended by:
Jane Johnson

Available in the UK via ‘My Local Bookshop‘ search engine or Amazon (Pendulum)
Available in the USA via Amazon (Pendulum)

I Am Pilgrim
Terry Hayes
(UK: Corgi, 2014; USA: Atria/Emily Bestler, 2014)

Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn’t exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder – and Pilgrim wrote the book.

Recommended by:
Christopher Gawor, Tutor

Available in the UK via ‘My Local Bookshop‘ search engine or Amazon (I Am Pilgrim)
Available in the USA via Amazon (I Am Pilgrim)

Blackout
(Dark Iceland: book 3)
Ragnar Jónasson
(UK: Orenda Books, 2016; USA: Orenda Books, 2016)

On the shores of a tranquil fjord in Northern Iceland, a man is brutally beaten to death on a bright summer’s night. As the 24-hour light of the arctic summer is transformed into darkness by an ash cloud from a recent volcanic eruption, a young reporter leaves Reykajvik to investigate on her own, unaware that an innocent person’s life hangs in the balance. Ari Thor Arason and his colleagues on the tiny police force in Siglufjordur struggle with an increasingly perplexing case, while their own serious personal problems push them to the limit. What secrets does the dead man harbour, and what is the young reporter hiding? As silent, unspoken horrors from the past threaten them all, and the darkness deepens, it s a race against time to find the killer before someone else dies…

Recommended by:
Christopher Norris, Jolabokaflod Book Campaign

Available in the UK via ‘My Local Bookshop‘ search engine or Amazon (Blackout)
Available in the USA via (Blackout)

The Undesired
Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
(UK: Hodder Paperbacks, 2016; USA: Minotaur, 2017)

Aldis is working in a juvenile detention centre in rural Iceland. She witnesses something deeply disturbing in the middle of the night; soon afterwards, two of the boys at the centre are dead.

Decades later, single father Odinn is looking into alleged abuse at the centre following the unexplained death of the colleague who was previously running the investigation. The more he finds out, though, the more it seems the odd events of the 1970s are linked to the accident that killed his ex-wife. Was her death something more sinister?

Recommended by:
Christopher Norris, Jolabokaflod Book Campaign

Available in the UK via ‘My Local Bookshop‘ search engine or Amazon (The Undesired)
Available in the USA via Amazon (The Undesired)