Robert G Slade

Brendan has always lived a careful, constrained life. A salesman who never liked the work, he's a man who has stayed in his marriage and his faith because it was what was expected of him. But now, having lost his job after corporate downsizing and on the cusp of sixty, he finds himself scrambling to somehow stay afloat in the only Los Angeles work on offer to a man his age - driving for Uber.

When one of his rides, a retired professor named Elise, asks to be dropped off outside an abortion clinic where she now volunteers, Brendan finds himself literally driving right into the virulent epicentre of one of the major issues of our time, engulfing his life in the process. A novel of high suspense and considerable moral complexity, Afraid of the Light is a tough, affecting social thriller that speaks volumes about the corrosive divisions of our troubled times.

Etta's greatest unfulfilled wish is to see the sea, and so, at the age of eighty-two she gets up very early one morning and begins walking the 2,000 miles to water. Meanwhile her husband Otto waits patiently at home, left only with his memories. Their neighbour Russell remembers too - and he still loves Etta as much as he did more than fifty years ago, before she married Otto.

With a missing girl in the news, Claire Scott can’t help but be reminded of her sister, Julia, who disappeared twenty years ago in a mystery that was never solved. But when Claire begins to learn the truth about her sister, nothing will ever be the same.

Serendipity Dahlquist is a headstrong roller-blading teenager living in LA who has lost her dog. She asks private investigator Leo Bloodworth to help her find the missing pet. In what proves to have been a moment of madness, Bloodworth agrees to take on the case, unleashing an appalling--but also extremely entertaining--series of extremely homicidal events.

Sleeping Dog remains, almost 40 years after its publication, one of the most wonderful crime debuts: by turns charming, hilarious and pathological, Lochte's novel is a great celebration of everything that is most deplorable and hair-raising about California in the 1980s.