The Cologne police know a woman is going to die. They know the day it will happen. And they're powerless to stop it. They call on an outside expert: Jan Fabel, head of Hamburg's Murder Squad and Germany's leading authority on serial killers. Fabel is on the point of leaving the police for good, but Carnival in Cologne is a time when the world goes crazy, and he is drawn into the hunt for the Carnival Cannibal. What he doesn't know is that he is on a collision course with a crack special forces unit from Ukraine and a disturbed colleague with a score to settle. Fabel finds himself on a trail of betrayal and vengeance, violence and death. And once more he faces his greatest enemy. The true Master of the Carnival.

The Carnival Master

Russell, Craig

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Hutchinson

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Hutchinson, London

Jan Fabel is a troubled man. His relationships with the women in his life are becoming increasingly complicated. If that weren’t bad enough, after a gap of ten years, a female serial killer – the Angel of St Pauli – again makes the headlines when an English pop star is found in Hamburg’s red-light district, dying of savage knife wounds. Links emerge with a series of apparently unrelated events. A journalist murdered in Norway. The death of a Serbian gangster. And a long-forgotten project by East Germany’s Stasi conceived at the height of the Cold War, involving a highly trained group of female assassins, known by the codename Valkyrie. Fabel’s hunt for the truth will bring him up against the most terrifyingly efficient professional killer.

The Valkyrie Song

Century

Just as a major environmental summit is about to start in Hamburg, a massive storm hits the city. When the flood waters recede, a headless torso is found washed up. Initially, Jan Fabel of the Murder Commission fears it may be another victim of a serial rapist and murderer who stalks his victims through internet social network sites, then dumps their bodies in waterways around the city. But the truth of the situation is far more complex and even more sinister. Fabel's investigations lead him to a secretive environmental Doomsday cult called 'Pharos', the brainchild of a reclusive, crippled billionaire, Dominik Korn. Fabel's skills as a policeman are tested to their utmost as he finds himself drawn into an unfamiliar, high tech world of cyberspace, where anyone can be anybody or anything they want. And he quickly realises that he is no longer the hunter, but the hunted.

A Fear of Dark Water

Mystery

'Blood Eagle' is a violently exciting thriller, and detective Jan Fabel's desperate attempt to solve the case before more victims are discovered gradually uncovers layer upon layer of intrigue. How can he track a murderer who leaves no trail and whose victims seem purposefully random?

Blood Eagle

Arrow Books, Ltd.

A girl's body lies, posed, on the pale sand of a Hamburg beach, a message concealed in her hand. 'I have been underground, and now it is time for me to return home...' Jan Fabel, of the Hamburg murder squad, struggles to interpret the twisted imagery of a dark and brutal mind. Four days later, a man and a woman are found deep in woodland, their throats slashed deep and wide, the names 'Hansel' and 'Gretel', in the same, tiny, obsessively neat writing, rolled tight and pressed into their hands. As it becomes clear that each new crime is a grisly reference to folk stories collected almost two hundred years ago by the Brothers Grimm, the hunt is on for a serial killer who is exploring our darkest, most fundamental fears - a predator who kills and then disappears into the shadows. He is a monster we all learned to fear in childhood.

Brother Grimm

"A blood-pumping, nerve-shredding thriller--elegant, edgy, ingenious. Craig Russell conjures not one but two unforgettable settings: Prague between the wars, pulsing with menace, and a Gothic mental asylum, as exciting a house of horrors as I've ever visited. You'll enter both with dread. You'll dwell in them with relish." --A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window Prague, 1935: Viktor Kosárek, a psychiatrist newly trained by Carl Jung, arrives at the infamous Hrad Orlu Asylum for the Criminally Insane. The state-of-the-art facility is located in a medieval mountaintop castle outside of Prague, though the site is infamous for concealing dark secrets going back many generations. The asylum houses the country's six most treacherous killers--known to the staff as The Woodcutter, The Clown, The Glass Collector, The Vegetarian, The Sciomancer, and The Demon--and Viktor hopes to use a new medical technique to prove that these patients share a common archetype of evil, a phenomenon known as The Devil Aspect. As he begins to learn the stunning secrets of these patients, five men and one woman, Viktor must face the disturbing possibility that these six may share another dark truth. Meanwhile, in Prague, fear grips the city as a phantom serial killer emerges in the dark alleys. Police investigator Lukas Smolak, desperate to locate the culprit (dubbed Leather Apron in the newspapers), realizes that the killer is imitating the most notorious serial killer from a century earlier--London's Jack the Ripper. Smolak turns to the doctors at Hrad Orlu for their expertise with the psychotic criminal mind, though he worries that Leather Apron might have some connection to the six inmates in the asylum. Steeped in the folklore of Eastern Europe, and set in the shadow of Nazi darkness erupting just beyond the Czech border, this stylishly written, tightly coiled, richly imagined novel is propulsively entertaining, and impossible to put down.

The Devil Aspect: A Novel

DOUBLEDAY

Hyde: A Novel

Product Description 
Winner of the 2021 McIlvanney Prize for Best Crime Novel of the Year From the internationally acclaimed author, a stunning gothic reimagining of the Jekyll and Hyde story in which Captain Edward Hyde, chief detective of Victorian Edinburgh, investigates a gruesome murder that may unmask his own darkest secret \nVictorian Edinburgh. Captain Edward Henry Hyde is chief detective for the City of Edinburgh Police; as such, he is responsible for investigating all murders and serious crimes in the city. Hyde is a striking but severe-looking man who provokes unease, and often fear, in those who encounter him. Nevertheless, Edward Hyde is truly a good man ... though he wrestles fiercely with his own unique demons.\nWhen Hyde finds himself at the scene of a heinous murder, with no idea of how he got there or the events leading up to the discovery, his alarm is triggered on two levels. First, the crime scene is brutal and involves the Threefold Death, an ancient Celtic rite of sacrifice entangled with dark Scottish spiritual mythology. Second, Hyde's inability to remember any detail of his arrival at the crime scene makes him immediately fret about the secret he keeps from all but his physician: He suffers from a rare form of epilepsy that causes him to lose time—amnesiac absences where he cannot account for his actions—and nocturnal seizures that manifest themselves as vivid and lucid dreams.\nAs Hyde begins his investigation of the murder in a city on edge, he finds himself not only searching for real world clues, but trying to unravel the significance of the imagery in the otherworld of his dreaming. His investigation leads to the very places he fears, but has never fully imagined. 
 Review 
"Russell writes a pacy, ever-twisting mystery that will keep you turning the pages." - 
Ian Rankin\n"Evocative prose (“violence hung like mine dust in the air, waiting for a spark to bring it to combustion”) enhances a suspenseful and sophisticated plot. This is the rare riff on an influential novel that sticks the landing." - 
 Publisher's Weekly *Starred Review* 
 About the Author 
CRAIG RUSSELL is an award-winning Scottish author whose books have been translated into twenty-five languages. His previous works include 
The Devil Aspect, the Fabel Series of thrillers and the Lennox Series of noir mysteries. He is the only two-time winner of the McIlvanney Prize (2015 and 2021) as well as the winner of the 2008 Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library prize. He lives in Perthshire, Scotland with his wife. 
 Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 
1 
It was a sound like no other. 
High, shrill, raw, it stabbed the night with sharp, juddering, ragged edges. It was a sound somewhere between a wail and a scream, yet it was unlike a voice; spoke of no human origin. 
Moonless night had already claimed the city: dragging itself around the flanks of the Mound, insinuating itself through the crenels and embrasures of the castle, creeping down into the Old Town and stretching dark fingers into its narrow wynds and cramped closes; in the grand terraces and crescents of the New Town it rubbed itself blackly against the prosperous panes of the broad, high windows. But as if possessed of some dark gravity, nowhere was the night blacker than where it had sunk into the depths of the gulley that creased the city, carrying pure waters from the heights of the Pentlands to where they became soiled dark and foam crusted in the effluent shadows of the clustering mills that lined the Water of Leith. 
When the sound found her, Nell McCrossan was a slight, insubstantial shadow moving through a greater darkness. Small for her fourteen years, her frame meagre and birdlike, her skin in the scarce and insubstantial pools of lamplight as bleach white as the flour produced by the mill in which she worked. 
Nell was a fearful soul. She feared the walk to her shift, feared the swelling darknesses between the

British & Irish

The Devil's Playground: A Novel

A riveting 1920s Hollywood thriller about the making of the most terrifying silent film ever&nbsp;made, and a deadly search for the single copy rumored still to exist, from the internationally acclaimed author of The Devil Aspect. "A masterful thriller." --Lincoln Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author "A guaranteed one-sitting read." --Jeffery Deaver, author of The Bone Collector and Hunting Time "The most sheerly entertaining novel I've raced through in at least a year." --A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window 1927: Mary Rourke--a Hollywood studio fixer--is called urgently to the palatial home of Norma Carlton, one of the most recognizable stars in American silent film. Norma has been working on the secret film everyone is openly talking about... a terrifying horror picture called The Devil's Playground that is rumored to have unleashed a curse on everyone involved in the production. Mary finds Norma's cold, dead body, and she wonders for just a moment if these dark rumors could be true.&nbsp;&nbsp; 1967: Paul Conway, a journalist and self-professed film aficionado, is on the trail of a tantalizing rumor. He has heard that a single copy of The Devil's Playground--a Holy Grail for film buffs--may exist. He knows his Hollywood history and he knows the film endured myriad tragedies and ended up lost to time.&nbsp;&nbsp; The Devil's Playground is Craig Russell's tour de force, a richly researched and constructed thriller that weaves through the Golden Age of Hollywood and reveals a blossoming industry built on secrets, invented identities, and a desperate pursuit of image. As Mary Rourke charges headlong through the egos, distractions, and traps that threaten to take her down with the doomed production, she discovers a truth far more sinister than she--or we--could have imagined.

Steeped in the folklore of Eastern Europe, and set in the shadow of Nazi darkness erupting just beyond the Czech border, this bone-chilling, richly imagined novel is propulsively entertaining, and impossible to put down. Czechoslovakia, 1935: Viktor Kosárek, a newly trained psychiatrist who studied under Carl Jung, arrives at the infamous Hrad Orlu Asylum for the Criminally Insane. The facility is located in a medieval mountaintop castle surrounded by forests, on a site that is well known for concealing dark secrets going back many centuries. The asylum houses six inmates--the country's most treacherous killers--known to the terrified public as the Devil's Six. Viktor intends to use a new medical technique to prove that these patients share a common archetype of evil, a phenomenon he calls The Devil Aspect. Yet as he begins to learn the stunning secrets of these patients, he must face the unnerving possibility that these six may share a darker truth. Meanwhile, in Prague, fear grips the city as a phantom serial killer emerges in the dark alleys. Police investigator Lukas Smolak, desperate to locate the culprit (a copycat of Jack the Ripper), turns to Viktor and the doctors at Hrad Orlu for their expertise with the psychotic criminal mind. And Viktor finds himself wrapped up in a case more terrifying than he could have ever imagined.

Vintage

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Books by Russell, Craig

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Russell, Craig. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Carnival Master

The Carnival Master

The Valkyrie Song

A Fear of Dark Water

Blood Eagle

Brother Grimm

The Devil Aspect: A Novel

Hyde: A Novel

The Devil's Playground: A Novel

The Devil Aspect: A Novel