bitter lemon press gb (426 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: New. When Martina accuses her ex-boyfriend the son of a powerful local judge of assault and battery, no witnesses can be persuaded to testify on her behalf and one lawyer after another refuses to represent her. Guido Guerrieri knows the case could bring his legal career to a premature and messy end but he cannot resist the appeal of a hopeless cause. Nor deny an attraction to Sister Claudia, the young woman in charge of the shelter where Martina is living, who shares his love of martial arts and his virulent hatred of injustice.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Counsel for the defence Guido Guerrieri is asked to handle the appeal of Fabio Paolicelli, who has been sentenced to sixteen years for drug smuggling. The odds are stacked against the accused: not only the fact that he initially confessed to the crime but also his past as a neo-Fascist thug. It is only the intervention of Paolicelli's beautiful half-Japanese wife that finally overcomes Guerrieri's reluctance. Matters are further complicated when Guerrieri ends up in bed with her.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A nine-year-old boy is found murdered at the bottom of a well near a popular beach resort in southern Italy. In what looks like a hopeless case for Guido Guerrieri, counsel for the defence, a Senegalese peddler is accused of the crime. Faced with small-town racism fuelled by the recent immigration from Africa, Guido attempts to exploit the esoteric workings of the Italian courts. More than a perfectly paced legal thriller, this relentless suspense novel transcends the genre. A powerful attack on racism, and a fascinating insight into the Italian judicial process, it is also an affectionate portrait of a deeply humane hero.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A visitor from Georgia, a country torn apart by civil war, ends the peaceful existence of a school teacher's family in Germany. Christian Kestner has all but forgotten his stay in Tbilisi seven years before. He begins to worry when he receives a letter from David Ninochvili announcing his visit to Germany. Why is David coming? To seek revenge from Christian, guilty of flirting at the time with David's wife? What are the ties of this unwelcome guest to the different factions now vying for the control of Georgia? Christian becomes intensely suspicious of David's secretive ways, of his attraction to Christian's wife and even to his teenage son. Fear turns into panic, so corrosive that it can transform even the most rational individual into a monster.

Paperback. Condizione: New. The story is violent, pacy and full of black humour. Imagine the Soprano family arriving in France, or perhaps better, Ray Liotta, the snitch from 'Goodfellas' settling down with his family in a small town in Normandy. Under cover of darkness, an American family moves into a villa in Cholong-sur-Avre in Normandy. Fred Blake tells everyone he is writing a history of the landings. In fact Blake is Giovanni Manzoni, an ex-Mafia boss who grassed and is now in the FBI Witness Protection Program. Having blown his cover a number of times in the US, the FBI finally sends him to France. Things happen to this thuggish family: a plumber who angers Fred with delays and exorbitant estimates 'falls down the stairs' and breaks both arms, the manager of the local supermarket insults Maggie behind her back so that afternoon his supermarket burns down, Warren, the son, starts a gang in his lycee, to intimidate and extort other pupils. A coincidence beyond belief blows Fred's cover yet again and, with the arrival of the shooters from Newark, he is able to dive back into the violent life of crime he misses so much.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This is a portrait of a wife betrayed, at first desperate to save her marriage but then intent on violent revenge, also an unrelenting dissection of family life among the Argentine middle class. Ines is convinced that every wife is bound to be betrayed one day, so she is not surprised to find a note in her husband's briefcase with a heart smeared in lipstick crossed by the words All YoursA" and signed Your true loveA". She follows him to a park on a rainy winter evening and witnesses a violent quarrel he has with another woman. The woman collapses; Ernesto sinks her body in a nearby lake. When Ernesto becomes a suspect in the case she provides him with an alibi. After all, hatred can bring people together as urgently as love. But Ernesto cannot bring his sexual adventures to an end so Ines concocts a plan for revenge from which there is no return.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A haunting work, reminiscent of Albert Camus, which portrays with exquisite psychological detail the emotional crisis in the life of a young Swiss schoolteacher. His father's prodigious vitality and virility had crushed his family and ruined his son's childhood. Even after his death the parental ogre haunts his son, sucking him into a vortex of despair. Fits with the contemporary success of autobiographical novels, focused on a tormented childhood, parental persecution and the loneliness of the outlier. Chessex's book is based on the character of his own father, his totalitarian and austere Calvinist upbringing and his escape to the sensual world of serial seduction. These motifs and the meditation on death have informed most of his fiction, especially "The Tyrant", his most successful book by far with 450,000 copies sold.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Another day in Barcelona, another slimy politician's wife is suspected of infidelity. Lluis Font discovers a portrait of his wife in an exhibition that leads him to conclude he is being cuckolded by the artist. Concerned only about the potential political fallout, he hires twins Eduard and Pep, private detectives with a supposed knack for helping the wealthy with their 'dirty laundry'. Their office is adorned with false doors leading to non-existent private rooms, a mysterious secretary who is always away and a broken laptop computer picked up on the street. The case turns ugly when Font's wife is found poisoned by a marron glace from a box of sweets delivered anonymously. This is a deftly plotted, bitingly funny mystery novel. It is a satire of Catalan politics and a fascinating insight into the life and habits of Barcelona's inhabitants, diurnal and nocturnal.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Why must the festive dinner in the Hirschen Inn be interrupted? A murder puts an end to the wedding celebration of Studer's daughter. A man is found with a sharpened bicycle spoke embedded in his back, and a suspect is quickly arrested - a bit too quickly, thinks Studer. Property speculation, usury and betrayed love find their way into this tightly written mystery novel that calls on Studer's intuitive, often absurd, yet efficient police methods. "The Spoke", a European crime classic, was first published in 1937. It has been translated into six languages. This is its first publication in English.

Paperback. Condizione: New. From the author of The Aosawa Murders, one of the NYT Notable Books of 2020. The WSJ commented: "Part psychological thriller, part murder mystery-it is audacious in conception and brilliant in execution." The Globe and Mail said the book was "emerging as one of the most praised novels of the year." Set in a Tokyo flat over the course of one night, Aki and Hiro spend one last night together before going their separate ways. Each believes the other to be a murderer and is determined to extract a confession before the night is over. Who has been killed and why? Which one is the killer? In an intense battle of wills over the course of a night, the true nature of the pair's relationship and the chain of events leading up to this night are gradually revealed in this gripping psychological thriller that keeps the reader in suspense to the very end. The thriller--buried in a literary whodunit--explores the mysteries of romantic love, memory and attaining self-knowledge. Like the best Japanese crime writing, it is an unflinching foray into the darker recesses of the soul, quietly suspenseful and elegantly constructed.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Lieutenant Mario Conde is suffering from a terrible New Year's Eve hangover. Though it's the middle of a weekend, he is asked to urgently investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rafael Morin, a high-level business manager in the Cuban nomenklatura. Conde remembered Morin from their student days: good-looking, brilliant, a "reliable comrade'' who always got what he wanted, including Tamara the girl Conde was after. But Rafael Morin's exemplary rise from a poor barrio and picture perfect life hide more than one suspicious episode worthy of investigation. While pursuing the case in a decaying but adored Havana, Conde confronts his lost love for Tamara and the dreams and illusions of his generation.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Twenty-four year old Lissette Delgado was beaten, raped, and then strangled with a towel. Marijuana is found in her apartment and her wardrobe is suspiciously beyond the means of a high school teacher. Lieutenant Conde is pressured by "the highest authority" to conclude this investigation quickly when chance leads him into the arms of a beautiful redhead, a saxophone player who shares his love for jazz and Japanese fighting fish. This is a Havana of crumbling, grand buildings, secrets hidden behind faded doors and corruption. For an author living in Cuba, Padura is remarkably outspoken about the failings of Castro's regime. Yet this is a eulogy of Cuba, its life of music, sex and the great friendships of those who elected to stay and fight for survival.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Hella Mauzer was the first ever woman Inspector in the Helsinki Homicide Unit. But her superiors deemed her too `emotional' for the job and had her reassigned. Now, two years later, she is working in Lapland for the Ivalo police department under Chief Inspector Järvi, a man more interested in criminal statistics and his social life than police work. They receive a letter from Irja Waltari, a priest's wife from the village of Käärmela on the Soviet border, informing them of the disappearance of Erno Jokinen, a local. Hella jumps at the chance to investigate. Järvi does not think that a crime is involved. After all, people disappear all the time in the snows of Finland. When she arrives, Hella stays the village priest and his wife, who have taken in Erno's grandson who refuses to tell anyone his grandfather's secret. A body is then discovered in the forest and she realizes that she was right; a crime has been committed. A murder. But what Hella doesn't know, is that the small village of Käärmela is harbouring another crime, a crime so evil, it is beyond anything any of them could have ever imagined.

Paperback. Condizione: New. When Judge Larocca is the subject of corruption allegations, Guerrieri goes against his better instincts and takes the case. After all they had been at school and university together. Helped by Annapaola Doria, a motorbike-riding bisexual private detective who keeps a baseball bat to hand for sticky situations, he discovers the judge's links to the mafia. Larocca is blind to the immorality of his actions but Annapaola makes sure that justice is done, perhaps not in the most orthodox way. Of course Guerrieri cannot stop himself from falling for Annapaola's exotic charms. The novel takes the form of a suspenseful legal thriller but it is much more. It is the story of a judge who , to quote Brothers Karamazov, ".lies to himself and listens to his own lies, so gets to the point where he can no longer distinguish the truth, either in himself or around himself." A man always looking to justify his evil and corrupt behaviour, perhaps an apposite metaphor for Italy itself.

Paperback. Condizione: New. The latest thriller from South America's best-selling crime writer.When a Buenos Aires industrialist is found dead at his home in an exclusive gated community, the novelist Nurit Iscar - Betty Boo to her admirers-is invited to cover the story by her former lover, now the editor of a national newspaper. Working with the paper's veteran, but recently demoted, crime reporter and his hapless junior, Nurit uncovers a trail of murders that will lead all three to the highest echelons of power in Argentina. In Betty Boo Claudia Pineiro combines a chilling story of murderous revenge with a warm and funny portrait of friendship and love in middle age.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Jonas is a British spy out in the cold. When his father, an elderly clergyman, is kidnapped and held for ransom by ISIS in Syria, he takes matters into his own hands and begins to steal the only currency he has access to: secret government intelligence. He heads to Beirut with a haul of sensitive documents and recruits an unlikely ally - an alcoholic Swiss priest named Father Tobias. Despite barely surviving his previous contact with ISIS, Tobias agrees to travel into the heart of the Islamic State and inform the kidnappers that Jonas is willing to negotiate for his father's life. British and American intelligence agents in Beirut try everything in their power to stop Jonas, and he finds himself tested to the limit as he fights to keep the negotiations alive and play his enemies off against each other. As the book races towards a thrilling confrontation in the Syrian desert, Jonas will have to decide how far he is willing to go to see his father again.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Studer investigates when the director vanishes and a child murderer escapes from an insane asylum in Bern, an environment Glauser knew all too well from personal experience. Set in the 1920s, the novel explores the no-man's-land between reason and madness where Matto, the spirit of insanity, reigns. Dubions psychological theories and therapies abound and the asylum darkly mirrors the world outside.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Must each man kill the thing he loves? For Victor Cox, a professor of film history, the Hollywood films noirs of the 1940s and 1950s are more real than his daily life. When his wife is found drowned, Cox is the first murder suspect. He falls in love with a student who looks like the 1920s film star Louise Brooks, but she disappears at a Belgian seaside resort. Smeared in lipstick in their hotel room are the words "No Sale", the same words Elizabeth Taylor wrote on a mirror in Butterfield 8 (she won her first Oscar in that film). Subsequently, a series of gruesome killings of young women, all modeled on violent deaths in films that he knows and loves, lead the police back to Cox, who starts to doubt his own sanity and innocence. With its stylish writing, pointed references to cinema classics, and blend of horror and humor, this is a powerful psychological thriller. It won the Diamond Bullet Award, the Dagger award for Belgium.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Helsinki, March 1953. An unusually long and cold winter, everywhere frozen sea, ice-covered lakes and rivers. In a port city flooded with refugees, who cares if a young woman goes missing? An up-and-coming inspector who views this as an opportunity to advance his career. A heartbroken PI with a score to settle. They have yet to discover one thing: the most dangerous lies are those we tell ourselves. It all begins when Nellie, a prostitute working in a high-end brothel is found floating upside down in Helsinki Harbour. Not exactly a high priority case for the Helsinki police, so homicide chief Jokela passes the job to his former colleague Hella. It's beginning to look like a serial killer is at work when Elena, another lady of the night, narrowly escapes being driven into the harbour by her 19-year-old john. Problem was he had handcuffed her in the car. And to add further excitement to Hella's life, the madam is soon found dead in the garden outside the brothel.

Paperback. Condizione: New. This is a beautifully crafted thriller set in a European world of small-town hypocrisy. Erika, an attractive local heiress, is married to Wallmann. When she falls to her death near their lakeside villa, the police conclude it as a tragic accident. Scholten, a long time employee of Erika's, knows a thing or two about the true state of her marriage. He suspects an almost perfect crime. Scholten's maverick investigation soon buys him a ticket for a most dangerous ride.

Paperback. Condizione: New. It is the end of October, the city of Basel is grey and wet. It could be December. It is just after midnight when Police Inspector Peter Hunkeler, on his way home and slightly worse for wear, spots old man Hardy sitting on a bench under a street light. He wants to smoke a cigarette with him, but the usually very loquacious Hardy is silent-his throat a gaping wound. Turns out he was first strangled and his left earlobe slit, the diamond stud he usually wore there missing. The media and the police come quickly to the same conclusion: Hardy's murder was the work of a gang of Albanian drug smugglers. But for Hunkeler that seems too obvious a resolution. After all, Barabara Amsler, a prostitute, was also recently found strangled, her ear slit. He follows his own intuition and methods which lead him deep into a seedy world of bars and night clubs. More ominously, he soon must face the consequences of certain events in recent Swiss history that those in power would prefer to keep far from the public eye.

Paperback. Condizione: New. One spring afternoon, defence attorney Guerrieri is confronted with an unexpected spectre from his past. In her youth, Lorenza had been a beautiful and unpredictable girl with dazzling charm. A changed woman faces him in his office that day. The ensuing years have ravaged her appearance and embittered her mind. As if that weren't enough, her son Jacopo, a small-time delinquent, stands convicted of the first-degree murder of a local drug dealer. Her trial lawyer has died, so, for the appeal, she turns to Guerrieri as her last hope. Guido is not convinced of the innocence of Lorenza's son, nor does he have fond memories of the way their relationship ended two decades earlier. Nevertheless, he accepts the case; perhaps to pay a melancholy homage to the ghosts of his youth. His old friend Carmelo Tancredi, a retired police inspector, and his girlfriend, the charming investigator Annapaola Doria are once again by his side. A masterful, compassionate novel, striking a balance between a straightforward trial story -some say the purest distillation of human experience - and the sad notes of time as it passes and exhausts itself.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Kati owns Istanbul's only mystery book store and, as usual, gets involved in a case that is none of her business. Every day, a beautiful woman lunches alone in the restaurant next to the bookstore. When the woman is found dead in her apartment, Kati immediately recognizes the stranger from the restaurant in images in the newspaper photos. Although the police believe it was an accident, Kati suspects something more sinister has happened. Sani Ankaraligil was an attractive young woman, in the middle of a divorce from her wealthy husband and a politically active ecologist. So who would benefit from her death? The industrial companies Sani had accused of polluting the rivers of Western Turkey, or her jealous husband seeking revenge through an honour killing, or a Thracian separatist group? The investigation pulls Kati into the murkiest of waters.

Paperback. Condizione: New. On August 6 th 1989 , the day on which the Catholic Church celebrates the Feast of the Transfiguration, the body of a strangled transvestite is discovered in the humid undergrowth of the Havana Woods. He is wearing a beautiful red evening dress and the red ribbon with which he was asphyxiated is still round his neck. To the consternation of Lieutenant Mario Conde, in charge of the investigation, the victim turns out to be Alexis Arayan, the son of a highly respected diplomat. His investigation begins with a visit to the home of the 'disgraced' dramatist, Alberto Marques, with whom the murdered youth was living. Marques, a man of letters and a former giant of the Cuban theatre, helps Conde solve the crime. In the baking heat of the Havana summer, Conde also unveils a dark, turbulent world of Cubans who live without dreaming of exile, grappling with food shortages and wounds from the Angolan war.

Paperback. Condizione: New. The novel is set in the Pantanal, the vast untamed Brazilian lowlands bordering Bolivia. One bright Sunday, alone on the banks of the Paraguay River, the narrator witnesses the fatal crash of a small 'plane. He finds a kilo of cocaine in the dead pilot's backpack. After but a moment's hesitation he pockets the coke and the pilot's expensive watch. Thus begins the protagonist's long slide into corruption. When the crash site is located several days later, the pilot's body is missing and remains unfound for months despite a large-scale police search. Our hero gets involved in a busted cocaine deal and ends up owing a Bolivian drug gang so much money that blackmailing the wealthy family of the dead pilot seems to be the only way out. The family secretly agrees to pay serious money to recover the body of their son. Our hero doesn't have the pilot's body so someone else's will do. Or so he thinks.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Kati Hirschel, in her thirties, is the proud owner of Istanbul's only crime bookshop. She has learned the corrupt ways of her adored city and soon takes possession of an apartment obtained with the help of a generous bribe to a government official. All is well until a man is found murdered in her dream apartment and Kati becomes the police's primary suspect. In her second novel Esmahan Aykol takes us to the alleys and boulevards of cosmopolitan Istanbul, to posh villas and seedy basement flats, to the property agents and lawyers, to Islamist leaders and city officials - in fact everywhere that baksheesh helps move things along.

Paperback. Condizione: New. UK ed. It all began with an unusual assignment, a job better suited for Marlowe than for counsel for the defence Guido Guerrieri. Could he find new evidence to force the police to reopen their investigation about the disappearance of Manuela, the daughter of a rich couple living in Bari? The stories of Manuela's druggy university friends don't quite add up. Her best friend, Caterina, too beautiful and certainly too young for Guerrieri, is a temptation he doesn't need. While the investigation proceeds, Guido fights his loneliness by talking to the punching bag hanging in his living-room and by walking the streets of Bari late at night, often visiting a colourful bar owned by a former client and ex-prostitute. She somehow provides the clue that explains Manuela's disappearance.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Italy, autumn 1943, the Italian government has switched sides and declared war on Germany. Italy is divided, the North controlled by the fascists, the South liberated by Allied forces slowly fighting their way up the peninsula. Having survived hell on the Russian Front, Wehrmacht Major and aristocrat Martin Bora is sent to Verona. He is ordered to investigate the murder of a prominent local fascist: a bizarre death, threatening to discredit the regime's public image. Against the backdrop of relentless anti-partisan warfare and the tragedy of the Holocaust, a breathless chase begins.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Superintendent Lascano is drawn into a war between the Buenos Aires Chief of Police and the Apostles, drug-dealing cops who want to control the city. When the Chief of Police is murdered Lascano becomes the Apostles' next target. His only way out of the country is to retrieve the loot from a bungled bank robbery. Mallo paints a scathing portrait of Argentina where the Junta's generals are paraded in court in civilian clothes, treated like mere petty thieves. The mothers and grandmothers of The Plaza de MayoA" see the people who have stolen their children go unpunished; corruption and violence continue to rule. But at the centre of the novel is a touching portrayal of two broken men, a cop and a robber, whose humanity is sorely tested by the times and events racking this proud country.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Bologna in August. Unbearable heat, an empty city. Claudia is a young student in a hurry to return home from her work as a waitress and get out of the uniform she hates. Tomas is a young man on his way to elope with his girlfriend Francesca and rescue her from her dysfunctional family. Aldo is a husband and father with an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley, anxious to get to an apartment filled with guilty secrets. All three have an urgent need to be somewhere else. Instead, they are trapped in a lift in a deserted building on a holiday weekend.and one of the trio is a serial killer. This dark, twist-packed psychological thriller has been adapted as a film by Mexican director, Rigoberto Castaneda, who made last year's Mexican/Spanish co-production "Kilometro 31", screened at the London Film Festival.