|summary=Ex-marine James Bishop worked for an elite protection company. The idea behind his last mission was to protect multi-millionaire Randall Brennan and his daughter Natalie but, instead, he found himself framed for murder. Who? Why? These why may be questions that need answering but that's not going to happen whilst he's serving a life sentence. However, where Bishop is concerned, that's only a minor blip compared to the task ahead.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755382692</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Matthew Crow
|title=My Dearest Jonah
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Jonah and Verity start to write to each other as part of a pen-pal scheme. They may only meet on paper but, as they reveal themselves and their pasts through their letters, they become the only constant in each of their existences, and what existences. Jonah has a troubled past (to put it mildly) including a stint in prison and a father serving a life sentence. Verity is the product of working class parents with aspirations which she has failed or refused to meet, splitting her working life between the local coffee shop and the local strip joint. Their futures begin to appear a lot brighter than their pasts but then clouds gather to prove that appearances can be deceptive.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908248254</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Quintin Jardine
|title=Funeral Note: A Bob Skinner Mystery
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=When a man's body was exhumed from a shallow grave in Edinburgh the initial reaction was that it was murder - I mean, why else would you dispose of the body in that way? But then, why would you bury it with obvious care and tell the police where it's buried? When the postmortem showed that the man had died from natural causes it seemed that it was case closed - but Chief Constable Bob Skinner didn't always think in straight lines. He had more pressing problems to deal with though. It seemed obvious that an Inspector on his force was corrupt and on the personal front it looked as though his marriage was heading for the rocks.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755356969</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Helen Noble
|title=Tears of a Phoenix
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=It was almost inevitable that Jed Johnson would follow his brothers into crime. The slippery slope from care to young offenders' institute to an eventual life sentence was almost predictable despite his mother's attempts to raise him for responsibility. However, once serving the life sentence, Jed has time to think and, aided by Elisabeth, a prison service psychologist, he assesses his past and decides how he'd like his future to look. Decision doesn't guarantee fulfilment though, and Jed has a long way to go before he knows how his story will end.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846949882</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jason Webster
|title=A Death in Valencia
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Chief Inspector Max Camara of the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia has rather a lot on his plate. A renowned local paella chef and restaurant owner went missing and then his body turned up in the sea. It's the eve of the Pope's visit to Valencia and there are threats against a local abortion clinic. The mayor and the town hall are set on demolishing El Cabanyal, the colourful fisherman's quarter on the seafront, to make way for modern development. To cap it all some ominous cracks have suddenly appeared in the walls of his flat. Well, he thinks they've suddenly appeared, but he's not quite certain. It's not exactly what you might call a ''home''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701185082</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gillian Galbraith
|title=The Road to Hell: An Alice Rice Mystery
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=DS Alice Rice is facing a disciplinary hearing which could result in her dismissal from the police force. She knows that she's innocent - that it wasn't her who'd been too free with some sensitive information - but it's all going to come down to whose word is believed and whether a couple of witnesses can remember exactly who said what in a very tense situation. It's a difficult afternoon and when she gets home that evening, Ian - the man with whom she lives - has a visitor and forgets the importance of Alice's afternoon. The resulting argument will stay in Alice's mind for some of the worst reasons.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846972256</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Christobel Kent
|title=The Dead Season: A Sandro Cellini Mystery
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=It's August and Florence feels hotter than it usually does in August - if that's possible. Businesses are shut up as anyone who can migrates to the coast, but Sandro Cellini isn't one of them. He used to be a policeman but he's now a private investigator but even this business is running very slowly. All he has to work on is the case of a young and very pregnant woman whose fiancé is missing. The manager of the local Bank won't be holidaying either - his body is discovered in the shrubbery on a normally busy roundabout - and it looks as though it's been there for a few days. Then there's a coincidence: it seems that the missing fiancé and the dead Bank manager both had the same name.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1843549522</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Henning Mankell
|title=The White Lioness (Kurt Wallander)
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Louise Akerblom was a young housewife, a mother, pillar of the local Methodist church and an estate agent. It was the last which would cause Kurt Wallander to investigate her disappearance and which would gradually bring to light a chain of events which led back to South Africa, to renegade members of the South African Secret Service and an ex-KGB agent who would do ''anything'' to live in South Africa. What they have in common is a determination to halt Nelson Mandela's rise to power even if the result is a blood bath. It didn't seem quite so complex on that Friday afternoon in 1992 but it would be one of Wallander's most complex cases and one which could cost him very dearly.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099571692</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roland Vernon
|title=The Good Wife's Castle
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=We start with a father's suicide, a child watching as he steps of the chair in the milking room with the noose around his neck. A father who died for shame.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552775533</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Olen Steinhauer
|title=An American Spy
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=The Beijing Olympics approach and Xin Zhu has every reason to be proud: a high ranking position in China's espionage system, a beautiful new young wife and the satisfaction of having wiped out 33 American agents and so closing down their department. But the spy business is not a place for resting on laurels, especially when American Alan Drummond wants to avenge the death of his entire department. Meanwhile survivor of the massacre, Milo Weaver, just wants time to recover and space to be with his family. The unlikelihood of that happening is pretty high; however, it becomes a lot more remote when Alan disappears.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848876025</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Elizabeth Wilson
|title=The Girl in Berlin
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Set in 1950s 'Austerity Britain', with detour or two to Berlin, Elizabeth Wilson's ''The Girl in Berlin'' is a stylish tale of espionage with a backdrop of the disappearance of Maclean and Burgess in a world where no one knows who to trust. Jack McGovern works at Special Branch but when Colin Harris, a known member of the Communist Party returns to the UK, MI5's Miles Kingdom draws Jack into investigate his intentions. Add in the fact that the wife of one of Harris's friends, Dinah Wentworth, works part time at the Courtauld Institute of Art where Dr Anthony Blunt is the main man, neither Jack, nor the reader, knows who is working for whom.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846688264</amazonuk>
}}
