Gerald Seymour's The Dealer and the Dead blurb

Amazon UK now have a short blurb for Gerald Seymout's next novel, The Dealer and the Dead...

Eighteen years after the barbarous war with the Serbs that tore their communities apart, a group of Croatian villagers discover the identity of the Englishman who they believe betrayed them by welching on a deal to supply arms.

With revenge in sight at last, they hire a professional killer from London to track him down . . . but is the story as simple as they think?

A brilliant, bruising thriller, told in a unique way, about what happens when the hand of the past suddenly reaches out to the present - and is holding a gun.

Source: www.amazon.co.uk

The Spy by Clive Cussler and Justin Scott

Amazon UK now have the cover image and blurb for The Spy , the third book in the Isaac Bell series by Clive Cussler and Justin Scott. As I have mentioned before Justin Scott is one of my favourite authors and this one looks interesting.



Here's the blurb.

It is 1908, and international tensions are mounting as the world plunges towards war. When a brilliant American battleship gun designer dies in an apparent suicide, the man’s grief-stricken daughter turns to the legendary Van Dorn Detective Agency to clear her father’s name. Van Dorn puts his chief investigator on the case, and Isaac Bell soon realizes that the clues point not to suicide, but to murder. When more suspicious deaths follow, it becomes clear that someone—an elusive spy—is orchestrating the destruction of America’s brightest technological minds . . . and the murders all connect to a top-secret project called Hull 44. As the intrigue deepens, Bell finds himself pitted against German, Japanese, and British spies, in a mission that encompasses dreadnaught battleships, Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, Chinatown, Hell’s Kitchen, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Isaac Bell has certainly faced perilous situations before, but this time it is more than the future of his country that’s at stake — it’s the fate of the world.

That reminds me a little bit of Scott's Normandie Triangle (aka The Man Who Loved the Normande) which featured spying and sabotage in New York during World War II.

Here's the link to the book on www.amazon.co.uk.

The book is due on 24 June 2010.

Firefox flies, the new Russian stealth jet

The new Sukhoi T-50 stealth aircraft...



... and the fictional MiG-31 Firefox...



OK, this has very little to do with books as such. But my favourite author has been and remains Craig Thomas and the reason I started reading his thrillers was because of the movie FireFox, the novel it was based on, and the sequel novel. (Yes, something was called FireFox before the web browser.)



The original novel FireFox came out in 1977 and dealt with a Russian supersonic stealth fighter that NATO codenamed FireFox. I don't think they called it a stealth fighter in the book but it was invisible to radar which is the same thing.



Clint Eastwood made a move of the book in 1982. It has it's critics but I find it a good solid Cold War era thriller and the plane they designed was pretty darn cool looking.



Craig Thomas went on to write a sequel novel called FireFox Down in 1983 that continued the story at the point where the first book and movie ended.

The US eventually revealed their own stealth aircraft at the end of the 1980s but the Russians never did get around to building a FireFox. So yesterday's news on the BBC website caught my eye. Russia has flown it's new Sukhoi T-50 stealth aircraft, also known as the PAK FA, and shown it off on TV.

The BBC article is at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8486812.stm

and the Times newspaper has an article at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7007913.ece

New Gerald Seymour novel listed

It's a long way off but Amazon UK are listing a new Gerald Seymour novel to be published toward the end of the year.

It's presently titled The Dealer and the Dead and will be published by Hodder & Stoughton on 14 Oct 2010.

No cover or plot details yet and I wouldn't be surprised if the title changes before then.

In the meantime you can find the hardback listing at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dealer-Dead-Gerald-Seymour/dp/034091890X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264289340&sr=1-2

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

I've spent the last week reading Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card.

I "discovered" card 20 years ago (!) when I bought his novel of James Cameron's move The Abyss. It was far from the run-of-the-mill novelisations and was a good novel in it's own right. I was an instant fan and hunted out anything else he had written.

Of course Card's "must read" novel is Ender's Game, featuring kids being sent to Battle School in order to learn how to defeat aliens that mankind is waging war with. A strong thread though the book and it's sequels is the humanity that Ender retains despite all that is done to him and all that he does.

Ender's Game was followed up by the Speaker for the Dead trilogy dealing with the character later in life as an adult. Later Card would also write the Ender's Shadow Quartet as a sort of "sidequel". Ender in Exile is the first true sequel to Ender's game and if you are a fan of the earlier books it's well worth a look.

My Ian Fleming/James Bond Website

I've spent much of the last day working on my sadly neglected Ian Fleming/James Bond website. I've had this site on the go since at least 1999 and it was high time for an update.

The site mainly features the paperback cover art from the various UK editions of the books. It's by no means a complete set of covers but a lot of my favourites are there and I'll add more as time goes on.

I've also changed the font to Century Gothic as it's the one used on the Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace movie posters. We'll see how long it takes for me to grow tired of it.

I've also scanned in a selection of my Ian Fleming paperback collection and here are a few covers.



You can find the new, improved, lovely site at the following link:http://flemingsbond.solidwebhost.com/index.html

I'm trying out that new host. Hopefully it will work ok and the advertising will not be too obtrusive. Feedback is always gratefully received!

Some books for 2010

First of all, it's almost 2010. How did that happen! I remember reading Arthur C Clarke's novel 2010 Odyssey Two back in 1985 and thinking how far off that future was and how much older I'd be...

Anyway here are a few books due out in 2010 that have caught my eye.



Hitler's War by Harry Turtledove due out in paperback on 21 Jan 2010. I read all ten volumes of turtledove's alternate history following the Great War and WW2 fought between the USA and Confederates. Hitler's War starts a new series asking what would have happened if Neville Chamberlain had gone to war with Germany a year early in 1938.



Eye of the Red Tsar caught my eye as I like thrillers set in Russia. It deals with a policeman released from the gulags in order to find out what happened to the Tsar's treasure. It's due out on 21 Jan 2010.



Here's three new books by Clive Cussler. Actually they are written by other authors in collaboration with Cussler. Spartan Gold (7 Jan 2010) is part of a new "Fargo" series, The Silent Sea (4 March 2010) is part of the "Oregon" series and of biggest interest to me The Spy (June 2010) is the third Issac Bell novel and is written by Justin Scott. That one does not have a UK cover yet so I have included the US cover that shows an early model German submarine in what I assume is New York. The Issac Bell novels are set in the first decade of the 1900s so that intrigues me.



Two new novels by Stephen Leather. I first read his book The Chinaman in 1993 and bought his new books as they came out over the following years. Lately he has been concentrating on his Dan Shepard character (who has the very unfortunate nickname "Spider") and Rough Justice is the latest of these (due out 22 July 2010). The other novel Nightfall marks a bit of a departure for the author as it is a thriller with a supernatural twist (due out 21 Jan 2010).


I've mentioned before how much I have enjoyed some of Stephen Hunt's alternative steampunk-style adventures. His fourth, Secrets of the Fire Sea, is due out on 4 Feb 2010.



I ready my first Stephen Coonts novel, Final Flight, 20 years ago. I read a lot of his books since but not the most recent ones. The Disciple has caught my eye due to it's eye-catching action-packed cover. (I didn't know they did these covers any more. Lately some of the UK editions of his novels have had Da Vinci Code style "arches" for some reason.) Anyway, this one features Tommy Carmellini and Jake Grafton investigating Iran's covert nuclear programme. Topical! it's due out on 4 Feb 2010.



Able One (2 Feb 2010) is a thriller by SF author Ben Bova about a is a modified 747 fitted with a high-powered laser to knock out missiles in flight. A training flight with a skeleton crew becomes the real thing when they have to try to stop missiles launched by North Korea. Most of Bova's books deal with exploration of the solar system so that is an interesting change of material.