==Crime==
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{{newreview
|author=George Pelecanos
|title=Shoedog
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=If you ever find yourself as a character in a work of fiction, it’s probably best to avoid hitchhikers. The chances are it’s going to turn out very badly for either the driver or the hitchhiker - or both. Constantine is a denim-clad, Marlboro-smoking, drifter and loner with a strong sense of right and wrong who has just returned from a period of travelling around the world and is heading south back home in the US when he is picked up by a man named Polk, driving a muscle car. So what could possibly go wrong?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687365</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Barrie
|summary=Meet Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. An unlikely police commissaire, he's an acquired taste for his colleagues. Short, ungainly, seemingly thinking about the most obtuse things in his pursuit of the truth, and endlessly doodling, but beneath his deathly slow speech and unexpected diversions into his childhood comes a surprisingly perceptive ability to find the culprit in whatever crime he is forced to solve.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099488973</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jean Rowden
|title=More Deaths Than One
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Constable Thomas 'Thorny' Deepbriar has a broken leg after his involvement in a case and so is taken by his wife, Mary, to recuperate in the seaside town where he worked as a policeman during the war. He expects to be bored - the most interesting thing on the horizon is a case of missing gnomes. Then he bumps into an old colleague - someone who left the force in a haze of suspicion. Shortly afterwards, a body is found on the beach. Even stranger is that the dead man is someone that Thorny and his colleague thought had died during the war. It seems that things are not as they seem. Can Thorny work out what is going on, even with a broken leg?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0709089309</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sue Grafton
|title=U is for Undertow
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Several years ago I joined a funny little book group in London, and one of the first books we read was a Sue Grafton alphabet book. I had, up to this point, never read any crime fiction, foolishly feeling myself above such books, and so I was dubious about what I'd have to say about it. That book changed my literary life. I devoured it. I couldn't get enough! I immediately searched for all the other books in the series and read them quickly, one by one, swiftly followed by a delicious plunge into the world of Agatha Christie which gave me a joyously long reading list. And so now, years later, I find myself with the latest book in the alphabet series lying in my lap, a happy smile on my face as I found I read voraciously once again!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>023070932X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Helen Black
|title=Dishonour
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Modern lives.
Lily Valentine is heavily pregnant and trying to get her own law firm up and running (having been sacked from her previous job for a tendency to be a trifle too ''independent'' – or maybe just disorganised).
Ryan is a boy from the sink estates. Thin, angry, rebellious, but with an ability to charm and a serious talent for art that gets lost in his gansta-speak and tendency to skive off school.
Lailla and Aasha are good Muslim girls. Hard-working, sober, appropriately dressed, dutiful to their families. They're also English teenagers, with a fair dose of what that normally implies.
Jack is a copper, overlooked for the interesting cases (like murder), good at child protection, in love with Lily, addicted to the job, always trying to do the right thing, and not always succeeding. His current clean-living and caring attitude is driving Lily to distraction.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847560725</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=M J Trow
|title=Maxwell's Retirement
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Peter 'Mad Max' Maxwell has always been something of a dinosaur and even he realises just how far adrift he is when some of his sixth form students start receiving threatening messages on their mobiles. He might prefer to make a phone call or send a note when the need arises, but this isn't the way of the younger generation and Maxwell discovers that he's going to have to climb a steep learning curve if he's to help his students through the problem.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0749007664</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Kessler
|title=Mercy
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=In some ways, the first line of this novel says it all: 'It's hard to sit still when your client is scheduled to die in fifteen hours.' From this moment on, the action comes thick and fast, leaving the reader with barely the breath to murmer 'is it really probable that all this was left to the last day?' However, if you suspend your disbelief, then the author does deliver blockbuster plot twists and twirls that are very satisfactory.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847561829</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=M R Hall
|title=The Disappeared
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=We first met Jenny Cooper in [[The Coroner by M R Hall|The Coroner]] when she had just taken over as Coroner for Severn Valley. It's now some months later and whilst she's settled into the job to some extent her relationship with her officer, Alison, is uneven and she's still shaky mentally and dependant on pills to a greater extent than she would care to admit. She's a feisty woman though and determined that she's going to do the job properly.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230709850</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Neil Cross
|title=Captured
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Kenny is dying - brain cancer is hitting him just as he's barely turning forty. As a result he compiles a short list of rights to wrong, and people to create closure with. One, his ex-wife, might not be easy, two concern a misguided sense of a guilt of old. The fourth turns out to be a missing woman. The journey he takes in that redemptive exercise is not for the squeamish.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847373976</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Colin Cotterill
|title=The Merry Misogynist
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Dr Siri Paiboun is now married to Madame Daeng and despite the fact that they have a combined age of going on for a hundred and forty they're behaving like the newly-weds they are. Even being the reluctant coroner for the Republic of Laos can't dampen Siri's enthusiasm for life. Well, it can't until he makes the gruesome discovery that a man is wooing and wedding girls in various parts of the country and then murdering them on honeymoon and binding their bodies to trees. What he does to his victims leaves the morgue staff sickened. There's a determination to find the man responsible and bring him to justice.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849160082</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Hayes
|title=A Hard Death
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=I haven't read Jonathan Hayes' bestseller 'Precious Blood' so I was a fresh reader, so to speak. His writing biography on the inside cover of the book is impressive. My expectations were high. All the ingredients are in place for a good thriller. The location is The Everglades in Florida. Brooding, enigmatic, awe-inspiring and where we all seem to expect crocodiles to rear their heads out of the swampy waters every five minutes.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099538644</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Colin Cotterill
|title=Curse of the Pogo Stick
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Dr Siri Paiboun usually managed to control his reactions in front of Judge Haeng, but occasionally he forgot himself and was more insolent than usual. This time the Laos national coroner (reluctant), communist (even more reluctantly) and shaman finds himself on a road trip with the judge and the Justice Department. Nurse Dtui (pregnant and married, although not in the usual order of events) is left to run the morgue along with Mr Geung, who might, or might not be a help, but probably not in the way that you might expect. As if that wasn't enough Nurse Dtui discovers a booby-trapped corpse, there's a geriatric hit-person on the loose and Siri is kidnapped.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849160112</amazonuk>
}}
