Set against a glorious Greek background, the spellbinding new Alex Mavros mystery - Hired by a Hollywood film company to trace a missing employee in Crete, private investigator Alex Mavros is plunged into a vortex of hatred. The company is shooting a movie about the invasion of Crete by the Germans in 1941 – and their activities are stirring up old resentments among the islanders. The bitterness of the past bursts into the present when one of the film’s consultants is found dead, hanged by the neck. Suicide – or murder? Mavros investigates and is drawn into an ever-widening conspiracy.From BooklistScottish Greek PI Alex Mavros specializes in locating the missing. His latest case takes him to Crete, where an American film crew is making a movie about the Nazi invasion of the island during WWII. A young Greek American woman, Maria Kondos, personal assistant to the star, Cara Parks, has disappeared. The police have been less than helpful, so the film’s director hires Alex to find the missing woman. Ensconced with the film crew at a luxury resort built by a former German officer who stayed in Greece after the war, Alex learns that the film is bringing up old memories of wartime horrors. Then one of the film’s local consultants is found dead. Murder or suicide? Alex’s ongoing investigation uncovers a huge conspiracy involving drug smuggling, antiquity theft, and revenge. With plenty of action, wisecracking characters, and a beautiful setting, this one is likely to please a wide range of mystery readers. --Barbara Bibel

Independent Edinburgh, 2026. The birth-rate is down in the Council’s ‘perfect city’ and gangs of disaffected kids roam the streets. A break-in at the former Scottish Parliament archive is rapidly followed by two gruesome murders, the victims mutilated and covered in blood-drenched branches. Renegade investigator Quintilian Dalrymple’s subsequent enquiries take a new twist when Edinburgh’s brightest teenagers are abducted to the much-feared democratic city-state of Glasgow. What Quint finds there will change his life forever...

Set against a glorious Greek backdrop, the intriguing new mystery featuring half Greek, half Scots PI, Alex Mavros. Hired by the wife of one of Greece's richest men to find her missing fourteen-year-old daughter, Mavros faces an uphill battle. But he's not the only one looking for Lia . . . When a man's charred corpse is discovered in a remote farmhouse, and the headless body of another is found in the ancient stadium at Delphi, Mavros confronts the possibility that one of his deadliest foes has returned to Greece, and that there may be a connection with the Lia Poulou case.

Independent Edinburgh, 2025. Global warming has turned the summer into the Big Heat. With water strictly rationed, citizens are mindlessly devoted to two things: the year-round tourist festival and the weekly lottery (Grand Prize: a five-minute shower per week for a month). Then a body is discovered face-down in the Water of Leith – the only clue to the death, a bottle of lethal contraband whisky. As the body count rises, subversive investigator Quintilian Dalrymple faces a ruthless conspiracy to destabilise the city.

Maverick ex-cop Quint Dalrymple returns to investigate a series of gruesome murders in a near-future independent Edinburgh. Independent Edinburgh, 2033. The Council of City Guardians has been forced to relax its grip on citizens and the borders are no longer secure. Then a human heart is found on a football pitch. Maverick investigator Quint Dalrymple is called in - but before he makes much progress, a citizen's headless body floats down a canal.Quint uncovers a link to the planned referendum over Edinburgh joining a reconstituted Scotland. But who is behind the killings and mutilations? Are the city's notorious gangs responsible, or does the solution lie with the rulers of Edinburgh and other former Scottish states? Quint must dig deep to save the Council from collapse, and to retain both his head and heart...

New Year's Eve, 2021, in the 'perfect city' of independent Edinburgh. The guards are less vigilant and a murderer strikes, leaving music tapes in the victims' bodies. Accompanied by sidekick Davie and on-off lover Katharine, Quint Dalrymple must penetrate to the most secret of places. What is the Bone Yard and why will no one even admit it exists? Meanwhile, the killings continue...

Edinburgh 2020: After years of rioting and chaos, during which time the United Kingdom was dissolved into dozens of warring city-states, Edinburgh achieves stability thanks to the Council of City Guardians and their vision of a new Age of Enlightenment. It becomes the Body Politic.The Council's goal of a "perfect" city-where television, private cars, and popular music are banned, and where crime is virtually nonexistent-is shattered when a brutal serial killer is discovered among their ranks. Can the fearsome Ear, Nose and Throat Man be back to his grisly old tricks? The usually complacent Council is forced to turn to the man they demoted years ago-the irreverent, blues-haunted Quintilian Dalrymple-to catch the gruesome killer.From Publishers WeeklyThis bleak, near-future hunt for a vicious serial killer won Britain's Creasy Award for best first novel and should capture admiring attention here as well. In the year 2020, Edinburgh is a virtual city-state (founded on the ideas of Plato's Republic) ruled by a benevolently despotic council riddled with corruption. This highly regimented society has lost most traces of individualism. Gone, too, are televisions, private cars, unsanctioned books and musicAas well as most crime, at least until the reemergence of a serial killer known as the ENT (ear, nose and throat) man for his bizarre attentions to his victims. Shocked by the first murder in five years, the council is desperate enough to bring back disgraced private investigator Quintilian Dalrymple, a jazz-loving iconoclast with previous experience of the ENT man. Johnston's spare style doesn't hinder him from effectively limning a society drastically altered by desperate circumstances, and, at the same, spinning a thoroughly entertaining chase novel. Edinburgh's physical and spiritual transformation makes an intriguing backdrop, while Quint, a private eye of the classic mold contending with inept bureaucrats, corruption and a determined killer, makes a first-rate hero. Offbeat but on target, this is one exciting debut. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsEdinburgh, 2020. The Enlightenment that swept through the city years ago has virtually eliminated crime, along with individuality, spontaneity, blues music, and anything citizens might have wanted to do after the 10 p.m. curfew. So it's a matter of considerable concern when the Public Order Directorate discovers that guardswoman Knox 96, a.k.a. Sarah Spence, has been murdered in a way eerily reminiscent of the Ear, Nose, and Throat Man, whose horrible mutilations still haunt the public memory since his last killing five years ago. Edinburgh's official guardians immediately summon Quintilian Dalrymple, who quit the Directorate to work as a Parks laborer and sometime private eye, to clear up the mystery before it affects the tourist trade. But Quint is reluctant to return to his old job, not only because he's just taken on a private clientKatharine Kirkwood, whose brother Adam has been missing for ten daysbut because he knows the rash of murders that's just beginning isn't the work of the ENT Man, whom he killed himself five years ago in revenge for his lover's death. It looks like Quint and Katharine will have to settle for uncovering a sex-slaves racket, medical-research corruption, and an avenger even more ruthless than Quint en route to realizing that ``in the perfect city, the only way to express free will was to commit murder.'' Forget the rickety, overstuffed plot and you'll see why Johnston's bone-chilling dystopia took Britain's John Creasey Award for the year's best crime debut. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Wealthy jeweller Eliezer Samuel contacts half Greek half Scots PI Alex Mavros after his Uncle Aron is spotted in the streets of Thessaloniki in northern Greece: but that's impossible - Aron Samuel perished in Auschwitz more than sixty years before. The case takes an even stranger twist when Mavros, accompanied by Eliezer's enigmatic daughter Rachel, travels to Thessaloniki to question the elderly witness. Ester Broudo denounces Aron Samuel as a traitor and murderer. Was he really a Nazi collaborator? Mavros' investigations will uncover tragic and terrible secrets from the war and its aftermath, resulting in devastating present-day consequences. **

Crime writer Matt Wells hasn't had much time for a career of late—he's been too busy fighting for his life. And now he can't trust anyone, not even himself.His thoughts are not his own—his subconscious has been infiltrated and a single word can trigger hidden orders buried deep within Matt's memory, turning him into a killing machine.The FBI aims him at the man responsible for his conditioning: an architect of Nazi revival and devotee of the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant. This man took Matt's life away and must pay.Even in a nation rife with antigovernment paranoia and conspiracy theories, nobody could believe the things Matt has seen. In a nation infected with trained assassins and ritual murderers, only he can piece together the truth and save the U.S. from impending disaster.