Julian Rathbone Books In Order

Inspector Jan Argand Books In Order

  1. The Euro-killers (1979)
  2. Base Case (1981)
  3. Watching the Detectives (1983)

Renate Fechter Books In Order

  1. Accidents Will Happen (1995)
  2. Brandenburg Concerto (1998)

Chris Shovelin Books In Order

  1. Homage (2001)
  2. As Bad as It Gets (2003)

Novels

  1. Diamonds Bid (1967)
  2. Hand Out (1968)
  3. With My Knives I Know I’m Good (1969)
  4. Trip Trap (1972)
  5. Kill Cure (1975)
  6. Bloody Marvellous (1975)
  7. King Fisher Lives (1976)
  8. Carnival (1976)
  9. Raving Monarchist (1977)
  10. Joseph (1979)
  11. A Last Resort (1980)
  12. A Spy of the Old School (1982)
  13. Wellington’s War (1984)
  14. Nasty, Very (1984)
  15. Lying in State (1985)
  16. Z.D.T. (1986)
  17. Greenfinger (1987)
  18. The Crystal Contract (1988)
  19. The Pandora Option (1990)
  20. Dangerous Games (1991)
  21. Sand Blind (1993)
  22. Intimacy (1995)
  23. Blame Hitler (1997)
  24. The Last English King (1997)
  25. Trajectories (1998)
  26. Dream (1999)
  27. Kings of Albion (2000)
  28. A Very English Agent (2002)
  29. Birth of a Nation (2004)
  30. The Mutiny (2007)

Collections

  1. The Indispensable Julian Rathbone (2003)

Inspector Jan Argand Book Covers

Renate Fechter Book Covers

Chris Shovelin Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Julian Rathbone Books Overview

Accidents Will Happen

Renata Fechter is a strong woman in a man’s world. She heads up the Eco Cops, a post she’s been given to keep her quiet and out of the way. But when the Burghaven case turns out to be a lot nastier than anyone ever imagined, she swings into action. Faced with corrupt politicians, crooked businessmen and toxic waste scandal, it takes Renata all her wits to stay one step ahead of her shadowy adversaries in a dangerous game.

Brandenburg Concerto

Thousands of small arms, mortars, and ammunition go missing when the Soviet army leaves its bases in East Germany. The eco cops, led by the feisty and unruly Renate Fechter, are brought in to investigate. What they uncover is a network of links with South America and Eastern Europe that leads to an explosive finale. Once again Julian Rathbone has written a fast page turner that cuts to the heart of international politics.

Homage

Homage begins when British private eye Chris Shovelin answers a call for help from a friend on the other side of the world. Arriving in San Diego, he discovers Jefferson, the friend in need, lying on the floor of his apartment with a hole in his head. Shovelin’s instinct is to run, but Jefferson’s client, the mega rich China Heart, wants him to take over where Jefferson failed, and find Jerry Lennox, her missing brother. From a dude ranch in the desert, to Los Angeles and San Francisco, the chase is on. But who is being hunted Shovelin or Lennox? Homage is classic Julian Rathbone complete with catastrophic plane crashes, extortion, drugs, and murder, all leading to a tumultuous climax that makes most thrillers pale in comparison.

As Bad as It Gets

Chris Shovelin is on the move again. Coming out of Mombassa where he has been checking out the unsuspicious death of a millionaire’s son in a scuba accident, he’s made enough money to treat himself to a safari. But Danielle call me Danny recruits him to be her minder before leaving him on a safari trip.

An international food conglomerate, playing Faustus with GM, aided by corrupt police, is forced to protect itself from the consequences of his unintended intrusion into its affairs. From a mugging in Nairobi, through meetings with lions and a Maasai warrior, to a truly scary escape from the sewer beneath Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Shovelin faces beatings, corrupt police, shootings, wild elephants and a crazed killer who will not give up.

As Bad as It Gets is a more than worthy successor to Shovelin’s acclaimed debut in Homage. This racy and entertaining thriller has an emotional and thought-provoking depth, which puts it miles ahead of the rest.

Joseph

Spain 1808 to 1813 where Revolution collides with Reaction, a British Army with a French; the Spain of Goya, where ignorant armies clash and from under them all comes the voice of Joseph: by birth European, by education enlightened, and living in Salamanca which suffered a new invasion every six months and saw one of Wellington’s greatest battles. From the moment in early childhood when Joseph hurls a stone at a playmate and makes an evil enemy for life, to the last page when he climbs a hill in North Spain accompanied by a donkey, a giantess, and a new born babe, and blunders into a battle, he takes the reader by the elbow and hurries him ‘will he or will he not’ across the terrible years that saw the birth of our own times. Racy, picaresque, but with an underlying seriousness, Joseph is a panoramic novel of the Spanish Penisular War, revealing as Goya did its grotesqueries and ironies as well as its horrifying waste of life. Rathbone’s wit, sensitivity and confident grasp of the subject are superbly matched to this brilliant historical scene. Joseph has never before been published in paperback.

Wellington’s War

Wellington’s War: His Peninsular Dispatches

Sand Blind

When Arnold Cartwright is recruited by a company working in commercial aircraft control, it soon becomes clear to him that his job is not as innocent as it seems, and that his true employer is the Iraqi government. A post Cold War thriller by the author of ‘The Pandora Operation’.

Intimacy

David Querubin, soprano and castrato, is plagued by memories of an affair with his mother. These precious memories have been dismissed by doctors as fantasy, so destroying his reason to live. A young woman, obsessed with becoming his pupil, sets out to determine the truth of his recollections.

Blame Hitler

Thomas hates his job, he drinks too much, and he realizes that from boyhood he has been driven to be better than his father. Thomas dreams of the man who became a stranger the day he joined up and who was there to blame but Hitler? The novel entwines domestic life with history at the sharp end.

The Last English King

On September 27, 1066, Duke William of Normandy sailed for England with hundreds of ships and over 8,000 men. King Harold of England, weakened by a ferocious Viking invasion from the north, could muster little defense. At the Battle of Hastings of October 14, he was outflanked, quickly defeated, and killed by William’s superior troops. The course of English history was altered forever. Three years later, Walt, King Harold’s only surviving bodyguard, is still emotionally and physically scarred by the loss of his king and his country. Wandering through Asia Minor, headed vaguely for the Holy Land, he meets Quint, a renegade monk with a healthy line of skepticism and a hearty appetite for knowledge. It is he who persuades Walt, little by little, to tell his extraordinary story. And so begins a roller coaster ride into an era of enduring fascination. Weaving fiction round fact, Julian Rathbone brings to vibrant, exciting, and often amusing life the shadowy figures and events that preceded the Norman Conquest. We see Edward, confessing far more than he ever did in the history books. We meet the warring nobles of Mercia and Wessex; Harold and his unruly clan; Canute’s descendants with their delusions of grandeur; predatory men, pushy women, subdued Scots , and wily Welsh. And we meet William of Normandy, a psychotic thug with interesting plans for the ‘racial sanitation’ of the Euroskepics across the water. Peppered with discussions on philosophy. dentistry, democracy, devils, alcohol, illusions, and hygiene, The Last English King raises issues, both daring and delightful, that question the nature of history itself. Where are the lines between fact, interpretation, and re creation? Did the French really stop for a two hour lunch during the Battle of Hastings?

Kings of Albion

England, 1460: The War of the Roses. Rival factions Lancastrians and Yorkists are hacking each other to death in a conflict that only the English could name after a beautifully scented flower. It’s not an ideal climate for tourists but three exotic travellers from the Far East are not here for pleasure. They’ve come to find a missing kinsman. The English, however, are truly strange. Most of the indigenous population are of the cowed peasant variety whilst any noble who can’t trace his ancestry to Norman Conquest isn’t, really, an awfully nice chap. In between battles of the most astonishing brutality they convey respects instead of affection, make love strangely and briefly and amuse themselves by playing a game with an inflated bladder that is in everyway a war except it’s called ‘footie’. The Indians think they’re mad. They also have this horrible suspicion that one day they will rule the world…
A wonderfully offbeat take on medieval England at its most brutal and savage, Kings of Albion snatches history, imbues it with the spirit of Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad, turns it on its head, invites scintillating speculation and, best of all, renders it into a fabulously readable novel.

A Very English Agent

Dwarfish Charlie Boylan carries a loaded pistol into the House of Commons. He was a police spy for nearly forty years, and now he wants a pension and knows what will get it. Did he, between Waterloo and Wellington’s funeral, cause the Peterloo riot to happen? Was it Charlie who fingered the Cato Street Conspirators? Did Shelley really drown by accident? And at the opening of the Great Exhibition was it he who saved the Queen from being blown up? With dark undertones in its revelations of the orchestrated state repression that followed the Napoleonic Wars, A Very English Agent travels through the early years of the 19th century in a rumbustious, funny novel, worthy of the times it describes.

Birth of a Nation

Eddie Bosham aka Charlie Boylan is in prison on a murder charge. But he’s not worried. He’s innocent, and, anyway, he has hidden proof of a ghastly scandal that could bring down the monarchy. Taking up his memoirs from where we left him, marooned on the Galapagos Islands, we find Eddie offering a young Charles Darwin an explanation of why the finches on the islands vary. In Texas, staunchly loyal to whichever side will win, he spies for General Santa Anna at the Alamo and, with the help of Emily Morgan, the ravishingly beautiful Yellow Rose of Texas, for Sam Houston at San Jacinto. Eddie works the Mississippi riverboats as a cardsharp. Caught cheating, he is forced to jump ship and inadvertently stumbles across the secret that will launch the Californian Gold Rush. Finally, having traversed the girth of a nation, his disgraceful saga ends, back east, at a highly inflammatory revivalist meeting.

The Mutiny

For its British population, the India that swelters in the late spring of 1857 is a place of amateur theatricals, horseracing, and flirtations under the aegis of the omnipotent East India company. But a brutal awakening lies in store for the complacent British: one May night, after 30 years of abuse, the East India Company’s native soldiers rise up against their British officers. Caught up in the violence is pretty Sophie Hardcastle, a young wife and mother newly arrived from England. As she searches for her infant son, missing in the chaos, Sophie finds herself bearing witness to atrocities on both sides. Moving, somber, and thrilling, Rathbone’s tale is told on a grand scale, ranging from the Cannings in Government House to the heroism of the humblest soldiers and peasants. It is as exhilarating as any Victorian adventure story, and yet, with its unflinching examination of religious fanaticism and the horrors of war, The Mutiny also carries a powerful message for the modern world.

The Indispensable Julian Rathbone

Rare essays, shorts stories, reviews and even the complete novel, ‘Lying In State’. Julian Rathbone has published over thirty novels in sixteen different languages, been shortlisted twice for the Booker, won a Crime Writers’ Association dagger and his thrillers have won prestigious prizes in Germany and Denmark. Reviewers have compared him to his advantage with Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, John Updike, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, John le Carre and William Burroughs. On top of that he’s an accomplished reviewer and essayist, and has written successful film screenplays.

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