Serpent S Tail imprint: 83 books

Summer 1951. The Cold War is at its height. Burgess and Maclean have just disappeared, and the nation is obsessed with the story of their probable defection.Colin Harris, a member of the Communist Party, who has been exiled in Germany for several years, arrives back in England with news: he has fallen...

Valentine, the troubled daughter of a well-off but dysfunctional Parisian family, vanishes on her way to school. Inexperienced private detective Lucie Toledo is hired to find the missing teenager, and enlists the help of a formidable agent with a past, known to her friends as the Hyena. Their quest,...

It's summer 1936, and the world is on the cusp of change, but there's little sign of this in rural Sussex. So when Kitty Allen answers an advert looking for 'a good plain cook', she has no idea what she's in for. For starters, her employer is an American called Ellen Steinberg who believes in having...

When a middle-aged alcoholic is found brutally battered to death on a roadside in West London, the case is assigned to a nameless detective sergeant, a tough-talking cynic and fearless loner from the Department of Unexplained Deaths at the Factory police station. Working from cassette tapes left behind...

London, 1947: it's freezing winter in the shabby, bomb-damaged city. Young socialite Dinah Wentworth, a bright, innocent newcomer to the Fitzrovia scene, becomes embroiled in a dark scandal when she discovers the corpse of surrealist artist Titus Mavor. Not wanting to explain her reasons for being...

London, 1926: Henry Twist's heavily pregnant wife leaves home to meet a friend. On the way, she is hit by a bus and killed, though miraculously the baby survives. Henry is left with nothing but his new daughter - a single father in a world without single fathers. He hurries the baby home, terrified...

London, 1956. A young woman has been found dead in a hotel in King's Cross. It looks like an accident, and Scotland Yard isn't interested in accidents. But Fleet Street journalist Gerry Blackstone reckons there's more to it than meets the eye. Meanwhile, Oxford is filling with Hungarian émigrés...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009 'Just as the father in the house in which we live is our father, so Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our country. And just as the mother in the house in which we live is our mother, so Comrade Elena Ceausescu is the mother of...

Middle England, mid-1980s. The kind of place where nothing ever happens. Except something has happened. A fifteen year old boy called Robert has been killed, down by the pools. And half a dozen lives will come unravelled. There's Kathryn and Howard, Rob's parents. Kath has been making the best...

Copenhagen, 2008. Excess is in, austerity is out. The international crash is about to send everything tumbling down, but everyone's too wasted to notice. And Mikkel Vallin's own bubble has already burst. Divorced, left by his girlfriend for a successful author, sacked from his job as a food critic,...

New York, 1923, the Argentine Luis Angel Firpo, called the Wild Bull of the Pampas, knocks out of the ring the American Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion of the world. In Buenos Aires, the match is transmitted on the radio and Firpo proclaimed world champion. However, the referee does not count the...

He's 39, a writer, dried up and waiting for better days. She's ten years younger, an arts graduate, not doing anything much. Both married, both bored. Lust at first sight. And so they fuck each other and keep fucking each other, just about everywhere in just about every way, and their desire increases....

The light greenery of the early summer is trembling around Erik and Julia as they shove their children into the car and start the drive towards the house by the sea on the west coast of Finland where they will spend the summer. From the outside they are a happy young family looking forward to a long...