It’s good to be reminded of what’s coming out especially if you use the library. It’s good to get those requests in early. This is not an exhaustive list.

BLACK SKIES (UK, June 21, 2012) by Arnaldur Indridason, previous title was Outrage (UK)  Synopsis: A man is making a crude leather mask with slits for eyes and mouth, and an iron spike fixed in the middle of the forehead. It is a ‘death mask’, once used by Icelandic farmers to slaughter calves. He has revenge in mind.

Meanwhile, with Detective Erlendur absent, his baseball-loving colleague Sigurdur Óli is in the spotlight. A school reunion has left Sigurdur Óli dissatisfied with life in the police force. Iceland is enjoying an economic boom and young tycoons are busy partying with the international jet set. In contrast, Sigurdur Óli’s relationship is on the rocks and soon even his position in the CID is compromised: when he agrees to visit a couple of blackmailers as a favour to a friend he walks in just as a woman is beaten unconscious. When she dies, Sigurdur Óli has a murder investigation on his hands. 

The evidence leads to debt collectors, extortionists, swinging parties. But when a chance link connects these enquiries to the activities of a group of young bankers, Sigurdur Óli finds himself investigating the very elite he had envied. Moving from the villas of Reykjavík’s banking elite to a sordid basement flat, Black Skies is a superb story of greed, pride and murder from one of Europe’s most successful crime writers.

IN THE DARKNESS by Karin Fossum (UK, July 19, 2012)

Eva is walking by the river one afternoon when a body floats to the surface of the icy water. She tells her daughter to wait patiently while she calls the police, but when she reaches the phone box Eva dials another number altogether.

The dead man, Egil, has been missing for months, and it doesn’t take long for Inspector Sejer and his team to establish that he was the victim of a very violent killer. But the trail has gone cold. It’s as puzzling as another unsolved case on Sejer’s desk: the murder of a prostitute who was found dead just before Egil went missing.

While Sejer is trying to piece together the fragments of a seemingly impossible case, Eva gets a phone call late one night. A stranger speaks and then swiftly hangs up. Eva looks out into the darkness and listens. All is quiet.

CRIMINAL by Karin Slaughter (July 3, 2012) Synopsis:Karin Slaughter’s new novel is an epic tale of love, loyalty, and murder that encompasses forty years, two chillingly similar murder cases, and a good man’s deepest secrets.

Will Trent is a brilliant agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Newly in love, he is beginning to put a difficult past behind him. Then a local college student goes missing, and Will is inexplicably kept off the case by his supervisor and mentor, deputy director Amanda Wagner. Will cannot fathom Amanda’s motivation until the two of them literally collide in an abandoned orphanage they have both been drawn to for different reasons. Decades before—when Will’s father was imprisoned for murder—this was his home. . . .

Flash back nearly forty years. In the summer Will Trent was born, Amanda Wagner is going to college, making Sunday dinners for her father, taking her first steps in the boys’ club that is the Atlanta Police Department. One of her first cases is to investigate a brutal crime in one of the city’s worst neighborhoods. Amanda and her partner, Evelyn, are the only ones who seem to care if an arrest is ever made.

Now the case that launched Amanda’s career has suddenly come back to life, intertwined with the long-held mystery of Will’s birth and parentage. And these two dauntless investigators will each need to face down demons from the past if they are to prevent an even greater terror from being unleashed.

THE ABSENT ONE (August 2012) by Jussi Adler-Olsen Synopsis:

In The Keeper of Lost Causes, Jussi Adler-Olsen introduced Detective Carl Mørck, a deeply flawed, brilliant detective newly assigned to run Department Q, the home of Copenhagen’s coldest cases. The result wasn’t what Mørck—or readers—expected, but by the opening of Adler-Olsen’s shocking, fast-paced follow-up, Mørck is satisfied with the notion of picking up long-cold leads. So he’s naturally intrigued when a closed case lands on his desk: A brother and sister were brutally murdered two decades earlier, and one of the suspects—part of a group of privileged boarding-school students—confessed and was convicted.

But once Mørck reopens the files, it becomes clear that all is not what it seems. Looking into the supposedly solved case leads him to Kimmie, a woman living on the streets, stealing to survive. Kimmie has mastered evading the police, but now they aren’t the only ones looking for her. Because Kimmie has secrets that certain influential individuals would kill to keep buried . . . as well as one of her own that could turn everything on its head.

GARMENT OF SHADOWS by Laurie R. King (September 4, 2012) Synopsis: Mary Russell wakes up, not knowing where she is. More important, she doesn’t even remember who she is. Her first step is to determine whether she’s a guest…or a prisoner. She discovers that she is in Morocco, where the tensions are bubbling over, and the conflict will drag the great powers of Europe into battle. Holmes works the back channels, seeking the aid of the famed T.E. Lawrence to stop the fire before it starts, but he’ll need more than Lawrence. He’ll need Russell with her memory restored. Laurie R. King takes readers into the back alleys of Morocco, spinning a wildly inventive, utterly compelling tale of politics and espionage, of friendship and betrayal, of the ingenious Sherlock Holmes and the indomitable Mary Russell. Story is set in Morocco.

LIVE BY NIGHT (Oct 2012) by Dennis Lehane Synopsis:

Joe Coughlin is nineteen when he meets Emma Gould. A smalltime thief in 1920s Boston, his task is to tie her up while his accomplices loot the bank she works in. But Joe falls in love with Emma – and his life changes forever. That meeting is the beginning of Joe’s journey to becoming one of most feared and respected gangsters. It is a journey beset by violence, double-crossing, drama and pain. And it is a journey into the soul of prohibition-era America…

PHANTOM by Jo Nesbo (Oct 2, 2012) Synopsis:

When Harry left Oslo again for Hong Kong—fleeing the traumas of life as a cop—he thought he was there for good. But then the unthinkable happened. The son of the woman he loved, lost, and still loves is arrested for murder: Oleg, the boy Harry helped raise but couldn’t help deserting when he fled. Harry has come back to prove that Oleg is not a killer. Barred from rejoining the police force, he sets out on a solitary, increasingly dangerous investigation that takes him deep into the world of the most virulent drug to ever hit the streets of Oslo (and the careers of some of the city’s highest officials), and into the maze of his own past, where he will find the wrenching truth that finally matters to Oleg, and to himself.

SALVATION OF A SAINT by Keigo Higashino (Oct 2, 2012) Synopsis:

Yoshitaka, who was about to leave his marriage and his wife, is poisoned by arsenic-laced coffee and dies. His wife, Ayane, is the logical suspect—except that she was hundreds of miles away when he was murdered. The lead detective, Tokyo Police Detective Kusanagi, is immediately smitten with her and refuses to believe that she could have had anything to do with the crime. His assistant, Kaoru Utsumi, however, is convinced Ayane is guilty. While Utsumi’s instincts tell her one thing, the facts of the case are another matter. So she does what her boss has done for years when stymied—she calls upon Professor Manabu Yukawa.

But even the brilliant mind of Dr. Yukawa has trouble with this one, and he must somehow find a way to solve an impossible murder and capture a very real, very deadly murderer.

THE BLACK BOX (Nov 26, 2012) by Michael Connelly I am so so far behind in the series. How behind? Don’t laugh but I’m at Angel’s Flight. Synopsis:

In a case that spans 20 years, Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to a file from 1992, the killing of a young female photographer during the L.A. riots. Harry originally investigated the murder, but it was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved.

Now Bosch’s ballistics match indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal, and connected to a deeper intrigue. Like an investigator combing through the wreckage after a plane crash, Bosch searches for the “black box,” the one piece of evidence that will pull the case together.

UPCOMING 2013 TITLES

GOLD DIGGER (Feb 2013) by Helen Tursten (UK, US)

STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE (Jan 2013) by Ian Rankin (UK)

PARADE by Shuichi Yoshida (Jan 2013) author of Villain 

Untitled Novel (Intercrime Series)  by Arne Dahl (got confirmation from his publisher for 2013)