How do young lovers snatch time together in the 1930s? They play hide and seek, of course. But as a Christmas gathering in a great country house reaches its peak, one such game will result in murder, the unravelling of long hidden secrets and, potentially, a grave miscarriage of justice. What’s it about? When the […]
Dead Opposite the Church The factual title gives you a feel for how this crime novel will develop: facts are followed by facts and little intuition is needed to connect them, which is just as well, as our main protagonist is rather short on intuition… What’s it about? Edward Packman ran his weekly newspaper as […]
Puzzle fans rejoice: DI Manson is on the case. As part of their ongoing mission to revive excellent but neglected authors, Dean Street Press are reissuing some of the most entertaining golden age crime fiction. ‘Who Killed Dick Whittington’ (written by husband and wife writing team E. & M. A. Radford) is indeed a classic […]
How do you make a witch? Sharon Bolton has some ideas, and her latest novel is a wonderfully chilling tale of conspiracy and murder in a small northern town at the foot of Pendle Forest. What’s it about? ‘I imagine that Patsy regained consciousness slowly, and that her first lucid thought was that she was […]
I’d not heard of Lisa Jackson before, but her books dominated a whole shelf on the library’s crime section, so I thought her books would be worth a read. Unfortunately, by the time I had finished reading the prologue, I was already feeling reservations… What’s it about? Dr Kacey Lambert was once targeted by a […]
‘Perfect People’ is a stand-alone story by popular crime writer, Peter James, in which the political is made, and remains, intensely personal. What’s it about? Having lost their four year old son to a rare genetic disease, John and Naomi Klaesson seek out controversial geneticist Leo Dettore in an attempt to ensure their next child […]
Snap decisions can be dangerous. We never meet Eileen Bright. Instead, we begin with a hot, airless car and her three small children: Jack, Joy and Merry. They fuss and bicker exactly as you would expect, but underneath their casual cruelties there is a deep fog of unease: their mother went to get help, but […]
‘An elk emerges from the overgrown pines and it is monstrous.’ Tuva Moodyson, isolated Gavrik’s newest reporter, is less than keen on being surrounded by overgrown forest and occasionally charged at by an elk, but Gavrik is home and home is near where her terminally ill mother lives, so she’s learned to live with her […]
One crossed wire. Three dead bodies. Six bottles of bleach. What a strapline! I was sold, but if you want more… What’s it about? Where to begin? Insomniac Seth, who is married to borderline-alcoholic Maeve, gets to know suicidal Hadley as a result of a crossed phone wire and a weird late night hobby. Hadley […]
It must be quite frustrating at times for a police officer reading crime fiction and thinking, ‘but that would never happen that way!’ Debut novelist Desmond P. Ryan is here to address this problem: a former Canadian detective with 30 years experience on the force behind him, he’s penned the first in a planned series […]