Current Projects and Authors
Fiction:
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 Ovid Kent Mysteries
Saul Isler
Please meet Mr. Ovid Kent, a man we believe you’ll like, in spite of his shortcomings, which are few, we assure you. Ovid is not your typical 21st century sleuth. He is more a throwback to the '20s, '30s and '40s, the Hammett/Chandler era, a more cozy criminalist. Could Ovid make it to the "silver screen?" I guess he could, but only as a nouveau-noir sort of anti-hero. He's not Iron Man, he's just Mid-age Man doing his limited best to stumble toward a solution. Ovid is a slightly overweight, semi-alcoholic, middle-aged, San Francisco-based rare book & autograph dealer, formerly with the DEA. He can't even shoot straight and doesn't even like guns.
But he’s not a man to be crossed.
Ovid’s a lot like you and me but for one important difference. Ovid Kent, due to a fortuitous fishing accident about a year ago, can see and talk to and become pals with the ethereal likes of Babe Ruth and . . . William Shakespeare.
Author’s Home: San Francisco Bay Area, U.S. World Rights.
Killing Shakespeare An Ovid Kent Novel Mystery
Killing Shakespeare is actually a pair of tales with parallel arcs.
Opening the first, a man and woman make love in a small loft room under the thatched roof of the Crown Inn in Oxford, England. They then meet repeatedly in the same room for the same purpose. The year is 1605. Their trysts are secret because the lovers are married; not, of course, to each other. A child is born of their ongoing clandestine affair. The man, whose reputation as a playwright and poet is growing throughout his country, is William Shakespeare. The woman is Jane Davenant, the wife of the inn’s proprietor, who sleeps peacefully, one floor below. Jane will later be known as “The Dark Lady” of Shakespearean legend.
In the second tale, set four hundred years later in 2010, beginning in America and moving on to England, the antagonist, for unknown reasons, is determined to seek vengeance against the Bard. This vengeance, foreshadowed by the antagonist’s poems which pathetically mimic Shakespeare’s style, begins with separate thefts and vandalism of the Bard’s works, first in San Francisco at the Legion of Honor Museum, then moving on, unexpectedly, to Las Vegas at the Bellagio’s Gallery of Art. It then escalates from an assault in Milwaukee at the Meir Shakespeare Library to explosive mayhem and murder at Washington DC’s venerated Folger Shakespeare Library, the largest repository of Shakespeare’s works and artifacts in America.
To solve these crimes, our protagonist Ovid Kent is hired by Sir Nigel Deming-Smith, billionaire English financier and owner of the world’s largest private collection of Shakespeareana, one that has been the repeated target of the antagonist’s attacks. Ovid is aided by Sir Nigel’s peripatetic private secretary L. Lewis Lumsley and by a frequently evanescing Will Shakespeare himself.
The storylines have their ironic nexus in Oxford, in the very room of the very inn where the first tale began. There, the stunning climax plays itself out in a breath-holding scene between Ovid, his frequently emerging friend Will Shakespeare and the antagonist.
Babe Ruth Is Missing An Ovid Kent Novel Mystery
Ovid Kent is hired to find and return the prized autograph of Babe Ruth stolen from the autistic son of a famous nonagenarian trial lawyer. After a legendary sturgeon sends him to the hospital, where he falls in love with his intake nurse, he begins a fruitless search of the Bay Area. The search leads him to Cleveland where the lawyer’s son had secured the Babe’s signature half a century earlier. There, with the help of the ethereal and nagging Babe himself, Ovid finds the thief, the autograph and a bonus: his estranged mother.
Babe Ruth is Missing is a delightful and funny character-driven mystery/cozy based upon an incident in Saul Isler’s own life, chronicled as one of NPR’s first National Story Project entries and in the recent NPR/Henry Holt best-selling anthology, I Thought My Father Was God.
Waypoint Thriller
Matthew Howe
Julie LePlant is a frustrated artist whose dull, day-job existence is shattered when she’s abducted by a mysterious stranger known only as John. Drugged unconscious, Julie awakens in a dingy motel room to make a horrifying discovery - there’s a bomb strapped to her chest, and she has 24 hours to travel a thousand miles to find the code that will disarm it. A fast paced thriller-‘24’ meets Harlen Coben in a breathtaking race against the clock.
Author's Home: New York. World Rights.
A Kingdom for the Sea Literary Fiction
John Walsh
We all have dreams. Many of us put them off until it’s too late. Sarah and Brid seize the moment and, with only a vague notion, set off from Dublin to the West to realize their dream. They have the energy of youth, the spirit of adventure, a blindness to the mistakes they are going to make.
Their dream takes shape in the form of Eamon Tierney’s rundown house in the village of Kilbeg. Even as they make the decision to take on the massive task of giving it a new life, the tensions and the differences between them surface. But undeterred, and with the encouragement of the musician Peadar and Jackie, the local shopkeeper, they settle in to their own alternative lifestyle in a community that is otherwise suspicious of them.
In the process of their dream becoming real, they grow and learn about themselves, work their way through disappointments but in the end find everything they have created threatened by a harsh underlying reality of violence and revenge. A Kingdom for the Sea captures the idealistic spirit of the seventies, the journey of two young women into a mostly male domain, and the atmosphere of conflict that defined that period in Ireland.
Author's Home: Connemara, Ireland. World Rights.
Once Upon a Time Cozy Mystery
Sally-Anne Stephenson
Once Upon a Time is set in Richmond’s historical fan district. It features a young divorced woman called Alex and her three boisterous young sons, a rampant canine called Bert and a nervous floppy eared bunny called Bugs. Alex has a neighbour called Neris who loves guns, karate, brandy, skateboarding, and drives a Mustang called Sally despite the fact that she’s over seventy years old and has a blue rinse (the neighbour, not the Mustang).
There’s action, romance, lots of humour, and an accidental involvement in a crime and a questionable alibi. All making Alex’s life even more complicated than it already was. Alex is trying to keep a balance in her life, protect her son’s and deal with her feelings for the man who has to keep coming to fix her windows. And most of all, she wants her ex-husband to stay as far away from her as possible.
Alex feels that her life has become unrecognisable and is now a cross between a romantic comedy and a Quentin Tarentino film. She is trying to keep a grip on all of it without losing her sanity (well what little sanity she had to begin with). So if the police could just find the person who is trying to kill her and solve the alibi problem, she can get her boys back, concentrate on her budding relationship, find out why the dog wants to hump everything within a five mile radius and stop Neris buying that rocket launcher she’s seen on e-bay!
Once Upon the Time is Sally-Anne’s first novel. The sequel, Jenna’s Journey, featuring Paul’s daughter Jennifer and all the other characters, is completed, and the third, fourth and fifth novels in the series are in progress.
Author's Home: London. World Rights.
The Far Side Of Paddy Crabtree General Fiction
Aiden McGlew
Aspiring scriptwriter Paddy Crabtree flew into Ireland a free man on the morning of his Uncle Conny’s funeral. Ninety three hours later he sailed out of the Dublin dockside a wanted man, in the aftermath of the death of his aunt Veronique. In the intervening period, he fell in love with the girl who was stalking him, was questioned in relation to the apparent suicide of his film school mentor, and helped bring an end to an internecine family feud. He found himself embroiled in a discussion on the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, which then went beyond theorisation, and was bequeathed a sea view cottage plus thirty four thousand Euros.
Paddy inspired the setting up of the myspace.com/ucantavoidjustice website and was the focus of a manhunt up, down and across the Connemara mountains by the world’s major media outlets. His best friend Reinaldo helped him flee on the proviso that he would have first option on the screenplay of Paddy Crabtree’s sorry week.
Loosely based on actual events, The Far Side… is Paddy’s story.
Author’s Home: Middlesex, 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.
When the Messenger Meets the King Science Fiction Thriller
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
The Wizard of Dublin Crime Thriller
Sean McGinty
In modern Ireland, there exists a crisis of epidemic proportions. A heartbreak claiming more lives than the Famine, more culturally divisive than The Troubles, namely, a cornucopia of drugs, guns, and gangland murders—and an eager willingness by the average Irish citizen to employ all three. The Wizard of Dublin, a riveting supernatural crime thriller, details precisely how one man's life is changed, from a doting father and husband, in the blink of an eye, into the mirror image of those he believes are the genesis of his pain. The unflinching, constant torment caused by the loss of his wife and daughter in a drug related car accident brings the protagonist, Gene Kearney, to the line-blurred world between being a good man and doing truly evil things.
Author's Home: Massachusetts, USA. 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).
The School For Wives:
Translation of Molière’s L’école des femmes Drama
Maria-Cristina Necula
A new translation of Molière’s “L’école des femmes”, a play in 5 acts, with a cast of 9 characters. In translating this 5-act comedy, the author’s mission has been to be as faithful to the original as possible, while transferring that “faithfulness” to a contemporary context. She has strived to maintain the original’s 12-syllable Alexandrine verse and rhyming couplets while taking contemporary English idiomatic expressions and used them in translating phrases, that during Molière’s time, were considered contemporary, thus attempting to bring this translation into the English language of today while still paying tribute to the musicality of the French original by maintaining the rhyme and rhythm.
Authors Home: White Plains, New York. World Rights.
Non-Fiction:
Dissident Ranks: A History of the Real IRA and Continuity IRA History/Current Events
Brendan McCourt
This book will outline and explain the origins, motives and modus operandi of dissident Republicans in Ireland. It is based on the investigations and detailed research the author has carried out over the past ten years or so, which have resulted in four programmes broadcast by the BBC: The Croatia Connection (BBC Spotlight, December 1999); Dissident Ranks (BBC Spotlight, February 2003); Omagh: What the Police Were Never Told (BBC Panorama, September 2008); The Gunmen Who Never Went Away (BBC Panorama, March 2009).
It will chart the rise of Republican Sinn Fein in the mid-eighties, which broke away from Provisional Sinn Fein on a point of policy principle, under the leadership of Ruairi O’Bradaigh, a prominent Republican and former IRA leader from the 1950s. It will also aim to throw new light on its military wing, the Continuity IRA, of which very little is known, or has been documented, to date.
It will also examine the origins of The Real IRA, which came into being some ten years later. Detailed research, supplemented by reliable source material, will outline how, in 1997, another group of hard line Republicans, with considerable military experience, decided to break away from the Provisional IRA to continue the war, as they see it, against the British presence in Ireland.
It will follow the progress of these dissident groups leading up to the present day activities which continue to threaten the fragile peace that has brought N. Ireland hope and promise.
Brendan McCourt is an award winning investigative journalist currently working for the BBC as a television current affairs producer. He has worked as a journalist in Northern Ireland for nearly 30 years and has produced and directed a number of programmes for the BBC about dissident Republicans over the past ten years. In 2009 he was nominated for an RTS award and a BAFTA for Panorama for Omagh: What the Police Were Never Told. In 2007, he was nominated for a Royal Television Society Scoop of the Year award for The Hunt for Captain Nairac.
Author’s Home: Belfast. World Rights.
Invisible Violence: The Story of How One Woman Fought Against the System and Caught Her Own Identity Thief
Karen Lodrick Memoir/True Crime
Invisible Violence: The Story of How One Woman Fought Against the System and Caught Her Own Identity Thief is a compelling, topical and highly readable account of Karen Lodrick’s nightmare of identity theft and her ultimate triumph over the thief and the system.
Invisible Violence is my story, the story of how my life was virtually put on hold and my identity was stripped away from me by a faceless, nameless assailant doing invisible violence to me. This is the story of how I overcame feelings of helplessness, surmounted an often inept and antiquated banking system, and worked against a strained police force and a postal service full of loopholes. I learned to dig deep and deepen trust in my instincts. This inner strength and conviction enabled me to be ready, ready for the day I chased down my thief through the streets of San Francisco, and caught the woman who stole my identity.
Author's Home: San Francisco. World Rights.
William Beggs: The Limbs in the Loch Murderer True Crime
Patrick Greg
In December 1999, as Scotland prepared for the biggest Hogmanay of all time with the coming Millennium celebrations, a gruesome discovery was made by a Police diving team on a training exercise in Loch Lomond. Limbs from a cadaver were brought to the surface, one after another, and it was clear that the team had inadvertently stumbled upon a killer’s dumping ground. Subsequently, a severed head is washed up on a beach on the west coast of Scotland near Troon, and matched forensically with the limbs. The victim was soon identified as Barry Wallace, a 19 year old who had been out on December 5th at a Christmas function in Kilmarnock.
Police already knew of William Beggs, and he became the prime suspect almost immediately. A case was carefully built against Beggs, even as he fled the country back to his parents home in Northern Ireland, and then to the Netherlands where he was detained by Dutch Police. After extradition, Beggs was eventually brought to trial and convicted of the slaying of Barry Wallace.
Patrick Greg explores not only this case but Beggs’ history of violent crime and the likelihood that a number of unsolved murders of gay men might be linked to Beggs as well.
Patrick Greg is the author of The Crum (Gill & Macmillan, 2007) and the forthcoming Cold Blooded Murder (John Blake, 2010). He is a former prison officer and is currently a serving Police Officer in a specialised pro-active team within the PSNI in Belfast.
Author’s Home: Bangor, N. Ireland. World Rights.
Through Maasailand, in the Footsteps of Africa’s Greatest Explorer Travel/Photography
Mike Hacker (Hax)
In 1883, a young Scottish Geologist was commissioned by the Royal Geographic Society to explore the last remaining uncharted lands on the continent of Africa. Joseph Thomson’s eighteen hundred mile expedition, made entirely on foot, was to take him through the notorious tribal lands of the fearsome Maasai. He was the first white man to do so and live to tell his tale.
Mike Hacker's book, lavishly illustrated with evocative photographs, painstakingly traces Joseph Thomson’s historical journey from the East African coast to Lake Victoria. Along the way, he documents the massive changes among the people and landscape of East Africa, in particular Kenya, since Thomson’s first forays.
Conceived as a 30 cm x 30 cm, 208 page, illustrated hardcover, including 195 full page colour photographs, the book is edited, designed and ready to go.
Author’s Home: London. World Rights.
Jeffers: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner Cookbook
Stephen Jeffers
The first cookbook from the chef/owner of the eponymous Jeffers By the Marina, the acclaimed restaurant in Bangor, County Down. Project managed by The Feldstein Agency to be published in November 2009.
Author's home: Donaghadee, N. Ireland. World Rights.
The Castlerock Murders True Crime
Deric Henderson
The compelling story of the Northern Irish dentist Colin Howell, who confessed in 2009 to murdering his wife and his lover’s husband back in 1991. To be published directly after the trial, expected in Autumn 2010.
Author’s Home: Belfast. World Rights ex Ireland
The Beauty Queens : The Stories of the Goddess, the Concubine, the Virgin, the Enigma and the Icon Biography/History
Fiona Mackenzie
The Beauty Queens focuses on the lives of five of the most captivatingly beautiful Queens the world has ever seen. From 1290 BC to 1997 AD, over 3000 years and 5000 miles separate this dazzling group, who illustrate an extraordinary diversity of feminine archetypes - the Goddess, the Concubine, the Virgin, the Enigma and the Icon.
In five powerful portraits, the spotlight of The Beauty Queens turns first on the ancient beauty secrets of Queen Nefertari of Egypt - c. 1290-1254 BC; then to the astonishingly luxurious lifestyle of Wu Zetian, c.624-705 AD; moving on to Queen Elizabeth I of England, 1533-1603 AD, - Gloriana, the Virgin Queen; to Nineteenth century Austria and the young and willful Elisabeth of Bavaria, 1837 – 1898; and finally to the ‘Queen of Hearts’ - the fabulously glamorous but heartbreakingly tragic Diana, Princess of Wales, 1961-1997.
Sex, violence, death, treachery, betrayal, heartbreak and hunger for power, the fortunes of The Beauty Queens would put a modern soap opera to shame. Lovers and mothers, formidable fighters, malicious murderers, ambitious rulers and romantic heroines; each Queen is brought vividly to life. Their privileged positions granted them rare access to limitless resources, funds, time, servants and slaves to enable their beauty regimes to encompass extraordinary, expensive and often bizarre rituals. Phenomenal self-discipline, priceless potions, poisons and extreme paranoia all feature in the products and practices that these legendary beauties employed on their faces, hair and bodies to sustain their image. For some, position and privilege were their birthright, but for others, their looks were their most coveted and tradable commodity, regardless of the often perilous eras, cultures, politics or religious times in which they lived.
Illustrated throughout, The Beauty Queens will draw back the fragrant curtains of the royal boudoirs to glimpse a richly textured picture of daily life at a diversity of Royal Courts, expose the vices practised to preserve their virtues and the interaction of the private and the public. Above all, learn how their remarkable beauty was central in determining the fates of each of The Beauty Queens, who were indeed the Queens of Beauty.
Author’s Home: Dorset, England. World Rights
Fans for Life: The Story of Football’s Oldest Fans Sports/Football
Dan Stanton
This will be a fascinating book about some of the oldest fans of the top flight teams in the English football league. Quirky, funny and deeply poignant at times too, these will be the stories of the fans who have seen it all and still live to love the game.
Many of those interviewed by the author will have been born before or during the time of the First World War. They have lived through the Great Depression, the Blitz and the life-changing events of the Second World War. They have witnessed the rise of popular culture and its succession of trends – Teds, Mods and Rockers, punk, and so on – as well as the advent of big money, ‘pop star’ footballers. They will have also seen the darker side of modern football – from the hooliganism to racism on the terraces. And here they are now today, living in the New Depression.
Divided into separate sections devoted to each fan and the club they support, the book will feature ‘live’ interviews with each fan, specifically commissioned photos and a quirky profile of the club in question from a fan’s perspective.
Fans for Life will provide the reader with a glimpse into the individual lives of some truly exceptional fans and the idiosyncrasies of particular clubs. Taken collectively, however, these stories will form a rich and fascinating overview of the game, its players and its most loyal fans – and how all of these have evolved over the years. Above all, this will be a delightful celebration of what it means to be a football fan – of the sheer dogged loyalty which the game inspires in those who follow it, and of the persistent triumph of hope over experience which makes it possible to keep supporting one’s club, no matter what!
Author’s Home: Belfast. World Rights
By William Sheehan: Author's Home: Cork, Ireland
The Front: Irish Soldiers and World War 1 Military History
This book concentrates on the personal stories of Irish soldiers in World War One, chronicling the experiences of Irish officers and soldiers who served on the Western Front during the war. It will tell their stories from recruitment, through training, to their experiences on the battlefields of the war, detailing how they lived and showing how they died. This work will focus on the human element of the war, and explore servicemen and women’s reaction to loss, isolation from home, and their experience and opinions of the War. While individual experience is central to the book, it will be set within the wider context of the service and the military experiences of the various Irish regiments of the British Army. World Rights ex Uk and Ireland.
The Gangs of London True Crime
One of the greatest threats that faced the London Metropolitan Police at the beginning of the twentieth century was organised crime, in particular Russian criminal gangs. Organised crime fascinated the British press: the violence, the nicknames, the sordid nature of the trade, all held readers captive. One gang, the Bessarabians, were described by Wensley as establishing a reign of terror in the East End. These gangs were involved in people trafficking, drugs, protection rackets, and murder. Gangland Violence reached such proportions that it led to a Royal Commission. What makes this an intriguing tale is the turf war in London between two rival Russian gangs, the Bessarabians and the Odessians.This book will take people into the unique world of Russian organised crime in early twentieth-century London prior to World War One. No book currently exists on this topic. World Rights.
The Big Four: The Detectives Who Created Scotland Yard
True Crime/History
The Big Four were Francis Carlin, Arthur Neil, Albert Hawkins, and Frederick Wensley, a group of detectives who were the founding fathers of Scotland Yard, the men who created the Flying Squad, and pioneered the role of the detective in modern British policing. Their careers stretch from the 1880s to the 1920s. Wensley was involved as a young policeman in the Jack the Ripper case, and, indeed, all of them would investigate the most famous murders of their times including the notorious Brides in the Bath case, to name but one. But they were also tasked with tackling organised crime, from Russian white slavers to Chinese cocaine importers, Irish terrorists and Russian anarchists. No collective or individual biography exists. World Rights.
The Letters and Journals of Mr. Wilfred Ginge Humor/Cats
Wilfred Ginge with Gayle Curtis
Wilfred Ginge, aspiring author and ginger cat from the McGinge clan in N. Ireland, writes to famous authors for publishing advice, assisted by his faithful friend Gayle, who lives with him rent free. Illustrated.
Author's Home: Norfolk, England. World Rights.
Narnian Ireland: A Pictorial Biography of CS Lewis Biography
Ronald W. Bresland
Narnian Ireland: A Pictorial Biography of CS Lewis is a major new appraisal of CS Lewis’s Irish life and background and will present the author’s relationship with his homeland in a fully illustrated and visually exciting, large format book. This book will show that Lewis remained and thought of himself as an Irishman throughout his life and that the Chronicles of Narnia and many of his other works, are directly influenced by his Irish background.
Narnian Ireland presents an informed, comprehensive and engaging biographical account of Lewis’s Irish background in a way that is illuminating, engaging and entertaining. The book is aimed at those interested in CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia, whether they have been introduced to his work through fiction or film, but who are generally unaware of the author’s Irish background and how this has influenced many of his writings.
Narnian Ireland will combine high quality contemporary photographs of places in Ireland closely associated with Lewis with illustrated and archival material of the Lewis family and associates drawn from a wide and varied range of sources. These images will compliment and inform the biographical account of Lewis’s life and the detailed exploration of his works (in particular, the Narnian stories) and relate these to the influence of the Irish landscape on the author’s imagination and capture the bustling, vibrant and varied nature of CS Lewis’s Irish life.
Author's Home: Artigarvan, N. Ireland. World Rights.
Belfast Taxi: Memories in the Fast Lane Memoirs/History
Lee Henry
Belfast Taxi: Memories in the Fast Lane tells the real life stories of the Belfast taxi drivers who kept driving through the Troubles. A factual mix of tragic personal testimonies, hilarious anecdotes and philosophical cabbie musings, the book becomes a social history of Belfast over the previous forty years (as told by the men and women who know the city best), as well as an entertaining tour through the working lives of Belfast’s most amiable professionals.
Author Home’s: Belfast. World Rights ex UK & Ireland
Israeli Tapestries, Israeli Lives Photography/Travel/Biography
Melody Amsel-Arieli, Photographs by Ricki Rosen
Israeli Tapestries, Israeli Lives will portray Israel's rich, colorful mosaic of people in words and photographs. Israelis hail from varied ethnic backgrounds, lifestyles, religions, cultures and traditions. They have survived the Holocaust, fought for freedom, arrived from the four corners of the earth, and then carved new lives in our ancient land. Even today, as Israel reaches her sixtieth year of independence, Israelis are still living history. Many lead fascinating lives, many have fascinating tales to tell.
Authors' home: Israel. World Rights.
Humor Titles from Ray Strobel: Humor
Dog Treats: 68 Things to Do with Your Dog Before they're Gone
Bear and the Rocketman
Advantage: Dog
Ray’s most recent book, How to Raise a Superchild (2008) was published by HCI. The Ultimate Cats’ Catalog (2002) and A Black Eye Isn’t the End of the World (2004), were both published by Andrews McMeel.
Author's home: Chicago, U.S. World Rights.
Carsten Krieger Photography/Ireland
Carsten Krieger is a landscape photographer based in Ireland.His first book was The Fertile Rock: Seasons in the Burren (The Collins Press, 2006) which was followed by The West of Ireland (Collins Press, 2009). His next book, Ireland's Glorious Landscape, will be published by The O'Brien Press in 2010 and will be followed by The Flora of Ireland, to be published by Gill & Macmillan in 2011.
Author's home: County Clare, Ireland.
Projects in development are:
Light and Land: Ireland through the Seasons
Down By the Sea: A Journey along Ireland’s Coast
Ireland: The Wild Places
Ireland’s Parks & Gardens
Ireland’s Woodland Heritage
The Landscape of Northern Ireland
Stone & Light: The Landscape of the Burren
Spirit: Ireland’s Sacred Places
The Wild Road: In the Footsteps of Robert Lloyd Praeger
World Rights