Showing results by publisher "Picador" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Éric Vuillard’s gripping novel The Order of the Day tells the story of the pivotal meetings which took between the European powers in the run up to World War Two. What emerges is a fascinating and incredibly moving account of failed diplomacy, broken relationships and the catastrophic momentum which led to conflict. 

In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani sought asylum in Australia but was instead illegally imprisoned in the country’s most notorious detention centre on Manus Island. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Behrouz Boochani spent nearly five years typing passages of this book one text at a time from a secret mobile phone in prison. Compiled and translated from Farsi, they form an incredible story of how escaping political persecution in Iran, he ended up trapped as a stateless person.

At dusk on a November evening in 2020, a woman slips out of her garden gate and turns up the hill. Kate is in the middle of a two-week quarantine period, but she just can’t take it anymore - the closeness of the air in her small house, the confinement. And anyway, the moor will be deserted at this time. Nobody need ever know. But Kate’s neighbour Alice sees her leaving, and Matt, Kate’s son, soon realizes she’s missing. And Kate, who planned only a quick solitary walk - a breath of open air - falls and badly injures herself. 

When 23-year-old Meggie meets distant and enigmatic Sabine, she recognises in her the person she would like to be. Giving up her daytime existence, her reliable boyfriend and the trappings of a normal life in favour of working the same nightshifts as Sabine could be the perfect escape for Meggie. She finds a liberating sense of freedom in indulging her growing preoccupation with Sabine and plunges herself into another existence, gradually immersing herself in the transient and uncertain world of the nightshift worker.

Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than 30 years, having started sleuthing on behalf of society’s finest in 1905. Her exploits grabbed headlines throughout the world, but beneath the public persona, she was forced to hide vital aspects of her own identity in order to thrive in a class-obsessed and male-dominated world. And - as Susannah Stapleton reveals - she was a most unreliable witness to her own life. Who was Maud? And what was the reality of being a female private detective in the Golden Age of Crime?

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is a story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his ageing father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett’s recurring preoccupations.

Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy works from home but devotes her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband, he wants her to know. The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage, she will hurt him three times.

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, vanishes from the luxury resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X on the last night of her family’s vacation. Several days later Alison’s naked body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men, employees at the resort, are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the time line against it, and the men are soon released. It’s national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved, but for Claire’s family there is only the sad return home to broken lives.

6th December 1993. A drug dealer called Scrappy is shot and left for dead on her mother’s lawn in South Central Los Angeles. Two local gang members, Wizard and Dreamer, are arrested. The problem is: one is guilty, the other wasn’t even there. It had to be a frame-up. And the cops had to be responsible, didn’t they? 

Six years ago, Henry and Celia were lovers and colleagues, working for the CIA station in Vienna, until terrorists hijacked a plane at the airport. A rescue attempt, staged from the inside, went terribly wrong. Everyone on board was killed. That night has continued to haunt all of those involved; for Henry and Celia, it brought to an end their relationship. Celia decided she'd had enough; she left the agency and is now living an ordinary life in California. Henry is still a CIA analyst and has travelled to the US to see her one more time.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people are due to have dinner in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The hosts are a retired physics professor and her husband; they are joined by one of her former students and await the arrival of another couple, delayed by what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. In the apartment, talk ranges widely. The opening kickoff is one commercial away. Then something happens, and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.

Born to a Vietnamese family based in Melbourne, the narrator is haunted by the story of his grandfather whose ten-year imprisonment by the Communist government in Vietnam’s notorious Chi Hoa prison looms large over his own place in the world and his choice to become a human rights lawyer. As he oscillates between identities of his Australian upbringing and his Vietnamese heritage, it is the death of his grandfather in a Parisian suburb and the birth of his daughter that crystalise some of the strands that have shaped his life and thinking

A mother moves to Geneva with her husband and their two young children. In their beautiful new rented apartment, surrounded by their rented furniture, and several Swiss instructions to maintain quiet, she finds herself totally isolated. Her husband’s job means he is almost never present, and her entire world is caring for her children - making sure they are happy, and fed and comfortable, and that they can be seen as the happy, well-fed, comfortable family they should be. Everything is perfect. But, of course, it’s not....

The island of Antigua comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the roads that pass through the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air. Ignoring the legacy of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who took her own life, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease amid his surroundings: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters.

A piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness. Kincaid inhabits each of her characters – a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England – as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future. Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, non-linear.