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Newest Crime Reviews (view source)

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[[Category:Crime|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Crime]]__NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
 
{{Frontpage
|isbn=0008517061
|title=Death in a Lonely Place
|author=Stig Abell
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary= Former Metropolitan Police detective, Jake Johnson, has settled into his rustic life at Little Sky. There’s perhaps a little uncertainty about the future of his life with his vet girlfriend, Livia and her daughter Diana, as moving in together would mean a lot of compromise: does Jake give up his off-grid and relaxing life to move in with Livia or does Livia move to Little Sky despite her reservations about whether or not this is the future she wants for herself and her daughter? For the moment they’re enjoying life in the present and putting the future on the back burner.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1786482126
|title=The Janus Stone (Dr Ruth Galloway)
|author=Elly Griffiths
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Builders were demolishing an old house in Norwich - the site was going to hold seventy-five 'luxury' apartments - when they discovered the bones of a child beneath a doorway. There was no skull. Was this a ritual killing or murder? Inevitably, Dr Ruth Galloway finds herself working with DCI Harry Nelson. It's difficult as Ruth knows, but Nelson doesn't, that she is pregnant with his child as a result of the one night they spent together some three months ago. Her condition will be obvious before long, not least because Ruth is prone to sudden bouts of sickness.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=0008551324
|title=The Devil You Know (D S Max Craigie)
|author=Neil Lancaster
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=It's unusual for anyone from the Hardie family to approach the police. Neither side likes or has any respect for the other. But Davie Hardie is struggling in prison and he's prepared to tell the police where the body of a missing person is buried and who was responsible for her death. This person, he promises, is someone big and it will be worth the police doing what he wants. And what he wants is to be transferred to an open prison to serve the remainder of his sentence and to get an early parole date. Not much to ask, is it? The new Deputy Police Constable doesn't think so and she's even prepared to do the other thing that Hardie demanded - make certain that DS Max Craigie and anyone who works with him is kept well away from what's happening.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=0008405026
|title=A Stranger in the Family (Maeve Kerrigan 11)
|author=Jane Casey
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=It's sixteen years since nine-year-old Rosalie Marshall disappeared from her bed one summer night. She was never found and the investigation ground to a halt. Now, her mother, Helena, and her father are dead in their bed. Initially, it looks like a straightforward murder/suicide but there's something about the positioning of the bodies that makes DS Maeve Kerrigan and her boss DI Josh Derwent suspicious. What looked as though it was going to be an open-and-shut case is now a complex double murder. Kerrigan is convinced that the explanation lies in Rosalie's disappearance: others (such as Derwent's boss, Una Burt) are less convinced.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=0571379877
|title=The Kellerby Code
|author=Jonny Sweet
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Edward Jevons is a working-class young man, obsessed with his upper-class friends, Robert and Stanza. Robert's a theatre director. He's also self-obsessed, demanding, handsome and entitled and uses Edward to run errands for him. Edward has been in love with Stanza since their university days - and he's drunkenly confided how he feels to Robert. Most men in Robert's position would stay away from Stanza or tell Edward that a relationship had begun between them but he's not like most men: Edward is left to stumble upon the two of them kissing in a dark passageway.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Jo Callaghan
|title=Leave No Trace
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=When a man is found crucified on the top of a hill in Nuneaton, DCS Kat Frank finds herself assigned to the case alongside her sidekick, the AI detective Lock. It's their first live case together, having previously been very successful with several cold cases. But when there is a second body found crucified a few days later, Kat is suddenly struggling with a potential serial killer and a very high profile case that draws a lot of unwanted attention to their AI Future Policing project. Will they be able to solve the case in time, or will Kat find herself taken off the case and, potentially, out of a career?
|isbn=139851120X
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1035021803
|title=The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder
|author=C L Miller
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=It's twenty years since Freya Lockwood has been back to the English country village where she grew up. She's back now because of a request for help from her beloved aunt, Carole. Freya's former mentor and Carole's close friend, Arthur Crockleford, is dead and the circumstances seem suspicious, to say the least. Arthur was the reason why Freya had not been back to the village: Arthur, she feels, let her down badly. Even though they were in business together as antique hunters, she has not felt able to be near the man or pursue the profession she loved. After the split, she worked in a cafe, met and married James (on the rebound from the love of her life, who was murdered) and Freya and James have now divorced.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1398524085
|title=Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter?
|author=Nicci French
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Charlotte Salter was expected at her husband's fiftieth birthday party but never turned up. Her children, sons Niall, Paul and Ollie and her daughter, Etty. are all worried but - strangely - her husband, Alec, is not. Shortly afterwards, Etty and Greg, find the body of Greg's father, Duncan Ackerley, in the river. It was an easy assumption for the police to make that Duncan had murdered Charlie and then committed suicide when he couldn't stand the guilt. The Salter children are not convinced but there's little else they can do but get on with their lives and wonder about what really happened.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1529900360
|title=The Ghost Orchid
|author=Jonathan Kellerman
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=It hadn't been Lt Milo Sturgis's fault that Alex Delaware had been badly injured but he felt responsible and even after Alex recovered, Sturgis was reluctant to ask for his help on difficult cases. His assertions that there were only open-and-shut cases which didn't need the help of a psychologist only worked for a while. Finally, it was Robin, Delaware's partner, who nudged Milo into asking for help again. She knew that the involvement was something that the man she loved needed. The next case did look simple, though. Two lovers were murdered in the swimming pool of a remote property in Bel Air. He was the heir to an Italian shoe empire and she is married to an extremely rich man and it's not the Italian. But which of them was the primary target?
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=178763681X
|title=Knife Skills for Beginners
|author=Orlando Murrin
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Chef Paul Delamare took a teaching job at a residential cookery school in Belgravia. He didn't really want to but celebrity chef Christian Wagner had a way of getting both men and women to do what he wanted. Paul ''somehow'' got the impression that he'd be at the school to assist Paul, who had a broken arm, but it didn't turn out that way. The teaching - and the problems - are all his own. The one thing he hadn't expected was for someone to turn up dead. Unfortunately, he was the person who discovered the body and everyone knows that the police consider that person to be the prime suspect.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1529421284
|title=Laying Out the Bones
|author=Kate Webb
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=It was one of those flash downpours that the British weather often delivers in a heatwave. In a gully, a human skeleton came to the surface and forensic testing proved the body to be Lee Geary, who had disappeared nine years earlier. He'd been a known drug user and had learning disabilities, so it could have been a simple case of misadventure but DI Matt Lockyer wasn't convinced. Geary was a townie, so what was he doing out on Salisbury Plain alone? There are connections to the suicide of Holly Gilbert and to two other deaths which were not considered suspicious at the time. Lockyer and DC Gemma Broad of the Major Crimes Review Unit (that's cold cases to you and me) investigate.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1529425867
|title=Lost and Never Found (A D I Wilkins Mystery)
|author=Simon Mason
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=In Oxford, there are two D I Wilkins. Raymond Wilkins is of Nigerian descent, Balliol educated and always exquisitely dressed. D I Ryan Wilkins, son of Ryan and father of Ryan, is not. He's not any of those things. He's white, originated from a trailer park, barely educated (reading's not ''really'' his thing) and his wardrobe consists mainly of shell suits and trackies. They're usually in lime green or acid yellow. You might wonder if you're being introduced to a police procedural written for laughs. Well, you're not. The two men are just different sides of the same policing coin. Sometimes the combination works brilliantly well. Sometimes it's problematic.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1529431735
|title=The Winter Visitor
|author=James Henry
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=It's February 1991 and Essex is bitingly cold, which made Bruce Hopkins' return all the more surprising. He'd been exiled on the Costa del Sol as a wanted drug smuggler for a decade. The return has come about because he's had a letter from his ex-wife, saying that she's ill and hasn't long to live. It's hard to feel any sympathy when Hopkins is abducted, stripped to his underwear and sent to a watery grave in the boot of a stolen Ford Sierra. Is it a warning from a Spanish gang or a problem closer to home?
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=0861541774
|title=A Nye of Pheasants
|author=Steve Burrows
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=DCI Domenic Jejeune's close friend and former colleague, Danny Maik, has taken a short holiday in Singapore to meet up with an old ally, Guy Trueman. Maik was involved in a street brawl - he would later maintain that he was facing a man armed with a knife - and he killed a Ghurka. Initially, he faced a charge of manslaughter but evidence came to light that suggested that he might have planned to murder the man. Now he could be facing the death penalty. Domenic Jejeune can do nothing to help as any interference from another police force could provoke a diplomatic incident and wouldn't help Danny at all.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1521129886
|title=They Had It Coming (Greg Mason mysteries)
|author=Keith Redfern
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Greg Mason's just beginning to get his confidence as an investigator to the point where he'll warn someone about how much he charges. It's a good job too because Greg and Joyce will soon have a baby and they're both delighted. Joyce will be more delighted about the baby when she gets past the morning sickness. Greg is approached by an old friend whose brother-in-law appears to have killed himself. Stuart's concerned about his sister, Lucy, who's struggling to make ends meet and her son is not thriving. Lucy, he says, is convinced that Gil would never have killed himself - it simply wasn't in his nature. The police and the coroner have accepted that the death was suicide, but Stuart's prepared to pay Greg to find out what happened on the night Gil died.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=B0CK3MYJ56
|genre=Crime
|summary=Grant Cliveden was a hero: a policeman who stood for all that was good and honest and looked up to by just about everyone, so there was public uproar when he was murdered in plain sight at the Old Bailey. There's just one man in the frame for his murder - Jimmy Knight - and it's not too long before Knight appears in court, charged with Cliveden's murder. Knight was told that the best barrister for him was Jonathan Taylor-Cameron of Stag Court Chambers and it's Taylor-Cameron and his pupil, Adam Green, who eventually represent him. Knight's determined to plead not guilty, despite all Taylor-Cameron's recommendations to the contrary.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Andrew Cartmel
|title=Death in Fine Condition
|rating=3
|genre=Crime
|summary=Cordelia really loves classic paperback crime fiction, and in particular a series called Sleuth Hound. She spends her time hunting out copies that she can sell on for profit, sometimes 'tweaking' them, to add value, in somewhat fraudulent ways. One day she discovers a near perfect collection of these books after seeing them in the background of a photograph on her drug dealer's living room wall, and so she sets about discovering where this collection is, and how she can steal it! It's a next-level step in her petty crime career, but has she reached too far, and what will happen when the owner of the collection comes looking for their books?
|isbn=1789098947
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1448309379
|title=Flesh and Blood (DS McAvoy 11)
|author=David Mark
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=It's something of a surprise to find that you're dead, particularly when you're thinking that you're actually on a break with your wife and children, but that's what happened to DS Aector McAvoy. Whilst he was relieved to find that he was still, officially, alive, it was difficult for Detective Superintendent Trish Pharoah. Her protegee - McAvoy - was still alive but the partially clad man who'd dashed from her flat in the early hours of the morning when it was obvious that someone was tampering with her car, was not. Thor Ingolfsson was Aector McAvoy's doppelganger - and not everyone who commented on this was doing so kindly. It had always been suspected that Pharoah was sweet on Aector.
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1529135389
|title=The Fall
|author=Gilly Macmillan
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Nicole Booth had spent the morning at the county fair before she returned home. There was no sign of her husband but opera was playing on the state-of-the-art music system installed in The Glass Barn. They'd not been in the architect-designed house on Lancaut Peninsula for long and were still getting used to all the high-tech systems Tom had insisted upon. Some of them fought with each other and didn't work as reliably as they should. It had all come about through a ten-million-pound lottery win and they were still getting used to having that sort of money, too. Eventually, Nicole found Tom dead in the swimming pool with a wound to his head.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Alan Parks
|title=To Die in June
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=What first seems like the unfortunate, accidental death of a homeless man on the streets, suddenly starts to feel like something more sinister as another body is discovered, and then another. This is worrying enough for detective Harry McCoy, but all the more so because his own father is a down and out alcoholic, with no fixed abode, and he has been for years. At the same time as facing these possible murders, Harry is also dealing with a move to a different police station, and the arrival there of a woman who claims her little boy has gone missing, only no record of the boy having existed can be found. Something feels wrong - not just with the woman’s story but also with the other officers where he has been stationed, but can Harry uncover just what is going on?
|isbn=1805300784
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1804545600
|title=The Monk
|author=Tim Sullivan
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=The body in the woods near Bristol was a nasty shock - a monk strapped to a chair and dumped in a ditch. He'd been savagely beaten. It's a while before D S George Cross and the Major Crime Unit establish that this is Father Dominic. He'd been missing for a few days and certainly hadn't asked permission to leave his abbey. As the team gradually unpick the monk's past it becomes clear that he'd been well-loved as an investment banker, brother, neighbour and friend. He'd also been very wealthy but had given it all up for his faith. Why would someone savagely murder him?
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=0008517010
|title=Death Under a Little Sky
|author=Stig Abell
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=The marriage had run its course. It might have been different if the pregnancies hadn't ended in miscarriages but no one else was involved - certainly not on Jake's side and he didn't think there was for Faye either. They were still polite to each other and wished each other well - but didn't wish to remain married. The perfect solution arrived in the form of a legacy from Jake's Uncle Arthur. He'd been left a secluded property in the hamlet of Caelum Parvum - Little Sky - and enough money to live there without the need to work.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Emily Critchley
|title=One Puzzling Afternoon
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=84 year old Edie has lived in the same small town for almost her whole life, but now she is facing a move as her son wants to move to another house and bring Edie to live with his family, as Edie is starting to lose her memory. However, Edie is tormented by the memory of her childhood friend, Lucy, who went missing over 60 years ago, and the worry that there was a secret she was keeping for Lucy that somehow might be the thing that reveals the truth of what happened all that time ago. After 'seeing' Lucy in the high street, just as she was the last time she saw her, she starts to find pockets of memories coming back to her. And yet as she remembers the past, she is forgetting more and more in her day to day life. Will she uncover the truth about Lucy's disappearance before her move, and before her memories are gone forever?
|isbn=1804181250
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=0008551278
|title=Blood Runs Cold (D S Max Craigie)
|author=Neil Lancaster
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Affi Smith was snatched from the bottom of Fyrish, where she'd been doing her training. She'd been a bit of a wayward teenager until she discovered athletics - and it now looks as though she could be heading for the national squad. That's quite an achievement for someone with her background: you see, Affo came to Scotland from Albania as Afrodita Dushku at the age of twelve. She was rescued when she was carrying a kilo of drugs and three years later she's happy with her foster family. There's just one cloud on her horizon: her little sister, Melodi is in a children's home in Tirana - and anyone could get to her.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Jenny Lund Madsen and Megan E Turney (translator)
|title=Thirty Days of Darkness
|rating=3.5
|genre=Thrillers
|summary=Hannah presents as an unlikeable, bitter woman, an author of failing if well-regarded literary short novels. Sorry to leave her bottles of red wine behind her for an afternoon at a book fair, she flukes her way into a public argument with the latest hot shot in the world of crime fiction, saying he's populist trash and only writing what anyone could write. Cue the bet that she cannot live up to that accusation. Her publisher duly books her flights from Denmark to Iceland, where she is put up for a wintry month away from it all. Just on the point of despairing – about her writing, about the people and the lack of stimulus for her plot, more or less about everything – word comes that the landlady's nephew has been found dead…
|isbn=1914585615
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1398509582
|title=The Favour
|author=Nicci French
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=It was 2 am, not long after A levels, when the car crash happened. It would cause problems for Liam Birch but then no one could really understand why he and Jude Winter were together. She was utterly driven by her determination to go to medical school. Liam was the reverse. He just acted ''as if life just rolled him over and carried him along''. A bit of weed here, a few drinks there: the legal effects of the car crash really didn't worry him at all. The relationship broke up soon after that - or rather, Liam simply didn't see Jude any more.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Robert Dugoni
|title=Her Deadly Game
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary= Patrick Duggan & Associates has been the life's work of Patsy Duggan – rather charmingly nicknamed 'The Irish Brawler' due to his reputation for no holds barred courtroom performances in defence of his clients. Along with an indisputable talent for the law, Patsy also has a gift for drinking himself to oblivion and inevitably the latter was beginning to overshadow the former. Enter Keera Duggan, former competitive chess prodigy and proven Seattle Prosecutor who finds herself in the hideous position of asking her father for a job at the family firm because a romantic entanglement with a senior colleague, Miller Ambrose, had gone, rather spectacularly, south.
|isbn=1662500181
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=0008404976
|title=The Close (DS Maeve Kerrigan)
|author=Jane Casey
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=It was because of Rula Jacques that DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent were living together in Jellicoe Close.
 
If you're a regular reader of the [[Jane Casey's Maeve Kerrigan series in Chronological Order|Maeve Kerrigan series]] you'll have read that sentence twice and wondered if it's a massive spoiler because there is a delicious sexual chemistry between the two which seems very, very real. But (there's always a 'but', isn't there?) Josh has a partner and he dotes on her son, even if the relationship with Melissa can be a little rocky. As for Maeve, she's just come out of an abusive relationship which has left her more than a little uncertain.
}}
{{Frontpage
|author=Nick Brooks
|title=Promise Boys
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=When the principal (headmaster) of Urban Promise Prep school is murdered, three boys find themselves called into the police station as suspects. Each, seemingly, has a grudge of some description against Principal Moore, and each could have been there at the time of his murder. But who killed him, and why, and if any of the boys are innocent, will they be able to clear their names?
|isbn=1035003155
}}
{{Frontpage
|isbn=1529125960
|title=Unnatural History
|author=Jonathan Kellerman
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Donny Klement was a photographer. Well, it was Adonis, actually, but Donny had stuck unless he got Danny but whichever - it's past tense as his PA found him dead in his bed. Three shots were placed neatly through his heart. The PA, Mel Gornick, is distraught and it falls to psychologist Alex Delaware to calm her down whilst Lieutenant Milo Sturgis gets more agitated as he tries to establish what's happened. Donny had just finished a series of photographs called ''The Wishers''. He'd taken eight homeless people off the streets and asked them what they'd really like to be. They were then dressed up as their fantasy, photographed and sent on their way with a generous gift in dollars.
}}
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