Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

In Jake, Marisa has found everything she’s ever wanted. Then their new lodger, Kate, arrives. Something about Kate isn’t right. Is it the way she looks at Marisa’s boyfriend? Sits too close on the sofa? Constantly asks about the baby they are trying for? Or is it all just in Marisa’s head? After all, that’s what her Jake keeps telling her, and she trusts him - doesn’t she? But Marisa knows something is wrong. That the woman sleeping in their house will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Marisa just doesn’t know why.

Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess. She’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But the longer Winifred spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.

In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together, with tragic consequences. There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit.

Vanessa Wye was 15 years old when she first had sex with her English teacher. She is now 32 and the teacher, Jacob Strane, has just been accused of sexual abuse by another former student of his. Vanessa is horrified by this news, because she is quite certain that the relationship she had with Strane wasn’t abuse. It was love. She’s sure of that. But now, in 2017, in the midst of allegations against powerful men, she is being asked to redefine the great love story of her life - her great sexual awakening - as rape.

Clean begins with an inescapable fact: a girl has died. Told by Estela, a maid to a wealthy, middle class family who speaks to us from a locked room, we hear of her plight and the circumstances that led to this moment. As we enter into her account of her daily existence, we see how her apparently simple life begins to sour, but would that drive her to the unthinkable? Disturbing and profound, Clean explores domestic work, class and violence, against the backdrop of Chile’s changing political landscape. This is one of the most daring and compelling thrillers in international literature.

In November 2021, Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of five counts of sex-trafficking of minors, and now faces 55 years in prison for the role she played in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of four girls. The trial was meticulously covered by journalist and legal reporter Lucia Osborne-Crowley, one of only four reporters allowed into the courtroom every day. The Lasting Harm is her account of that trial, a gripping true crime drama and a blistering critique of a criminal justice system ill-equipped to deliver justice for abuse survivors, no matter the outcome.

Penny Rush has problems. Freshly divorced from her mobile knife-sharpener husband, she has returned home to Santa Barbara to deal with her grandfather, who is being moved into a retirement home by his cruel second wife. Her grandmother, meanwhile, has been found in possession of a sinister sounding weapon called ‘the scintilltor’ and something even worse in her woodshed. Penny’s parents have been missing in the Australian outback for many years now, and so Penny must deal with this spiralling family crisis alone. Enter The Dog of the North.

Dove Connolly is dead. That’s not good for anyone in Tullyanna, never mind Dove. Now his best friend, Sharkey, is home asking awkward questions about Dove’s death, about the strange graphic novel he left behind and, most of all, about Sandra. Sandra Mohan. Missing now for more than a decade, whereabouts unknown. This, however, is a town dead-set on keeping its secrets. And Sharkey is already drawing attention from all the wrong quarters.

June, 1878. The body of a boy is pulled from the depths of the River Thames, suspected to be the beloved missing child of the widely admired Liberal MP Ralph Gethin. Four months earlier. Harriet is a young maid newly employed at Finton Hall. Fleeing the drudgery of an unwanted engagement in the small village where she grew up, Harriet is entranced by the grand country hall; she is entranced too by her glamorous mistress Clara Gethin, whose unearthly singing voice floats through the house. But Clara, though captivating, is erratic.

Hurtling past the downtrodden communities of Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he’s landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office. A wealthy art lover named John Long and his wife Eve have agreed to host Val at their sprawling ranch. Rumors and intrigue surround the couple: Eve left behind an itinerant life riding the rails and singing in a western swing band.

Robin Lyons is back in her hometown of Birmingham and now a DCI with Force Homicide, working directly under Samir, the man who broke her heart almost 20 years ago. When a woman is found stabbed to death in a derelict factory and no one comes forward to identify the body, Robin and her team must not only hunt for the murderer, but also solve the mystery of who their victim might be.

Florence Grimes is a 31-year-old party girl who always takes the easy way out. After a dismal end to her girlband career, she's living in West London, single, broke and unfulfilled with only her son Dylan to keep her afloat. But then Alfie Risby, the ten-year-old heir to a frozen food empire and Dylan’s school rival, mysteriously vanishes on a class trip, and Dylan becomes a prime suspect.

Nik Christou has been a rent boy since he was 15. He knows the ins and outs of Piccadilly Circus, how to spot a pretty policeman and to interpret a fleeting glance. One summer night his life is turned upside down, first by violence and then by an accusation of murder. Anna Treadway, fleeing the ghosts of her past, works as a dresser in Soho’s Galaxy theatre. She has learned never to place too much trust in the long arm of the law and, convinced Nik is innocent, she determines to find him an alibi.

Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of France’s most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of an influential man. At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Springora, now in her 40s and the director of one of France’s leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her story. Consent is the story of her stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Springora’s memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a 13-year-old girl to become involved with a 50-year-old man.

Dylan Read, the legendary country pop star, has spent fifteen years learning to craft the perfect good girl image. But Dylan is privately haunted by the loss of her best friend Kelsey, who went missing the year before Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame. When Kelsey’s body is found at the bottom of a New England lake where they grew up, Dylan is drawn back to her hometown where she must revisit their ill-fated teenage friendship and reckon with secrets that have stayed hidden for decades…

Someone is watching Etta. Footsteps in the night, the security light coming on at strange hours...is it all just her curtain-twitching neighbours, who seem to monitor her every move? Or is her little online problem making her paranoid? Because Etta needs to win big. She joined a gambling website to get a bit of cash, hoping to convince her boyfriend, Ola, that they can afford to get married. And she was so good at it...until she wasn’t. Luckily, she’s made a friend who hit the jackpot, and if she plays her cards right, he could lend her the money to win everything back. Easy.

In 1933, after Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated power in Germany, Immanuel Birnbaum, a German-Jewish journalist based in Warsaw, is forbidden from writing for newspapers in his homeland. Six years later, just months before the German invasion of Poland that ignites World War II, Immanuel escapes to Sweden with his wife and two young sons.

Life is going well for Marie. She and her husband, Laurent, live a comfortable life in a large apartment in the 11th arrondissement in Paris. Laurent has a good job at a big law firm, and Marie enjoys her work at a bank, where she feels appreciated by her clients and colleagues. Comfortable, secure and ready for family life, the couple begin to try for a baby. But not long afterwards Marie experiences a shocking encounter which threatens to derail their plans completely, and her world slowly starts to fall apart.