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Second Burial
by Andrew Nugent.
Pages 275. Headline £ 6.

Sergeant Molly Power of the Irish Police Force Murder Squad is on duty when the call comes in. A young African man, Shad, has been attacked and left for dead on the Dublin Mountains. He crawls to the nearest house and raises the alarm, but later dies in hospital.

Shad's injuries are strange and deeply disturbing. Was he the victim of a racist attack, sadism, a punishment, or some mysterious sacrificial ritual? Inspector Quilligan and Molly Power launch a murder investigation — it is like none they have ever experienced before.

Shad's younger brother, Jude, who has only arrived recently to live and work with him in his restaurant in Dublin's Little Africa, is grief-stricken and mystified by his cruel death. He swears a solemn oath to find his brother's killer, but the more he uncovers about Shad's life and relationships outside their Nigerian community, the more he realises how dangerous and twisted some people can be...

In this compelling and moving story of callous murder and a brother's loss, Andrew Nugent brilliantly depicts the cultural diversity of Dublin and with wit and charm reveals the strength of faith and community when confronted with naked ruthlessness.

Dying Day

by Robert Ryan Headline Review. 
Pages 343. £ 6.00

The year 1948: Laura McGill, a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties, is waiting on a street corner in Piccadilly, London, with a Colt .32 in her handbag. She is desperate to find out what happened to her sister Diana, and she won't put up with Home Office stonewalling any longer.

Both Laura and Diana were Special Operation Executive (SOE) spies during World War Two. One night in 1944, Diana was flown into occupied France in a Lysander and never returned. Did she disappear into the lethal 'Night and Fog' of the Nazi death camps? Could she still be alive?

James Hadley Webb, the man who sent Diana on her final mission, is now a spy in Berlin. Despite attempts by the security services to stop her, Laura travels to Germany to confront him.

But someone is killing Webb's agents and the Russians want to starve Berlin into submission with a total blockade. Laura is about to get caught in the crossfire of a bloody turf war fought between the East and the West for control of the city.

The curtain is being raised on the deadly battle of wits that will become known as the Cold War, and may people are going to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time...

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