Our families are often the people who hurt us the most. This is certainly true for Nell Churcher, who, despite being attacked by an obsessive ‘Golden Bones’ fan when she was was in her early teens – a fan who believed they needed to carve out Nell’s pelvic bone to resurrect a fictional character called […]
I love books that are completely real whilst also being darkly comic. Welcome back to the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team, now on their fifth outing in a fictionalised, mid-Virus-epidemic-Edinburgh. Bernard is still surprised daily by the demands of his job, (which is supposed to be about healthcare but is really a sort of police […]
King Lear is meant to die – but the actor performing the title role isn’t. When Sir Nigel Viliers collapses and dies on stage during the opening night of King Lear, everyone around him appears to be startled: Sir Nigel is a leading light of the London stage – so it’s even more startling when […]
Today I’m excited to be part of the cover reveal for L. C. North’s new thriller ‘Clickbait’  Isn’t it pretty? But of course, we shouldn’t judge a book purely by its cover, so here’s the blurb to tempt you further: ​——————————— ‘We’re not famous anymore. We’re notorious.’ For over a decade, the Lancasters were celebrity royalty, […]
Short version: this wasn’t for me. Longer version: ‘The Wife Upstairs’ suffers from a few plot holes, to put it mildly, and despite being promoted as a modern re-telling of Jane Eyre, bears very little resemblance to that classic. Both books contain an orphan whose name is Jane, and even that isn’t true (Jane Bell […]
How do you stop a murder when it’s already happened? I was hooked by the tagline and reassured from reading previous McAllister books that such a brilliant premise wouldn’t fizzle out or otherwise disappoint. This, I was certain, would be a brilliant read – and it was. What’s it about? Jen is waiting up for […]
A murdered woman. A missing husband. An impossible crime scene. The strapline sounded a bit like a locked room mystery, but this is a police procedural with a purpose. When a wealthy woman is found dead in her locked London mansion by her cleaner, the key questions that arise are: what is the meaning of […]
Imagine that you have ended up in prison, as a result of poverty and constrained life choices. Now imagine being told that you will serve out the rest of your prison sentence on the other side of the world – and you are unlikely to ever find your way home. Such is the fate facing […]
Sometimes it’s nice to try reading something a little different. ‘Where the Water Flows’, a story about a dramatic event rather than a crime, certainly fits that description for me. The Blurb: It had been a long, hot summer followed by a very wet autumn. The River Hawk, lying to the north of a former […]
Imagine that a novel virus caused chaos and led to significant restrictions on public movement and… Oh. Hello Covid-19! No need to imagine the government crackdown or the population’s reactions. But actually, that just makes ‘Songs by Dead Girls’, first published in 2018, EVEN BETTER because it’s so perfectly pitched. Now I don’t mean that […]