A Rage in Harlem and The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
Reviewed by Annabel I first discovered the mad world of Chester Himes’s Harlem in an old Allison & Busby paperback of The Crazy Kill, the third novel of his Harlem…
Reviewed by Annabel I first discovered the mad world of Chester Himes’s Harlem in an old Allison & Busby paperback of The Crazy Kill, the third novel of his Harlem…
Translated by Rachel Ward Reviewed by Annabel I’ve come late to German ‘Queen of Krimi’ Simone Buchholz’s novels. Hotel Cartagena is the ninth of her books featuring the Hamburg-based State…
Reviewed by Annabel Having been a fan of Jeff Noon’s cult spec fiction novels set in an alternate Manchester, I was surprised and delighted when his book Slow Motion Ghosts,…
Reviewed by Annabel A new novel from Tana French, Irish author of the acclaimed Dublin Murders series is always worth waiting for. Her latest, The Searcher, a standalone, is that…
Translated by Nick Caistor Reviewed by Gill Davies This is the first novel by Olivier Norek to be translated into English. It was first published in France in 2013 and…
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long When I was younger and read every Agatha Christie book I could lay my hands on, she always produced a book at the festive season and…
Reviewed by Harriet I was very late in the day in discovering the novels of Tana French. I’d tried her first novel, In the Woods, some years ago and for some…
Review by Annabel William Shaw, former award-winning music journalist has, in recent years, become one of the UK’s must-read crime authors. Although he’d already written a well-received detective series set…
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies When I started teaching popular fiction courses forty years ago, having always been more drawn to Jesse James than to Henry James, there were sneers aplenty…
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies Adultery. It crops up everywhere. Few grown-up pastimes are as popular as disobeying the sixth Commandment. Where would novels, plays and movies be without it? It’s…
Review by Gill Davies This powerful and engrossing novel continues a series of crime novels in which Attica Locke uses plot and suspense to investigate inequality and American racism in…
Translated by Howard Curtis and Katherine Gregor Review by Basil Ransome-Davies Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em/And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad…
Reviewed by Harriet He wished that he could just once hear his sister play a solo again. Or help his sister pin up the hem on a dress she’d made….
Translated by Antony Shugaar Reviewed by Gill Davies This is the third book in a series of police procedural novels by the successful Italian crime writer Maurizio de Giovanni (also…
Review by Rob Spence East Anglia has quite a lot of previous when it comes to crime fiction: Colin Watson’s chronicles of Flaxborough, James Runcie’s Grantchester mysteries, and Nicola Upson’s…
Reviewed by Annabel I first discovered Jeff Noon’s weird take on our world when his debut novel Vurt was picked up by a major publisher after being an indie original that went…
Reviewed by Annabel I’ll say it up front, Jane Harper’s third novel, The Lost Man, was totally unputdownable! Not having read her first two, The Dry and Force of Nature…
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies At times crime fiction seems a genre so powerful that it sucks in and revitalises other forms. At others, literary fiction appears to piggyback expediently on…
Translated by Tim Mohr Review by Gill Davies The Second Rider is the first novel in a projected new series by the Austrian writer, Alex Beer. It is set in…
Reviewed by David Harris Roberts seems to have been very busy lately so I’m glad he managed to include a return to the world of The Real-Town Murders, one of my favourite books…
Reviewed by Gill Davies Following on from her highly-acclaimed first novel, The Dry, Jane Harper has written a second gripping story featuring the harsh Australian outback and a detective called…
Translated by Jamie Bulloch Reviewed by Terence Jagger We are not in Japan, but Germany; set in the snowy Black Forest, not far from the French border, this novel starts…
Reviewed by Harriet Nine Lessons is the seventh of Nicola Upson’s crime novels featuring the mystery writer Josephine Tey (1896-1952). I normally have a few reservations about the seemingly fashionable…
Reviewed by Gill Davies This is Attica Locke’s fourth novel and a stunning follow-up. Black Water Rising was set in 1981; Pleasantville in 1996 and both used the crime genre with deep political insight…