The case of the grinning gorilla

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Josephine Bell

> Sally Combs had just finished a temporary job as a secretary to her uncle in Bermuda. As a farewell present he arranged for her to go on a cruise round the Caribbean. It seemed an ideal holiday, but the night before the ship arrived in Bermuda, Felicity Fennister, one of the passengers, suddenly disappeared. At first no one seemed at all anxious to discover the whereabouts of the missing woman - not even when Sally finds what looks like a suicide note. As sinister events build up into a pattern of violence, Sally is forced to realise that almost anyone on board could hold the key to the puzzle.

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Helen Knode

Ann Whitehead is sick of her job. She's a movie critic for a counterculture rag in Los Angeles and she needs a break badly. Instead of a break, she gets a murder. A woman dies in Ann's bathtub: the victim is a film school grad and Industry hopeful. It's the kind of story Ann was born to write, but the disgraced LAPD detective leading the investigation is determined to stop her. The search for the killer turns into a search for the victim's missing script, the story of another woman murdered in 1944. Suddenly there are two killers, and a complicated conspiracy spanning decades. Ann is smack in the middle and everyone she meets wants into the film business--whatever the price.

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Jeffery Deaver

Five feet two inches of slick repartee, near-purple hair, and poetic imagination, twenty-year-old Rune hasn't been in Manhattan for very long. But she's crafty enough to have found a squatter's paradise in an empty TriBeCa loft, and a video store job that feeds her passion for old movies. It's a passion she shares with her favorite customer, Mr. Kelly, a lonely old man who rents the same video over and over. The flick is a noir classic based on a real-life unsolved bank heist and a million missing dollars. It's called Manhattan Is My Beat.That's the tape Rune is picking up from Mr. Kelly's shabby apartment when she finds him shot to death. The police suspect a robbery gone wrong, but Rune is certain the key to solving the murder is hidden somewhere in the hazy, black-and-white frames of Mr. Kelly's beloved movie. But as Rune hits the mean streets of New York to find answers, she gets caught up in a dangerous adventure more chilling than anything Hollywood could dream up. As her story draws to its terrifying conclusion, Rune's final close-up may include the killer of a co-star.From the Paperback edition.

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Roger Ormerod

Retired Detective Inspector Richard Patton and his wife Amelia return to the world of crime when Patton is asked by his wife's old college friend to investigate a burglary that leads to a murder and threatens Patton's loyalty to Amelia's friend