Newest Crime Reviews
Massacre Pond by Paul Doiron
What is best for the great outdoors? Is leaving it to nature is the most sustainable option or does hunting help to protect the ecosystem? Each group has opposing viewpoints and are unlikely to reach common ground, therefore someone is going to have to stand between the two of them and make sure nothing bad happens. Something like murder. Full review...
The Fourth Secret (Inspector Montalbano) by Andrea Camilleri
Early one morning an Albanian construction worker - a legal resident with a work permit - fell from scaffolding and was dead when his co-workers found him. What struck Montalbano was that there had been rather a lot of what were described as tragedies in the workplace - six in the last month, in fact, although he was sure that there would be statistics to prove that this was not abnormal within the EU. Strictly it wasn't his case to deal with, but he received an anonymous letter telling him that Pashko Puka was going to be killed. Admittedly the letter arrived after the death due to a malfunction in the local postal system, but it did mean that it was difficult to think of the death as a 'tragic accident'. Full review...
The Kill by Jane Casey
I'm quite picky with crime fiction. This oversaturated market seems to teem with mediocre products. There are thrillers with excellent plots that are are badly written, some that contain masterful prose but are, well... boring, and others that are so far-fetched that I end up throwing the book away in disgust. I read Jane Casey′s highly enjoyable stand-alone The Missing several years ago. The Kill was my first foray into her Maeve Kerrigan series and I was keen to see how it would stand up. Full review...
Unmanned by Dan Fesperman
Unmanned, the title of Fesperman's latest thriller, refers to the drones, the Predators, that Captain Darwin Cole flew over Afghanistan, from a shed somewhere in Nevada.
It also refers to the state that those missions left Cole in, after one of them went badly wrong. A poor call-down led to a misidentified target, a house destroyed, civilians killed, including two kids lying out in the open running away, and a girl, not dead but wounded. Cole could see her from his thousands of miles away, moving, agonising, separated by a considerable distance from the arm she would never use again.
A one-armed girl would haunt his dreams for a long time to follow. Full review...
The Secret Locket by Suzan Stainforth
Librarian Penny Knight was surprised when she came home on day and found a jacket belonging to her twin brother Joseph hanging in the hall. He was supposed to be in Moscow for six months, working as a croupier. When she went through to the lounge he was lying on the sofa and her immediate reaction was that he was playing a trick on her - until she got closer and realised that there was something dreadfully wrong. And then she saw the blood. His last words were that he was innocent - and that she should look for a necklace in his jacket pocket. He died before he reached hospital. Penny and her parents were devastated - and then they realised that they were being watched. Full review...
The Lion's Mouth by Anne Holt
This is the first Anne Holt novel that I have read and I am going back for more. Jo Nesbo is quoted describing Holt as 'the Godmother of modern Norwegian crime fiction' and judging only from identikit cover design – grey mist, loneliness, treacherous ice, snow-encrusted gun, red typeface to hint at fresh blood – readers could be forgiven for expecting another volume of semi-standardised Scandinavian noir. Full review...
Believe No One by A D Garrett
Scottish forensic science expert Professor Nick Fennimore, and English DCI Kate Simms are both, for various reasons in St Louis, just as Nick planned. Fennimore and Simms have worked together in the UK when Nick's wife was murdered and daughter kidnapped. In fact they were together the night they first went missing having a less than professional dinner. Nick's daughter is still missing but while he follows new leads, he and Kate have other things to work on. St Louis has a serial killer to contend with: the victims are all mothers and their children are taken at the same time. Not so pure coincidence? Nick sees connections so will try to make everyone else see them. Whether his tactics work or not remains to be seen. Full review...
Troubled Waters: An Alice Rice Mystery by Gillian Galbraith
When we left DI Alice Rice she was newly widowed, but time has moved on a little and she's thinking about what to do with her life. Professionally she's more settled and now faced with an investigation into a body washed up on the foundations of the new bridge that's being built across the Forth. Establishing the identity of the young woman is the first problem and this leads Rice back to members of a religious sect with some very strange rules. And then a second body - that of a young man - is washed up on a beach and it's difficult not to assume that there's a connection between the two. Full review...
Tight-Lipped by David Barrie
It's a little bit different in the UK but in Paris intellectuals are lauded in much the same way as rock stars. Jean-Jacques Marsay is a philosopher and equally as famous as his wife, the beautiful and talented actress, Carine Dufour. Marsay is writing a book about Appoghiu Terra - an eco-terrorist organisation - and its leader Gabriel Agostini. His editor is Virginie Desmoulins - or rather was - because Virginie was murdered at her flat in a rather unusual way. The case is being investigated by Captain Franck Guerin of the Brigade Criminelle and he and Agostini have a history. Agostini shot and seriously wounded Guerin when Guerin was with his previous employers, the French version of the security services. He was moved on to the Brigade Criminelle when it was thought that he might have become just a little too sympathetic to Agostini - and Agostini to him. Full review...
The Wolves of London - The Obsidian Heart Trilogy (Book 1) by Mark Morris
Alex Locke has grown from the young petty criminal he once was. Now a psychology lecturer with a beautiful 5-year-old daughter he has every incentive he needs to stay straight. It would take something devastating to make him return to his former life but devastation happens. Alex is coerced into doing on last job: stealing a piece of heart shaped obsidian from someone it didn’t belong to in the first place. What are the consequences? What's so special about this piece of rock? As all hell breaks loose, Alex is about to find out. Full review...
Confidentially Yours by Charles Williams
Carthage was what you might call 'backwoods' and there wasn't really all that much to do there. For recreation, hunting probably came top of the list and John 'Duke' Warren went for an early morning duck shoot before going to work. Whilst in the shoot he heard two shots from an adjoining blind and on the way out saw the car of a fellow shoot member. It was only later that he found out that the shots had caused the death of Dan Roberts. At first it looked like suicide, but Warren and the police realised that it's not often that suicide victims shoot themselves twice. Full review...
Black Noise by Pekka Hiltunen
It was just one of them quirky internet things to begin with. Empty videos appearing on the internet. Dark expanses of time: no images, no sound.
They'd been uploaded from hacked accounts: teenagers who didn't know anything about it or about each other. There were ten of them altogether. If it had stopped there it would have been one of those 9-days-wonders of the web. An oddity talked about for years, freaking a few people out, but sinking, ultimately without much trace. Full review...
Falling Freely, As If In A Dream by Leif G W Persson
In 2007 Lars Martin Johansson, the head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sweden, was approaching retirement and he had one unsolved case which he would dearly love to clear: the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986. Palme, without bodyguards, had left a cinema in central Stockholm with his wife and was walking home when he was shot in the back. He died almost instantly and his wife suffered a minor injury, whilst the assassin sprinted away into the people milling around in the city. There were witnesses to the killing and people who saw the killer as he escaped. Some time after the death a man was convicted of the murder, but he was later cleared and more than twenty years later the identity of the killer is still a mystery. Full review...
This Little Piggy by Bea Davenport
In 1984 I turned two years old, unconcerned by what the miners were up to and more impressed by being served two different drinks at once at my birthday party. I've seen the photos. For Clare Jackson, though, the summer of 1984 changes everything. A small town journalist, she gets the stuff dreams are made of: a murder on her patch, and the murder of a baby, no less. Set against the backdrop of the miners’ strike (the baby belongs to one of the scabs), it’s a tense time on the troubled Sweetmeadows estate and she's not the only one who needs a drink or two (like my 2 year old self) to get through it. Full review...
Race to Death (DI Ian Peterson 2) by Leigh Russell
A man falls to his death at York races, with the wind whistling past his ears indistinguishable from the roar of the crowd. But is the death suicide or murder? For newly-promoted DI Ian Peterson the pressure is on and his team need to solve the case quickly. Unfortunately the killer is also following events as they unfold. Full review...
Black Chalk by Christopher J Yates
I think I have finally understood why it is that over the last few years, authors have increasingly insisted on non-linear structures for their novels. It is a deliberate and possibly conscious ploy to try to make them un-filmable. The Hollywood rights are certainly lucrative, but if my theory doesn't leak like the Jumblies' boat then our complex-structure-loving writers are not just being too clever for their own good, they are trying to be true to the great works of literature that they aspire to emulate. Full review...
Bitterwash Road by Gary Disher
Shots fired on Bitter Wash Road, is the call that comes in, three weeks after he arrived. Hirsch is the only cop in town, so obviously it's up to him to try to figure out exactly where 'the tin hut' might be and discover whether this is just a local looking for rabbit stew or something more sinister. Full review...
Darkness, Darkness: Resnick's Last Case by John Harvey
It's difficult to believe that it's thirty years since the miners' strike, not least because a lot of the enmities still live on. It wasn't so much that it was the miners against the government and the police as the fact that it was neighbour against neighbour - and sometimes the problem was within a family. The Nottinghamshire miners were less militant than some of their northern counterparts - and many continued to work. And so it was in Bledwell Vale. The pit there was just about played out and was scheduled for closure, so many men were continuing to work, despite the picketing. Six months after the end of the strike the pit did close, but there was no magic solution for Bledwell Vale and thirty years on another row of the old Coal Board houses was being demolished when the skeleton of a woman was discovered. Full review...
Help for the Haunted by John Searles
Rose and Sylvester Mason make their living from helping the haunted, performing exorcisms and running seminars across America on the subject of the paranormal. When they are murdered in a church, their daughters, Rose and Sylvi, are left negotiating the complex legacy their work has left behind. Full review...
Criminal Enterprise by Owen Laukkanen
We all have bills to pay and many of us have felt that shiver down our spine as we realise we may be a little short this month. What we don’t do is take a scribbled note saying you have a gun into a bank and force money out of the till. For one out-of-work accountant, Carter Tomlin, this is the option he chooses over bankruptcy and one crime leads to another. Will spiky FBI Special Agent Carla Windermere and laidback local cop Kirk be able to catch this white collar criminal before his cuffs become stained with blood? Full review...
Remember, Remember by Lisa Cutts
Detective Constable Nina Foster has just returned to work after after a stabbing which nearly killed her. Everyone - even Nina - thinks that she's going to be taking it gently and easing herself back into the job. She's working on cold cases - this time it's a train crash which happened in 1964 - but what she's given is just a little tame compared to the cases which her colleagues are struggling to cope with. Drugs deaths and robberies are a lot more immediate, but then - with one of those peculiar quirks of fate - evidence emerges which links the crash which happened half a century ago to the current spate of drug deaths. The woman who is supposed to be taking it easy is back in the thick of it. Full review...
The Burglar Who Counted The Spoons by Lawrence Block
The return of Lawrence Block's wonderful burglar, Bernie Rhodenbarr, 9 years after the tenth novel in the series, was my most-anticipated book release for an awfully long time. It is an absolute pleasure to report that the character has lost none of his charm, Block's writing is as superb as ever, and the plot is as ingenious as in any of the previous 10. I say that having reread them all in the twelve months before reading this one. This is up there along with The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart as my favourite in the series. For newcomers to the series, I'd definitely recommend starting at the beginning, but if you do want to dive into this one, you definitely can without feeling too lost. Full review...
The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell
Before the Second World War a series of tunnels were dug under the green fields of Loughton in Essex. As children will they played in them, acted out small dramas and made them their own - until they were told not to go there again by the father of one of the children. He was known as Woody - a man with a sharp temper along with a disinclination to work, which he managed to achieve because of the money which his wife had inherited and which was supplemented by some inheritances of his own. There was a child in the family - Michael - but neither parent took any interest in him and his mother spent most of her time indulging herself. When Woody discovered that she was being unfaithful to him he murdered her and her lover, cut off one of their hands and buried both in a tin box far out in the fields. Full review...
The Axe Factor by Colin Cotterill
Jimm Juree's family is beyond dysfunctional. Her mother apparently hired her father, one brother is her sister as well as a computer genius and her other brother is dating a body builder old enough to be his mother. Jimm is relatively normal: a thirty-four-year-old crime reporter living in - and helping to run - a dilapidated beach resort on the Gulf of Thailand - but without a crime to report on. Until, that is, she was approached by Nurse Da about the fact that the Doctor from the health centre had gone missing. There doesn't actually seem to be a crime, but Jimm agrees to find out what has happened to Dr. Somluk. Full review...
The Dark Meadow by Andrea Maria Schenkel and Anthea Bell (translator)
It was at the end of the war that Afra Zauner returned to her parents' cottage in Finsterau. She'd lost her job as a waitress and it was some time before she realised that she was pregnant. When Albert was born her father turned against her and the boy and there was little sympathy for her in the village - but they didn't expect that Afra would be murdered. The obvious suspect was Johann Zauner. It was no secret that there had been constant arguments between him and his daughter and he had some injuries which he couldn't entirely explain. When a policeman 'obtained' a confession it seemed that this was an open-and-shut case. Full review...
Train That Carried The Girl: 2 (Riccarton Junction) by W Scott Beaven
A few years have passed since we last met Kikarin, the then teenager growing up in the wilds of the Scottish borders surrounded by some pretty wild people. Her parents have gone back to live in Japan while her brother has fled abroad as a result of the family's near fatal brush with the criminal underworld. This leaves Kiri to continue her life with her friends Ainslie and Melanie filling the void. Although disappointed to have missed out on her honours degree in archaeology, Kiri finds alternative employment selling double glazing for commercial premises. Some things change but Kiri is still scarred by the past. She wants to settle down but will this past let her? Full review...
The Spring of Kasper Meier by Ben Fergusson
Germany may be defeated as the embers of World War II grow cold but Kasper Meier is making the most of it. His trade in black market goods and casual private investigation work augment the meagre rations for him and his dying father. When a woman asks him to find a missing British airman he refuses – it's not really his line. She blackmails Kasper and still he refuses but then the note arrives: This is bigger than you. You don't have a choice. Queers still die in Berlin. Find the pilot. It seems that he's been seen with another man and now he has a decision to make that will either cost or save his life. Full review...
