Kirjahaku

Dan Starkey, the ducking and diving hapless investigator, takes centre stage again in this brilliant new novel by the master of comic crime.Radio shock-jock and self-styled people's champion Jack Caramac is used to courting controversy - but when his four-year-old son is kidnapped for just one hour, and then sent back with a warning note, he knows he may have finally gone too far. Jack has no choice but to turn to Dan Starkey for help. Recently chucked by his long-suffering wife Patricia, Dan has finally given up on journalism and is now providing a boutique, bespoke service for important people with difficult problems. Dan resolves to catch whoever kidnapped Jack's son - and very soon finds himself in the middle of a violent feud between rival drug gangs, pursued by jealous husbands, unscrupulous property developers and vicious killers as the case spirals ever more out of his control...

'I was upstairs with a girl I shouldn't have been upstairs with when my wife whispered in my ear, 'You have twenty-four hours to move out'.The book that started it all, Bateman's first novel published in 1995. It introduced the world to the hapless, endlessly wily and witty Belfast journalist Dan Starkey. Dan shares with his wife an appetite for drinking and dancing. But when he meets Margaret, things get seriously out of hand. Terrifyingly, unbelievably, she is murdered. Before long Dan is a target himself, racing against time to crack the mystery.

When billionaire's daughter Alison Wolff disappears following a massacre at a party, nobody knows if she has been kidnapped or killed. Dan Starkey is hired to find the missing student but instead is drawn into a violent struggle between rival gangs.A drugs war is tearing the city apart and in response, a new church movement has sprung up. But when a controversial new abortion clinic is firebombed, Dan is asked to prove their involvement.In a Belfast rapidly descending back into chaos, Dan is left with an impossible choice - betray his client or risk losing his family...

Hired to find the missing son of retired political activist Moira Doherty, Dan Starkey knows his new case is going to be challenging. Billy 'the Bear' Doherty isn't an easy man to find - a criminal with a nasty drug habit, his mum is convinced he's been murdered.But when Moira herself is killed, her body found floating in the waters under Londonderry's Peace Bridge, Dan finds himself in the middle of a deadly game of cat and mouse. Already in unfamiliar territory, Starkey is quickly embroiled in the city's porn and drug fuelled underworld, where a new generation of gangster terrorist is intent on creating mayhem their predecessors could only dream of ...

Nathan Jones - scarred for life by one night of horror in his Northern Irish past. And also by having the same name as a Supremes song.Hoping for a fresh start, Nathan moves to New York but when his girlfriend leaves him, he only has his new job for company - that of a security guard at the Empire State building. Recently acquired by a computer billionaire, the building is about to be visited by President Michael Keneally, an army of FBI men, and George Burley of Alabama, a white supremacist with the President at the top of his assassination Top Ten.Wildly dark and wonderfully entertaining, EMPIRE STATE takes the world of politics - international, racial and sexual - and holds it hostage at the top of one of the most famous buildings on Earth.

Bicycling journalist Miller is exiled from his big-city paper to small-town Crossmaheart. There, he is to replace another reporter, Jamie Milburn, who has disappeared. Not that anyone's all that surprised, since Crossmaheart is a notoriously fatal place in which to ask questions.Miller aims to keep his head down, but as soon as he gets involved with Jamie's girlfriend Marie, that plan, and much else besides, begins to fall apart.Bateman is a master of storytelling, and CYCLE OF VIOLENCE is dark, disturbing and hugely enjoyable.

Not a lot happens in Niagara Falls. It's a sleepy Canadian town full of honeymooners and tourists, and that's how Inspector Frank Corrigan likes it. He saw enough trouble as a cop in Northern Ireland. Now he's happy dealing with parking offences and the odd drunk, although since his wife left him and took their daughter, 'happy' may not be quite the word.Then a reincarnated Native American princess by the name of Lelewala canoes over the Falls - and survives. Or so she says. And Frank falls in love. And finds himself confronting the greatest terrorist of the age at an international gathering of drug dealers.And that's before the music starts...

Meet Harry McKee - a sleazy local chat show host. Once a loving husband, he's become a drunken unfaithful slob. His wife is divorcing him and taking him to the cleaners. Even his kids won't speak to him. On his last night as a married man he winds up drunk and is beaten up. When he keels over the next day at the divorce hearing his wife and solicitor assume he's pulling a fast one. He eventually wakes from a week-long coma but he's lost his memory - everything since 1974.Inside his sagging middle-aged body, Harry feels eighteen again. Though he doesn't know it yet, he has been given the chance to get back his life, his wife and his self-respect. If only he could remember how it all went wrong and why his family hate him...

When the Marines destroy a terrorist training camp in the Libyan desert, they also kill both the parents of a ten-year-old boy, Mohammed Maguire.Brought back to Ireland, the land of his mother's birth, young Mohammed is treated as a public relations commodity by both sides of an argument that he doesn't understand - but which he can see with the clear eyes of a child.Wickedly funny and wonderfully abrasive, MOHAMMED MAGUIRE is Bateman at his very best.