Disappeared                Crime Fiction

Anthony Quinn

If Detective John Rebus woke up in a decomposing cottage on the misty shores of Lough Neagh, and found himself balanced precariously on the edge of a pool of self-pity, while pitted against shadowy security forces and the IRA, the result might be something like Disappeared, Anthony Quinn’s first crime thriller.

The action is set in a wintry, water-bound landscape, a sniper’s puzzle of thick thorn hedges and slanting fields, which is inhabited by a small group of reclusive duck-hunters, who have retreated to the wilds of the lough shore in the hope of escaping their sinister pasts.

One of them, a former spy, believing his life is in grave danger, writes his own obituary, and publishes it in a newspaper the day before he is brutally murdered. Shortly afterwards, his handler, now suffering from Alzheimer’s and plagued by ghosts, disappears from his lough-shore cottage, presumed kidnapped.

Detective Celcius Daly is charged with investigating the murder, and must navigate his way through a dangerous world of cover-ups, abductions and killings to uncover a truth which threatens to destabilise the peace process.

Interwoven with the story of Daly’s faltering investigation are chapters describing the mysterious events which befall the kidnapped man. He escapes death and capture on several occasions with the help of a ghostly figure known as ‘the visitor’. He also sends a cryptic postcard to his sister and carer, which gives clues to his whereabouts.

The emotional climax involves a teenager’s search for his father's grave, one of the Disappeared, who was abducted and killed by the IRA. The teenager joins forces with Daly in the hunt for the missing man, and as their search unravels through the labyrinth of bogs and tree-lined coves around Lough Neagh, they discover a conspiracy of silence between the IRA and the security forces.

Anthony Quinn is a stunning new crime fiction author-this is his first novel.

Author’s Home: Dungannon, N. Ireland     World Rights

That Devil-Monk Hopkins   Literary Fiction

Norman White

Staging a revolution against conventional biography, That Devil-Monk Hopkins follows flights of fancy to reinvent and explore what the lives of Fr Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ and his mistress, Sister Winifred Nowlan, almost were, set against the times as they were. Abandoning the securities of a simple narrative and questioning the whole concept of ‘truth’, this complex and capricious tale is woven out of snippets of other people’s lives and memories, seldom reaching the satisfaction of solid fact, but always moving near the likeness of its subjects, like pictures seen through a misty screen.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as we know them appear in all their clarity and detail, and we ask ourselves repeatedly ‘Is this fact or invention, did this truly happen?’ Lively with the most surprising and esoteric observation and detail, the art-worlds of the English Aesthetes and the French Impressionists, the lives of the munitions workers of the First World War, the serio-comic escapades of units in the Easter Rising, Dublin 1916, all appear as oblique sidelights in the account, illuminating it and illuminated by it.

Fictions are invented upon fictions to explore the ‘truth’ that we are seeking, and it always avoids us. The shadowy worlds of the English spy in Ireland, into which Fr Hopkins plunges, and that of the prostitute in London, into which Winefred is drawn, involve them in half-truths, secrets, and innuendo, much like the way the book itself plunges into a shadowy world between fact and fiction. The world of art equally finds the protagonists groping for a style and understanding, while the world of politics fails to provide an answer either to the hero or to the heroine, both of whom are sacrificed, almost by accident, to the romanticizing juggernaut of national history.

The book’s method is inventive—a collection of randomly preserved pieces of varying historical credibility woven into a potential biography, and coming at the subjects from many different angles and in many voices, curious and enjoyable. Nabokov would have liked this novel.

Dr Norman White’s Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Oxford University Press, 1992, paperback 1994) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography prize (UK) and won the Dictionary of Literary Biography prize (USA).

Author's Home:  Venice, Italy.    World Rights.

The Devil’s Chord
A historical fantasy in four movements    Historical/Literary Fiction

Giulia Morisini

Music and passion intertwine throughout this compelling novel, set mainly in Venice during the last of the 18th and the early 19th century.

Napoleon Bonaparte, 26, and Sofia, 25, an orphan and a celebrated soprano at the hospital and orphanage, the Ospedaletto dei Derelitti in Venice, meet by chance in 1796, the year Bonaparte marches his ragged army across the Alps and conquers Northern Italy. The death throes of Venice provide a backdrop to the story as the untidy, gauche Bonaparte, with his brusque and animated gestures, deposes the Doge and destroys that most ancient republic.

The young general is in Venice incognito, and decides to attend Vespers to enjoy the voices of the ‘figlie di coro’ in the small church at the Ospedaletto, one of the four Venetian choruses renowned in Paris and throughout Europe. Sofia has learned that a famous guest will be among the congregation that night, and just before the music is about to begin, she pulls the curtains a little aside to take a peep. Bonaparte is captivated by the soprano’s voice, and catching sight of her through the chink in the curtains, he falls in love with the young passionate woman.

BellaMira, 10 years old, an orphan at the Ospedaletto and Sofia’s pupil, has a small golden ball in which she glimpses fleeting images of the past and the future. With his Corsican background and superstitious mind, Bonaparte is terrified of her and the images she sees in the ball, as his intimate private life is also laid bare. Who is the man behind the warrior? When one day the girl suddenly disappears from the Ospedaletto under mysterious circumstances, dramatic consequences follow in the wake of her disappearance which implicate all the main characters.

Giulia Morosini lives part of the year in Italy and part of the year near Copenhagen (with her black Labrador Hubert). She has had two anthologies published by Gyldendal. This is her second novel. Now that her children are grown she has the time to fulfil her lifelong desire to write fiction. She is also the author of The Venetian Secret, A Nun’s Tale, 1620.

Author’s Home: Copenhagen, Denmark. World rights.

Also by Giulia Morosini:

The Venetian Secret, A Nun’s Tale 1620    Historical/Literary Fiction

An epic drama set in the heart of Venice, a city riddled by deceit.

Intelligent and passionate, Marietta, 19, lives at a time when dowries are reaching for the skies. Child of a prestigious noble family, the Morosinis, she is no more than a pawn in a frenzied money game to win honour and social status, and consequently, she falls victim to religious fervour and political machinations.

Forced by her family to take the veil, Marietta contemplates the impossible. She makes up her mind to defy God, throw off the chains of her destiny, and try to escape to a life in exile with her childhood love, her peer, the nobleman Tommaso Contarini.

An old, forgotten painting by Paolo Veronese, showing her beautiful great aunt Rosalba Morosini as a young bride to be, turns out to be essential for her plans to leave behind bleak convent life, the hellfire of the Inquisition, her hateful mother and vile brother, and the convent confessor Orsolo Lupi. Rosalba‘s romance brings the passion back into Marietta’s life.

This is a story of love and the striving for personal freedom in a world where paradox and hypocrisy rule. Historical facts blend with fiction in this tale of the dark side of early 17th century Venice.

World Rights.

Memory Scents                 Mystery

Gayle Carter-Curtis

She looked even more beautiful now than she had done when she’d been alive. Her green eyes were still sparkling, but now glazed, they held a snapshot of the fear that she had endured only moments previously. Death fascinated Tim. The way a person’s eyes altered, showing no emotion, becoming empty, coloured oval shaped glass. He loved that part, when he could reflect on the stillness of his victim like a photo in an album.

Ten years after the disappearance of Alice and her mother can’t process the information that she may have been murdered by a serial killer. She finds solace in writing Alice love letters, believing that this will bring her daughter home, but years of denial, pain and isolation may have left behind an inability to accept the truth.

An unsolved series of child murders is the shocking news that hits Chrissie shortly after moving to a picturesque North Norfolk coastal village. Sinister paranormal activity in her idyllic cottage causes her to wonder if she is receiving a message from one of the victims, or if her memory is playing tricks on her and she is recalling a past life. Many eerie coincidences begin to reveal the truth.

Grace is married to a serial killer, something she has been aware of for almost a year. Her decision to keep it a secret comes from her desire for revenge, but she may have left her carefully thought out plans too late. All three women are linked in their involvement with the same nightmare, as they try to unravel the catastrophic chain of events caused by a child killer.

Author’s Home: Norfolk, England. World Rights.

The Irish Twins       Historical Fiction

Bob Huerter

Twin Irish boys, the product of an illicit union between a priest and a young woman in his parish, are adopted, one to live in Belfast, the other in America, and their lives become intertwined years later as The Troubles envelop all of Ireland. Bob Huerter delivers a fast paced, engrossing historical novel, filled with action, passion and politics, all against the background of The Troubles.

Author's Home: Nebraska, U.S.   World Rights

Flake         General Fiction

Tara West 

It’s the ‘what ifs?’ that keep thirty-something Tommie Shaw awake at night. Well, mostly it’s her big gay housemate Blob, a morbidly obese actor and Morrissey impersonator, who keeps her awake as he vogues around their shabby kitchen. But the ‘what ifs?’ are definitely up there.

What if her mother’s soon-to-be-released sensational memoirs air all of Tommie’s sad and sordid laundry? What if she can’t save her beleaguered colleagues’ jobs when she’s hit with an unwelcome promotion? What if Gluteus Maximus’s wife learns of their affair? What if Blob finds out he didn’t win the role in the TV ad through talent alone but through her influence? And what if her depression comes back?

After fifteen years in a walking coma, life comes looking for Tommie Shaw – but as the pressure mounts, can her artistic soul take the heat? Fresh, highly original and darkly funny, Flake is a subtle, bittersweet account of one woman’s struggle to stop falling apart.

Tara West is the author of Fodder (Blackstaff Press).

Author's Home: Country Antrim, N. Ireland. World Rights.

Liam McCann

Former cop and university lecturer Ed Sampson discovers that an apparent natural disaster was actually caused by a mysterious rogue satellite. When he learns that the power behind the incident intends to use new technology to create a space-based weapons system that will permanently alter the world’s climate, he is thrown headlong into a nightmare. Meanwhile, the same technology is being used by the villains to terraform the Martian surface and make it habitable by man.

With investigative teams drawing blanks, and with death stalking him at every turn, Sampson follows the trail to the European Space Agency, and to a solar furnace hidden high in the Pyrenees. There he learns that the free world is threatened by a conspiracy so terrifying that even the superpowers must face the prospect of global annihilation. A race against time leads to pitched battles at the solar furnace and on the Martian surface that will decide the fate of those on Earth.

Liam McCann’s science-fiction thriller takes the reader on a roller coaster ride and lends itself perfectly to adaptation as a major Hollywood blockbuster.

Author's Home: Surrey, England.  World Rights

Biddy Weirdo            General Fiction

Lesley Richardson

A spare and moving account of the devastating effects of a relentless campaign of bullying on its subject, a shy young loner with an exceptional talent for drawing and an emotionally crippled father. Set in a fictional seaside town in Northern Ireland, this story with universal appeal is at once full of pathos and speckled with black humour. Reminiscent of Brian Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne in its acute portrait of the quiet desperation of the socially inept, this is a very promising first novel from a writer with much potential.

 Author's home: Bangor, N. Ireland. World Rights

Phoebe and Thelonius   Literary Fiction

Trina Boyer Barchi

A lyrical, heartfelt look at a brother and sister, the people they encounter and the relationships they form in a pivotal summer in Campo de Fiore in Rome.

Author's Home: Rome, Italy. World Rights.

Russian Dolls           Literary Fiction

Tanya Ravenswater

Beautifully written with a simple lyricism which is sustained apparently effortlessly throughout, this is a compelling first novel of rare integrity and compassion which breaks down the barriers between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and gives us a unique insight into the world of the obsessive-compulsive – and the power of friendship, compassion and love.

Author's Home: Cheshire, England. World Rights.

          Also by Tanya Ravenswater:     

Middletown Tales       Short story collection

A collection of quirky, darkly humorous tales, all set in the fictional Northern English town of Middleton.The events and characters portrayed in individual stories intertwine to create a pleasing sense of unity of time, place and community. Gentle satire with a sometimes savage twist in the tale. World Rights.

The Scapegoat:Book I in the Robert Darwin series

Crime Thriller

Fiona Mackenzie

A young musician stands trial for murder, and the guilty sit in judgment on the innocent. Half brothers Robert Darwin, who applies Darwinian theory to solve crimes, and the Reverend Gideon Flint, who believes in creationism, battle for the soul of Robert’s estranged son Levi Capra. 

Trapped between the two half-brothers, Darwin’s estranged son is on trial for a violent murder of a young girl.Someone has framed him, and Darwin is determined to find out the truth and make amends. Along side Darwin’s efforts to find the evidence to free his son, the narrative moves to tell the dark secrets of the twelve jurors sitting on Levi’s trial.Each one has killed, and each carries the toxic burden of guilt.Levi becomes their scapegoat.

Author's Home: Dorset, England. World Rights.

Inside Out; Under the Rainbow; Time and Tide Irish Women’s Fiction

Mary O’Sullivan

The fourth, fifth and sixth novels by Irish author Mary O’Sullivan. Mary’s books are published by Poolbeg in Ireland. She is ready for the world stage. The next Maeve Binchy?

Author home's: County Cork, Ireland.  World Rights  (Ireland sold).

Non-Fiction:

Muses in the Landscape    Garden Poetry Illustrated     Gardening/Poetry

Curtice Taylor