New Signed UK arrivals

These new UK arrivals are all signed. To order your copy either click the link of the title, call or email The Poisoned Pen.


Trick of the Dark by Val McDermid

'Death is a hollow drum whose beat has measured out my adult life.' So writes Jay Macallan Stewart in her latest volume of memoirs. But nobody has ever asked whether that has been by accident or design. Nobody, that is, until Jay turns her sights on newly-wed and freshly-widowed Magda Newsam. For Magda's mother Corinna is an Oxford don who knows enough of Jay's history to be very afraid indeed. Determined to protect her daughter, Corinna turns to clinical psychologist Charlie Flint. But it's not the best time for Charlie. Her career is in ruins. Pilloried by the press, under investigation by her peers, she's barred from the profiling work she loves. What Corinna's asking may be her last chance at redemption. But as Charlie digs into the past and its trail of bodies she starts to realise the price of truth may be more than she wants to pay.


Tigerlily’s Orchids by Ruth Rendell

From the incomparable, award-winning Ruth Rendell — "the grand dame of British crime fiction" (The Gazette) —comes her latest psychological thriller.

When Stuart Font decides to throw a house-warming party in his new flat he invites everyone in his building. The party will be one everyone remembers. But not for the right reasons....

Living opposite, in reclusive isolation, is a young, beautiful Asian woman, christened Tigerlily by Stuart. As though from some strange urban fairytale, she emerges to exert a terrible spell on the occupants of Lichfield House.


Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld

A spellbinding literary thriller about terror, war, greed, and the darkest secrets of the human soul, by the author of the million-copy bestseller,The Interpretation of Murder.

September 16, 1920. Under a clear blue September sky, a quarter ton of explosives is detonated in a deadly attack on Wall Street. Fear comes to the streets of New York.

Witnessing the blast are war veteran Stratham Younger, his friend James Littlemore of the New York Police Department, and beautiful French radiochemist Colette Rousseau. A series of inexplicable attacks on Colette, a secret buried in her past, and a mysterious trail of evidence lead Younger, Littlemore, and Rousseau on a thrilling international and psychological journey - from Paris to Prague, from the Vienna home of Dr Sigmund Freud to the corridors of power in Washington, DC, and ultimately to the hidden depths of our most savage instincts. As the seemingly disjointed pieces of Younger and Littlemore-s investigations come together, the two uncover the shocking truth about the bombing - a truth that threatens to shake their world to its foundations.


Our Kind of Traitor by John Le Carré

Starred Review. Those readers who have found post–cold war le Carré too cerebral will have much to cheer about with this Russian mafia spy thriller. While on holiday in Antigua, former Oxford tutor Perry Makepiece and his lawyer girlfriend, Gail Perkins, meet Dmitri "Dima" Vladimirovich Krasnov, an avuncular Russian businessman who challenges Perry to a tennis match. Even though Perry wins, Dima takes a shine to the couple, and soon they're visiting with his extended family. At Dima's request, Perry conveys a message to MI6 in England that Dima wishes to defect, and on arriving home, Perry and Gail receive a summons from MI6 to a debriefing. Not only is Dima a Russian oligarch, he's also one of the world's biggest money launderers. Le Carré ratchets up the tension step-by-step until the sad, inevitable end. His most accessible work in years, this novel shows once again why his name is the one to which all others in the field are compared. 


Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor

1786, Jerusalem College Cambridge. The ghost of Sylvia Whichcote is rumoured to be haunting Jerusalem since disturbed fellow-commoner, Frank Oldershaw, claims to have seen the dead woman prowling the grounds. Desperate to salvage her son’s reputation, Lady Anne Oldershaw employs John Holdsworth, author of The Anatomy of Ghosts – a stinging account of why ghosts are mere delusion – to investigate. But his arrival in Cambridge disrupts an uneasy status quo as he glimpses a world of privilege and abuse, where the sinister Holy Ghost Club governs life at Jerusalem more effectively than the Master, Dr Carbury, ever could. And when Holdsworth finds himself haunted – not only by the ghost of his dead wife, Maria, but also Elinor, the very-much-alive Master’s wife – his fate is sealed. He must find Sylvia’s murderer or the hauntings will continue. And not one of them will leave the claustrophobic confines of Jerusalem unchanged.


The Lost Kings by Bruno Hare

London, 1893. Mild-mannered watchmaker Cyril King harbours a secret wish to be an explorer. When he acquires a mysterious timepiece from a notorious criminal, Cyril gets his heart's desire, the clues he finds propelling him halfway around the world on the trail of a fabulous treasure. On the borders of India and Afghanistan, Cyril meets a real-life adventurer who seems to be everything he aspires to. But high in the Karakoram mountains there are lessons to be learned, as nothing is quite what Cyril expects: neither the treasure, nor his companion, nor the life of discovery and excitement which he imagined -- and certainly not the deadly peril into which he stumbles with all the insouciance of the innocent abroad. Meanwhile, intercut with Cyril's account of his 1893 adventures are the letters of famous explorer Sir Paul Linley-Small, written to Cyril from various points of the compass fifteen years later, as Small pursues a rare, perhaps mythical, creature. And as Small's tale grows ever more fantastic, the way in which the two narratives link with one another reflects on the nature of truth and the lives which we envisage for ourselves.


Dictator by Tom Cain

Africa has had more than its share of dictators, but Henderson Gushungo may be the worst. Millions starve and opponents are flung in jail, while Gushungo and his cronies get rich on the country's rich natural resources. A powerful consortium of political and business interests offer Samuel Carver the job of enforcing regime change. Can the taking of one life save millions of others? And can Carver trust the men who hired him? As the action hurtles from the plains of southern Africa to the teeming streets of Hong Kong, and an old enemy rises from the grave to haunt him once more, Carver becomes both the hunter and the hunted in a deadly game where the survival of a nation is at stake.


Sacred Treason by James Forrester

A brilliant and enthralling debut historical thriller in the vein of C J Sansom.

London, 1563. England is a troubled nation. Catholic plots against the young Queen Elizabeth spring up all over the country. The herald William Harley - known to everyone as Clarenceux - receives a book from his friend and fellow Catholic, Henry Machyn. But Machyn is in fear of his life... What secret can the book hold? And then Clarenceux is visited by the State in the form of Francis Walsingham and his ruthless enforcers, who will stop at nothing to gain possession of it. If Clarenceux and his family are to survive the terror of the state, he must solve the clues contained in the book to unlock its dangerous secrets before it's too late. And when he does, he realises that it's not only his life and the lives of those most dear to him that are at stake...


Red Station by Adrian Magson

First in the brand-new Harry Tate thriller series - Having been made the scapegoat for a botched drugs intercept operation, MI5 officer Harry Tate is dispatched to '-Red Station', a remote outpost in the Balkans, ostensibly to avoid press scrutiny, but where in effect the security services send '-problem' agents they'd like to be rid of. But the outpost is thrust into the international spotlight when troops begin massing in the area; and, as the situation becomes increasingly dangerous, Tate discovers the real, truly shocking, purpose behind '-Red Station' - and decides to fight back . . .