Soltalk January 2019 | Page 50

Book Talk with Smiffs book & card store, Nerja Village Of The Lost Girls (l), the haunting debut novel set in the Spanish Pyrenees by the renowned screenwriter Agustín Martínez (b. 1975) becomes available in English this month. The village of Monteperdido still mourns the loss of Ana and Lucia, two 11-year- old friends who left school one afternoon five years ago and were never seen again. Now, Ana reappears unexpectedly inside a crashed car. She is wounded but alive. The case reopens and a race against time begins to discover who was behind the girls’ kidnapping. Most importantly, where is Lucia and is she still alive? Police inspector Sara Campos and her boss Santiago Bain, from head office in Madrid, are forced to work with the local police. Five years ago, fatal mistakes were made in the investigation and it must not happen again. Snow (l), by Will Dean; Day Of The Dead (p), by Nicci French; The Flower Girls (l), by Alice Clark-Platts; Heartbreak Hotel (p), by Jonathan Kellerman; Displaced (p), the sixth Hakim and Arnold mystery by Barbara Nadel; Texas Ranger (p), a US Western thriller by James Patterson; and, Blood & Sugar (l), by Laura Shepherd-Robinson. Turning to general fiction, we have looked out a quartet of titles that, at least for the length it takes to read each of them, could provide some escape from all the doom, gloom and fractiousness that dominate politics and economics just now. Good things are being said about The Binding (l), the first-ever novel for adults from Bridget Collins, UK actor, playwright, and author of seven acclaimed books for young adults. Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter summons him to begin an apprenticeship to a Bookbinder. It is a vocation that arouses superstition, fear and prejudice, but his family cannot afford to refuse. He will learn to hand craft beautiful volumes. In each, he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there is something you want to forget or erase, your past can be stored safely in a book. You will never remember your secret, however terrible. In a vault under his mentor’s workshop, rows of books and memories are meticulously stored and recorded. Then one day Emmett makes an astonishing discovery: one of them has his name on it. Village Of The Lost Girls leads off this month’s Soltalk Hotlist of titles, some entirely new, others moving into small paperback format for the first time or being reissued, sometimes after years out of print. All are due for publication on dates in January, with availability in print this month or in early February. The Hotlist helps readers to plan and budget for book ordering; and do not forget that delivery times can be more erratic in the festive period. Closer to home, terror comes to the Costa del Sol in The Angry Sea (l), by James Deegan. Former special services soldier John Carr is relaxing on the beach when his attention is attracted by a man who seems fixated on a group of young British people. The man does not notice Carr, and soon moves on. Within the hour though, the Costa is plunged into one of the most audacious and horrifying terrorist attacks that Europe has ever seen. In a co-ordinated strike, armed men storm both the beach and a cruise ship anchored further up the coast. But the terrorists, hiding their personal greed behind a veil of religious extremism, have an even bolder plan. Or, try When All Is Said (l), a much-lauded debut from Dublin-born author Anne Griffin, now of Mullingar, Ireland. If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If Also worth considering are: Twisted (l), by Steve Cavanagh; The Wanted (p), an Elvis Cole novel by Robert Crais; Red 48