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“Di Fulvio exposes souls with the skills of a surgeon. It’s like turning the pages of something forbidden—seductive, elegant and dangerous.”—Alan Rickman

“A wonderful first novel that will seduce the fans of deranged murderers in the style of Hannibal Lecter. And beautifully written to boot.”—RTL

“A novel that caresses and kisses in order to violate the reader with greater ease.”—Rolling Stone

“A powerful psycho-thriller of spine-shivering intensity. Written with immense intelligence and passionate menace. Not to be read alone at night.”—The Times

“Know why she’s smiling?” he asked, pointing a small torch at the corpse. “Fish hooks. Two fish hooks at the corners of her mouth, a bit of nylon, pull it round the back of the head and tie a knot. Pretty straightforward, right?” Amaldi noticed the metallic glint at the corners of the taut mouth.

Inspector Amaldi has enough problems: a city choked by a pestilent rubbish strike, a beautiful student harassed by a telephone stalker, a colleague dying of cancer, and the mysterious disappearance of arson files concerning the city’s orphanage. Then the mutilated bodies begin to appear.

This novel of violence and decay, with its vividly portrayed characters, takes place over a few oppressive weeks in an unnamed Italian city that strongly evokes Genoa. A finalist for the European Crime Writing Prize.

“A splendid reminder of the virtues of the traditional novel, this work tackles the territory of Balzac and Zola, not just in the solidity of its construction and characters, but in its readiness to tackle corruption in church and state.”-The Independent, UK

"In contrast with Mankell, the warm-hearted psychologist of the individual, we find Geeraerts, a cold-blooded surgeon who lays bare the ills of a society. This thriller, so loyal to the genre that the irony and parody are barely perceptible, is relentless.”—Tagesspiegel Berlin

“One of Geeraerts’ literary achievements is that such an arrogant and baroque character as Savelkoul ends up attracting your sympathy. A revealing study of a very dark society.”—Facts Zurich

“Geeraerts exposes the mechanics of corruption, the abuse of power, political cynicism and the excesses triggered by religious delusion.”—ZDF

Albert Savelkoul, the public prosecutor of Antwerp, has power, money, an aristocratic wife, and a high-maintenance mistress. A wonderful life—until Opus Dei takes a less than benevolent interest in it. In the course of this subversive psychological thriller, the shameless, slippery Albert becomes an almost-lovable, desperate victim of a power structure controlled by effete aristocrats, a corrupt judiciary, and ultra-right fanatics of the Catholic church.

Jef Geeraerts, born in 1930 in Antwerp, was much admired by Henry Miller and is Belgium's best-known author after Georges Simenon. He was educated in Jesuit schools and spent time as a colonial administrator and army officer in the Belgian Congo. He gained international acclaim with his Gangrene Cycle, four novels based on his experience in the Congo. Since then he has focused on crime and noir novels, of which The Public Prosecutor is the first to be published in English.

The fifth in the Martin Bora WWII mystery series. In May 1941, Wehrmacht officer Bora is sent to Crete, recently occupied by the German army, and must investigate the brutal murder of a Red Cross representative befriended by SS-Chief Himmler. All the clues lead to a platoon of trigger-happy German paratroopers, but is this the truth?

Bora takes to the mountains of Crete to solve the case, navigating his way between local bandits and foreign resistance fighters. With echoes of Claus von Stauffenberg, Bora is torn between his duty as an officer and his integrity as a human being.

“At fifty the good Buddhist takes to the road, leaving all his belongings behind. His sole possession is a begging bowl. That’s how it should be. The problem was, there were four million dollars in my begging bowl and the mafia were after me. It was their money. They wanted it back, and they also wanted the girl, the woman who was with me: Sonia Kovalevskaya”.

Not only a thriller about murder and big money but also a powerful evocation of the cruel history that binds Russia and Germany.

Günter Ohnemus, born in 1946, lives in Munich and writes novels, essays and translations. This is his first novel to be translated into English.

“Prose that penetrates the reader’s mind like speed, fast paced, without an ounce of fat.”—Weltwoche

He’s found five pounds of top--quality Peruvian cocaine in a suit-case. Pur-sued by the police and drug traffickers the luckless Blum falls prey to the frenzied paranoia of the cocaine addict and dealer. This is a fast-paced thriller written with acerbic humour, a hardboiled evocation of drug-fuelled existence and a penetrating observation of those at the edge of German society.

Having broken his addiction to on heroin at the age of thirty, Jörg Fauser spent much of the rest of his life dependent on alcohol. He died aged forty-three in 1987, run over by a truck at four am on a German highway.

"Solana's excellent novel, set in the streets and parlors of Barcelona, offers probing social commentary and an excellent crime story."—Booklist

Two detectives, brothers Borja and Eduard, are contracted by best-selling author Teresa Solana to research the world of so-called alternative therapies. They enroll for a course at Zen Moments, an exclusive meditation center in the ritziest part of Barcelona, only to discover the director murdered, whacked in the head with a statuette of the Buddha. The violent death of a neighbor—who happens to be a CIA agent—simultaneously drags them into an international conspiracy complicated by Borja's attempt to smuggle a priceless Assyrian figurine, the Lioness of Baghdad.

In this, the third in her satirical series, Catalan "noir" novelist Teresa Solana mercilessly punctures the pretensions of New Age quacks who promote pseudo-science and pseudo-spirituality. At the same time, Solana draws compassionate portraits of characters trying to live "ordinary" lives in circumstances that have ceased to be normal, yet still cope with such everyday issues as adultery, menopause, and simply surviving to the end of the month.

Born in 1962, Teresa Solana lives in Barcelona, Spain. She has written several novels, some kept quietly in her drawer, others highly acclaimed. A Not So Perfect Crime, the first in this series, won the 2007 Brigada 21 Prize for the best Catalan mystery novel.

Peter Bush is the well known translator of Leonardo Padura and Juan Goytisolo.

Praise for Friedrich Glauser’s other Sergeant Studer novels:

“Fever is a deviously plotted procedural. Not many can outdo Friedrich Glauser.”—The New York Times

“This gem contains echoes of Dürrenmatt, Fritz Lang’s film M and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Both a compelling mystery and an illuminating finely wrought mainstream novel, Matto’s Realm will make it clear to American readers why the German language prize for detective fiction is named after Glauser.”—Publishers Weekly

“Thumbprint is a fine example of the craft of detective writing in a period which fans will regard as the golden age of crime fiction.”—The Sunday Telegraph

This is the fifth, and last, novel in the much-acclaimed Sergeant Studer series. Why must the festive dinner in the Hirschen Inn be interrupted? A murder puts an end to the wedding celebration of Studer’s daughter. A man is found with a sharpened bicycle spoke embedded in his back, and a suspect is quickly arrested—a bit too quickly, thinks Studer. Property speculation, usury, and betrayed love find their way into this tightly written mystery novel that calls on Studer’s intuitive, often absurd, yet efficient police methods.

The Spoke, a European crime classic, was first published in 1937. It has been translated into six languages. This is its first publication in English.

Friedrich Glauser is a legendary figure in European crime writing. He was a morphine and opium addict much of his life and began writing crime novels while he was an inmate at the Swiss insane asylum Waldau.

"Kettenbach provides answers that are either darkly humorous or melancholically tragic, depending on how black the reader's heart proves to be."—Booklist

"Black Ice is a devilish dive into an obsessed mind by a prolific German writer."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

The cover cites Simenon and Highsmith in comparison. I'll not quibble with that."—Tangled Web

"A look into the individual's soul laid bare, into its abyss and its hopeless entanglements. Stories told along the razor-sharp edge of reality."—Die Zeit

Young lawyer Alexander Zabel has been pressured by the head of his law practice into defending the indefensible: a lying, power obsessed adulterer and ruthless industrialist accused of wrongfully dismissing his assistant and mistress. She is thirty-four; he, seventy-eight: a despot who has always had his way, now wheelchair-bound and dying of cancer. Alex must deal with a hopeless case, his growing sympathy for a repulsive client, and his sexual attraction to Klofft's elderly wife.

Less a thriller than an investigative and psychological cliffhanger, this novel examines how eroticism is somehow amplified by a sense of approaching death and presents insights into the corrosive desire for revenge, and the narrowing horizons of old age.

Hans Werner Kettenbach was born near Cologne. He published his first novel at the age of fifty. Previous jobs he has held include construction worker, court stenographer, football journalist, and foreign correspondent in New York. This is his third novel published by Bitter Lemon Press.

Winner of France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt.

A haunting work, reminiscent of Albert Camus, that portrays with exquisite psychological detail the emotional crisis in the life of Jean Calmet, a young Swiss schoolteacher. As we watch the father's cremation in the opening chapter, we sense that, even though his father's body has been reduced to ashes, his spirit survives to haunt Jean. His father's prodigious vitality and virility had crushed his family and ruined his son's childhood. Even after his father's death, Jean cannot be free. The parental ogre's actions continue to suck Jean into a vortex of despair.

Jacques Chessex, a giant of Swiss literature, won the Grand Prix de la langue française and was awarded the Grand Prix Jean Giono for his entire work. Bitter Lemon Press published his novels The Vampire of Ropraz and A Jew Must Die to high acclaim. He died in 2009 at age seventy-five.

“Silky prose in this harrowing account of crime and punishment.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Using spare, effective prose, Chessex brilliantly renders both the inhospitable winter landscape of the mountains and the harshness of a society that makes monsters of its victims.’—London Review of Books

“A superb novel, hard as a winter in these landscapes of dark forests, where an atmosphere of prejudice and violence envelops the reader.”—L’Express

“It’s beautiful; it’s pure, like a blue sky over a black forest. Giono without garlic and olives.”—Le Point

“Far from just telling us a simple story Chessex has had the intelligence to integrate a dose of poetry, of the aesthetics of sin, and of the metaphysics of the monster.”—Lire

Jacques Chessex, winner of the prestigious Goncourt prize, takes a true story and weaves it into a lyrical tale of fear and cruelty.

1903, Ropraz, a small village near the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. On a howling December day, a lone walker discovers a recently opened tomb, the body of a young woman violated, her left hand cut off, genitals mutilated, and heart carved out. There is horror in the nearby villages: the return of atavistic superstitions and mutual suspicions. Then two more bodies are violated. A suspect must be found. Favez, a stableboy with bloodshot eyes, is arrested and placed in psychiatric care. He escapes, enlists in the Foreign Legion as the First World War begins, and is sent into battle in the trenches of the Somme.

Jacques Chessex, born in 1934, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize for his novel A Father’s Love. He is considered one of Switzerland’s greatest living authors. He lives in Ropraz.

After Joel Dicker, here is the latest literary sensation from Switzerland: brilliant twenty-five-year-old novelist Quentin Mouron with his first mystery novel, which garnered ecstatic reviews in the French-speaking world. This is the first time his work is available in English.

Three Drops of Blood and a Cloud of Cocaine is a darkly humorous literary and psychological mystery set in a Boston still suffering from the consequences of the financial crisis.

Written with the pace and controlled violence of the very best Tarantino film

When old Jimmy Henderson is found murdered in his Ford pick-up truck in a suburb of Boston, Sheriff Paul McCarthy takes charge of the investigation. Soon, Franck, a young private detective visiting from New York, also takes an interest in the case.

Breaking the conventions of the genre, the novel holds a satirical mirror to our society by entering the minds of two men right on the edge of sanity. Sheriff McCarthy, a church-going man, desperately trying to keep a boundary between the sordidness of his investigations and his private life. And Franck, a violent, decadent dandy, always rushing to the bathroom for another line of coke, revealing the darker workings of the case with a blood curdling laugh. When the two men finally meet the entire existence of the sheriff as a righteous family man – and probably as a police officer -- will be turned on its head.


“Mouron is a revelation. He juggles characters with ease in a seamy world perfectly evoked, and all of it is done in a taut high-tempo style. “ HuffPost

“Three Drops follows the US tradition of the searing social novel, literary, troubling, to be read in one sitting. It leaves a bitter and vivid after-taste, like the morning after a sleepless night.” Le Temps

“It’s a fine example of the craft of detective writing in a period which some regard as the golden age of crime fiction.”—The Sunday Telegraph

The death of a traveling salesman appears to be an open and shut case. Studer is confronted with an obvious suspect and a confession to the murder. But nothing is what it seems. Envy, hatred, and the corrosive power of money lie just beneath the surface. Studer’s investigation soon splinters the glassy façade of Switzerland’s tidy villages and manicured forests.

Diagnosed a schizophrenic, addicted to morphine and opium, Friedrich Glauser spent the greater part of his life in psychiatric wards, insane asylums and prison. His acute observations conjure up a world of those at the margins of society.

"An agile novel written in a language perfectly pitched for the subject matter, a ruthless dissection of a fast decaying society"—José Saramago, Nobel Prize winner

The English translation of hit novel Las Viudas de Los Jueves!

“Piñeiro’s clever U.S. debut.. . illuminates the hypocrisies of the country's upper classes after 9/11.”—Publishers Weekly

“Piñeiro is particularly skilful at exposing the social forces undermining Argentine society, and the fragility of personal relationships. We learn the surprising truth of the three men’s death in the final chapter; the build-up to it is riveting.”—The Times (London)

"Piñeiro builds up tension through banal, domestic details and the accretion of despair in everyday marital and professional struggles. There may be bloody murder at the centre of this novel, but the dystopia portrayed is an indictment not solely of an assassin but of Argentina’s class structure and the willful blindness of its petty bourgeoisie."—Times Literary Supplement

“A razor-sharp psychological and social portrait not only of Argentina, but of the afluent Western world as a whole.”—Rosa Montero

Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires. It's Thursday night at the magnificent Scaglia house. Behind the locked gates, shielded from the crime, poverty, and filth of the people on the streets, the Scaglias and their friends hide lives of infidelity, alcoholism, and abusive marriage. Claudia Piñeiro's novel eerily foreshadowed a criminal case that generated a scandal in the Argentine media. But this is more than a story about crime. The suspense is a byproduct of Piñeiro's hand at crafting a psychological portrait of a professional class that lives beyond its means and leads secret lives of deadly stress and despair. It takes place during the post-9/11 economic meltdown in Argentina, but it is a universal story that will resonate among credit-crunched readers of today.

The film of Thursday Night Widows, by Argentine New Wave and award-winning director Marcelo Piñeyro is coming soon with trailers available online.

Claudia Piñeiro was a journalist, playwright, and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pléyade Annual Journalism Award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of literary crime novels that are all bestsellers in Latin America and have been translated into four languages. This novel won the Clarin Prize for fiction and is her first title to be available in English.