Obviously, it was the title that intrigued me. For her debut novel starring a serial killer who decides to murder her entire biological family, Mackie chooses Lady MacBeth’s demands to the witches as an epigraph: ‘Unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.’ […]
‘Resnick had despised estate agents ever since one of them ran off with his wife.’ So begins chapter two of ‘Rough Treatment’, a tale of dreadful TV executives, mismatched burglars, a menacing drug dealer and a reclusive detective. What’s it about? ‘Rough Treatment’ is the second Charlie Resnick novel, in which a house burglary somehow […]
Jim had lured the Watcher out on the seas. Jim had shaken the shadows. If the sentences above intrigue you, this book may be for you. If they leave you shrugging and wondering where the plot is, then you may be best advised to read something else. What’s it about? Sam is seven when she […]
What a killer premise! An injured man stumbles into a remote Australian police station. He has fought his way through the wilderness after being drugged and kidnapped, somehow managing to escape from a cabin in the mountains where he was chained. His name is Gabriel and he is fleeing a man called Heath, who threatened […]
‘All of them? Even the children?’ The fireplace sputtered and crackled and swallowed his gasp. ‘Slaughtered?’ ‘Worse.’ There was silence then. And in that hush lived all the things that could be worse than slaughter. By now, readers of Louise Penny’s Three Pines series may think they know these characters well, but Penny is determined […]
This is one of those ‘it caught my eye, but’ books. It clearly caught my eye enough for me to buy it, and, in fact, I recently added a second Louise Penny title to my collection, still without having ever read the first. There was obviously something about the plots I found appealing – or […]
A missing man. A careless wife. An ailing business. Is Harry Bowers dead or deliberately missing? Heart of England police are determined to find out. What’s it about? I’m pinching the blurb for this one: The peace of a Midlands village is upset when local businessman Harry Bowers doesn’t return from choir practice. More concerned […]
“I confess freely that I cut his throat with a carving knife.. “…in the morning I shall make the short walk from this condemned cell to the gallows here at Newgate. I understand the scaffold has been erected in the yard, inside the prison walls, not outside in the street. Is that so?” Chatty convict […]
This story brings together two of my favourite kinds of book: crime fiction and anything Jane Austen related. Now that doesn’t mean you need to be an Austen fan to enjoy this 23rd outing in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, but it means there’s a treat threaded throughout the story if you are. What’s it […]
‘I was beginning to regret choosing crime as the subject for my mold-breaking bestseller – the red tape was fierce.’ Today I am delighted to host an extract from The Awful Truth About the Herbert Quarry Affair, a book purportedly written by the main character in real time… How does that work? Denis Shaughnessy is […]