'Truly ingenious' The Tablet
Goddard sprinkles head-turning double-crossing with delightful by-play between his two leads' Times
'Fast-paced, beautifully crafted with some excellently drawn characters... engages from start to finish' Choice Magazine
'Goddard writes amazing novels of mystery/suspense. His new one is magical and the title is simply the best' Stephen King
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On a stifling afternoon at Police HQ in Algiers, Superintendent Taleb, coasting towards retirement, with not even an air-conditioned office to show for his long years of service, is handed a ticking time bomb of a case which will take him deep into Algeria's troubled past and its fraught relationship with France.

To his dismay, he is assigned to work with Agent Hidouchi, an intimidating representative of the country's feared secret service, who makes it clear she intends to call the shots. They are instructed to pursue a former agent, now on the run after twenty years in prison for his part in a high-level corruption scandal. But their search will lead them inexorably towards a greater mystery, surrounding a murder that took place in Paris more than fifty years ago.

Uncovering the truth may be his responsibility, but Taleb is well aware that no-one in Algeria wants to be reminded of the dark deeds carried out in the struggle for independence - or in the violence that has racked the nation since. Before long, he will face a choice he has long sought to avoid, between self-preservation and doing the right thing.

And, ultimately, the choice may not even be his to make.

The new novel from Robert Goddard, THIS IS THE DAY THEY DREAM OF, is available for pre-order now.
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Praise for Robert Goddard

'The world's greatest storyteller' Guardian
'One of the finest crime writer of any generation' Daily Mail
'Our finest practitioner of double-crossing plotting' Mick Herron

Robert Goodard's manipulation of suspense and surprise rarely fails to dazzle.--The New York Times Book Review

Harry Barnett lives the life of an Englishman on permanent vacation in Greece, house-sitting for a powerful friend and hiding from a past disgrace. That is, until a guest at the villa disappears on a walking tour, and Harry is the number one suspect. While a Greek detective tries to trap him, and the British tabloids pillory him at home, Harry's conscience is his worst enemy of all. What happened to young, beautiful Heather Mallender? Who took her--and why didn't Harry realize that something was amiss?

Suddenly, a man steeped in failure has found a purpose, retracing the strange, twisting route that led to Heather's vanishing. But the more he learns, the less he knows. Until Harry finds himself at the heart of a dangerous puzzle whose pieces are scattered everywhere: in the realm of British politics, in the beds of adulterous lovers, in the past, the present, and most of all, amid the secrets of a killer. . . .

Praise for Into the Blue

Cracking good literature entertainment . . . had me utterly spellbound . . . Into the Blue is] a book that will push the edges of late night fatigue. . . . It's the storyteller as magician; we only see what he wants us to see, when he wants us to see it.--Washington Post Book World

A cracker, twisting, turning and exploding with real skill.--Daily Mirror

Impossible to put down . . . totally compels you from the first page to the last . . . a wonderful storyteller.--Yorkshire Post

'The world's greatest storyteller' GUARDIAN
'One of the finest crime writers of any generation' DAILY MAIL
'Our finest practitioner of the double-cross plotting' MICK HERRON
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Umiko Wada never set out to be a private detective, let alone become the one-woman operation behind the Kodaka Detective Agency. But so it has turned out, thanks to the death of her former boss, Kazuto Kodaka, in mysterious circumstances.

Keen to avoid a similar fate, Wada chooses the cases she takes very carefully. A businessman who wants her to track down his estranged son offers what appears to be a straightforward assignment. Soon she finds herself pulled into a labyrinthine conspiracy with links to a twenty-seven-year-old investigation by her late employer and to the chaos and trauma of the dying days of the Second World War.

As Wada uncovers a dizzying web of connections between then and now, it becomes clear that someone has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the past buried. Soon those she loves most will be sucked into the orbit of one of the most powerful men in Tokyo. And he will do whatever it takes to hold on to his power...

The Fine Art of Uncanny Prediction is another tour de force from the cunning mind of master storyteller Robert Goddard. Spanning seventy years, it takes the reader on a head-spinning journey of twist and counter-twist which keep you guessing until the final pages.
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Readers love Robert Goddard:

***** 'Guaranteed and satisfying escapism'
***** 'Twists and turns right up to the last page'
***** 'Edge-of-the-seat stuff'
***** 'Fresh and inventive'
***** 'The master of twists and suspense ... sublime'
***** 'Scintillating and wickedly twisty'
***** 'If Stephen King has taken it to a baseball game, I'm going to read it'

Umiko Wada has recently had quite enough excitement in her life. With her husband recently murdered and a mother who seems to want her married again before his body is cold, she just wants to keep her head down.

As a secretary to a private detective, her life is pleasingly uncomplicated, filled with coffee runs, diary management and paperwork.

That is, until her boss takes on a new case. A case which turns out to be dangerous enough to get him killed. A case which means Wada will have to leave Japan for the first time and travel to London.

Following the only lead she has, Wada quickly realises that being a detective isn't as easy as the television makes out. And that there's a reason why secrets stay buried for a long time. Because people want them to stay secret. And they're prepared to do very bad things to keep them that way...

What readers are saying:

***** 'Guaranteed and satisfying escapism'
***** 'Edge-of-the-seat stuff'
***** 'The master of twists and suspense ... sublime'

It is 1919, the Treaty of Versailles has been signed, and a team assembled at Max's behest now anxiously awaits his arrival in Tokyo. Max had traveled to Paris after the end of the Great War to investigate the suspicious death of his diplomat father, Sir Henry Maxted, and was soon plunged into a treacherous game of cat and mouse with the people behind the murder: German spymaster Fritz Lemmer and the dark horse of the Japanese diplomatic contingent, Count Tomura. It is in Japan--the country of Max's birth, where Sir Henry worked early in his career--that Max hopes to finally uncover the truth behind his father's de-mise and take down Lemmer's spy network once and for all. But what Max's co-hort doesn't know is that his own story seems to have come to an end in France. Stuck in limbo, the team decides to pursue their only lead--right into Lemmer's den.

Loaded with death threats, knife fights, a kidnapping or two, and a coded list that has the power to dismantle whole governmental hierarchies, this is a masterful work of historical cut-and-thrust that tests the bonds of family and country to their very limit.

Their journey starts with an unscheduled stop at the imposing Thiepval Memorial to the dead of the Battle of the Somme near Amiens. Amongst those commemorated is Leonora's father. The date of his death is recorded and 30th April, 1916. But Leonora wasn't born until 14th March 1917.

Penelope at once supposes a simple wartime illegitimacy as the clue to her mother's unhappy childhood and the family's sundered connections with her aristocratic heritage, about which she has always known so little.

But nothing could have prepared her, or the reader, for the extraordinary story that is about to unfold.

January, 1721. London is reeling from the effects of the greatest financial scandal of the age--the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, which plunged the nation into recession. William Spandrel, a penniless mapmaker, is offered a discharge of his debts by Sir Theodore Janssen, a director of the South Sea Company, on one condition: He must secretly convey an important package to Amsterdam.

With the package safely delivered, Spandrel barely survives an attempt on his life, only to discover that the recipient has been murdered, and that he himself is the prime suspect. Spandrel quickly realizes that he has become a pawn in a very dangerous game. British Government agents, and others, are on his trail, believing that the mysterious package contains secrets that could spark a revolution in England. Spandrel's only chance of survival is to recover the package and place its contents in the right hands. But what are the contents and whose exactly are the right hands?

In the spring of 1919, Paris is filled with delegates working towards the Treaty of Versailles--British diplomat Sir Henry Maxted among them. But before his work is done, he turns up dead outside a Montparnasse apartment building. The French police conclude that Sir Henry tripped and fell from the roof, but when his son Max is sent to Paris to collect the body, it quickly becomes clear that there is more to the story, starting with the beautiful woman whose apartment Sir Henry often visited. What begins as an innocent inquiry into his father's death soon leads Max into a perilous world of secret allegiances, international espionage, and double- and triple-crosses.

The Ways of the World is a vivid, visceral thriller at the crossroads of history, where one spilled secret has the power to change the fate of empires.

Martin is intrigued by Strafford's story, by the man's overwhelming love for a beautiful suffragette, by her inexplicable rejection of him and their love affair's political repercussions. But as he retraces Strafford's ruination, Martin realizes that Strafford did not fall by chance; he was pushed. Suddenly Martin, who has not cared for many people in his life, cares desperately--about a man's mysterious death and a family's terrible secret, about a love beyond reckoning and betrayal beyond imagining. Most of all Martin cares because the story he is uncovering is not yet over--and among the men and women still caught in its web, Martin himself may be the most vulnerable of all....

For Chris, the suicide opens a floodgate of doubt and suspicion. How did his family's wealth slip out of the hands of a great-uncle, brutally murdered before he could change his will? Were the men convicted of the crime truly guilty? And who is the mysterious, seductive woman who claims to know the Napiers' darkest secrets? As the crimes of two families are exposed, a series of violent acts shadows him and suddenly Chris knows he's in uncharted waters...until a killer drops one last disguise--for the ultimate act of revenge.

The stranger offers his name as James Norton, but claims he is in reality Sir James Davenall, the man to whom Trenchard's wife Constance had once been engaged, and who had supposedly committed suicide eleven years ago. Davenall's mother and younger brother, who has since inherited the family's baronetcy, refuse to recognize this stranger as one of their own, and they soon force Trenchard--who fears the loss of his wife's affections and his own sanity--into an uneasy alliance against him. But Trenchard must plumb the depths of his own despair before the dark secrets of the Davenall family can finally, shockingly, be revealed.

It is a golden evening of high summer in July 1990. Robin Timariot has set out that morning on what he has planned as a six-day tramp along part of Offa's Dyke. At the close of his first day's walk he encounters an elegant middle-aged woman who seems strangely out of place among the sheep and gorse of Hergest Ridge. They exchange only a few words of conversation, but their talk is enigmatic -- and unforgettable. A few days later, at the end of his walk, Timariot returns home to learn from the newspapers that, just a few hours after their meeting, the woman, whose name was Louise Paxton, was raped and then murdered, along with an artist, Oscar Bantock, who lived near by.

A man is swiftly charged and convicted of the crime, but a string of inexplicable events begins to convince Timariot -- and others -- that all is not what it seems. Timariot, fascinated by Louise Paxton's memory, is drawn irresistibly into the complex motives and relationships of her family and friends, searching against his better judgement for the secret of what really happened on the day she died.

The closer he gets to the truth, the more hideous and uncertain it seems to be. And far too late he realizes that it may threaten many powerful people. So much so that anybody who uncovers it is unlikely to be allowed to live.

A decade before, a woman matching Hayley's exact description died in a suspicious diving accident--at the side of the man giving Harding his orders. Now the ring, said to have been cut off the finger of a drowned British naval commander in 1707, is at the center of a many-tendrilled puzzle. Uncanny resemblances . . . stunning contradictions . . . Then Hayley's sudden disappearance . . . For Harding, one misstep and a handful of coincidences ignite a search through dozens of lives, back into English history and the age of the Black Death, and forward to a fatal meeting in Germany . . . to find Hayley, her true identity, and the most shocking secret of all.

Now, amid shattering revelations about her family, and in the aftermath of a second savage crime, Charlotte finds herself at the center of a widening storm. And for Charlotte, something extraordinary is beginning to happen. As fifty years of secrets begin to unravel, shy, cautious Charlotte is coming alive in the shadow of a mystery--uncovering a shocking tale of wartime greed and treachery, and a vendetta of violence seemingly without end....

The desperate attempt to save his old friend sets Richard off on a race across Germany and then north, first to Copenhagen, then to Helsinki. Whatever the contents of the case, they link a Danish tycoon and his family's dark secret to the deaths of several innocent people. And now that secret is beginning to tug at the threads of a larger mystery--one involving the fate of the Grand Duchess Anastasia, last of the Romanovs.

When two con men, traveling to England in 1931 aboard a transatlantic liner, decide to fleece a wealthy heiress, they become enmeshed in a deep and dangerous mystery involving betrayal, deceit, and intricate political machination.

Harry Barnett is leading a contented life in Vancouver with his wife and daughter when he is brought back to England by the death of his mother. He intends to spend just a few days sorting out her affairs when a chance meeting he will regret for the rest of his life makes him change his plans. Two old acquaintances from his National Service days track Harry down to his mother's house -- the last address they had for him. A lavish reunion has been organized to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their RAF days. Harry decides to go.

During the war, Harry and his fellow RAF conscripts spent three months in a Scottish castle where they acted as guinea pigs in a psychological experiment. The reunion is to take place in the same castle. It will be a chance to see friends, settle old scores and lay a few ghosts to rest.

The party begins on the train up to Aberdeen, until the apparent suicide of one of their number shatters the holiday atmosphere. Their arrival in Scotland seems under a cloud, and when another comrade dies soon after their arrival, Harry is gripped by a sense of foreboding. As well, the recollections of the old comrades of their time in the castle are frighteningly different, and unexplained events from 1955 still haunt them. As Harry tries to solve the mystery of what really happened fifty years ago, he uncovers an extraordinary secret that convinces him he will never leave the castle alive.