Kirjahaku

Detective Lou Perlman returns to Glasgow’s dark underbelly in the atmospheric new crime thriller from the acclaimed author of The Bad Fire and The Last Darkness. When a young Asian entrepreneur dies in a suspicious fall from his high-rise apartment and an Indian kindergarten teacher is gunned down in front of her class it’s clear to Detective Sergeant Lou Perlman that he is dealing with racially motivated murder. The emergence of a group called White Rage and a growing sense of fear across the city of Glasgow mean that Perlman needs some answers quickly. At the same time, he needs to make sense of a crime that is closer to home – the mysterious shooting of his own brother Colin. Lou’s conviction that the killing is connected to the underworld boss Leo Kilroy nags at his mind almost as much as his unspoken love for Colin’s widow Miriam. And when Lou Perlman looks beneath the glittering new surface of the city in which he was born, he finds all sorts of ancient connections, some of them painful, some of them shocking, many of them disturbing.

On a bitter winter evening, during rush hour, a bomb explodes in a crowded train in the London underground. More than a hundred people are horrifically and senselessly slaughtered. In the absence of any terrorist claims come distressing unanswerable questions: Who planted the device? And why?A few hours later in a Mayfair flat a young prostitute is murdered and an enigmatic message written in blood is left in her room... It is addressed to Frank Pagan, counter-terrorist specialist, who has been shunted aside by the political infighting at Special Branch, but is now brought back from exile to investigate the most terrifying case of his career.Pagan, who moves in his own mysterious ways, who flaunts the rule-book and follows his own instincts, is plunged into a darkening puzzle more sinister than a bomb in an underground tunnel. He finds himself pitted against two old adversaries: the deranged terrorist Carlotta, a woman whose appetite for blood is matched only by Pagan's hunger for justice - and the ghost of Jig, his most famous antagonist, whose death has given birth to new demons.

The world of Frank Pagan, Special Branch's counter-terrorist agent, is being violated. He is being observed, his every movement tracked and recorded. His flat is broken into. The only object stolen is a photograph of his dead wife, which is later returned to him grotesquely disfigured.But it is more than Pagan's residence that has been invaded. His dreams, his every waking moment, are filled with hot, obsessive thoughts of a mortally alluring woman. For it is the most critical assignment of Pagan's career, as well as his fate, to bring to justice the enigmatic and ruthless terrorist Carlotta, who is wanted the world over for her hideous crimes.Indifferent to the horror and destruction she leaves in her wake, yet curiously fixated on Pagan, Carlotta sends emotional depth-charges into his life to the point where his pursuit of her crosses the line that separates duty from sexual obsession. In a deadly cat-and-mouse chase, Pagan is destined always to stay just a step behind Carlotta, until the fatal day he catches up with his nemesis.Riddled with intrigue, violence and sexual tension, Heat resolves the confrontation begun in Campbell Armstrong's bestselling Jig, and Jigsaw. A consummate psychological thriller, it takes the reader on a journey into the darkest reaches of a man's soul.

Asterisk is America's fragile secret. It waits somewhere in the Arizona desert to pave the way to world domination. Two frightened, desperate men are racing to crack the wall of silence surrounding Asterisk - John Thorne, a White House aide, and Ted Hollander of the CIA.