MARTIN FLETCHER ON BATEMAN’S NEW LOOK

Colin Bateman is a fantastically original writer. His plots are endlessly inventive and duck and dive with razor-edged wit and pitch-black humour. He’s a Belfast-based Carl Hiaasen, Christopher Brookmyre without the misanthropy.

Colin’s new novel, I PREDICT A RIOT, has to be his best yet. It’s an epic of urban calamity as James ‘Marsh’ Mallow of the Belfast CID tries to take down the city’s mobsters and politicians who are making a mockery of law and order. It is populated by a wonderful range of characters, from the love-struck Primark employee who suffers a near-death reaction to a piece of carrot cake, to the out-of-work IRA terrorist languishing in a Columbian jail who must get himself killed and trust in reincarnation to escape.

Colin Bateman is one of our favourite authors at Headline: booksellers rave about him; the critics laud him. So we have decided to put him centre stage.

Say goodbye to ‘Colin’; we now know him as ‘Bateman’. Clean, simple and direct. His latest novel and two backlist titles, BELFAST CONFIDENTIAL and MURPHY’S REVENGE, now have thoroughly contemporary, streetsmart jackets: iconic, instantly recognisable and with a touch of humour.

It’s a whole new look for Bateman – a new tag and a radical paint job to take him to the top of the bestseller lists.