On the Radar — Crime fiction is great. It can take you to just about any setting. So if you want to relish the Scottish Highlands, you can grab Val McDermid’s new Karen Pirie novel. But if you want to catch a wave, maybe the reprint of Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source should be your read this week. Then again, maybe you want the sophisticated charms of downtown Toronto? Oh, and did we mention that Tennison is back? Peckham, anyone? There’s plenty more too in this week’s books news here on Crime Fiction Lover…
Broken Ground by Val McDermid
In her fifth police procedural featuring DCI Karen Pirie, Val McDermid will be stitching past and present together in a manner similar to Arnaldur Indridason in books like The Shadow District and Strange Shores. A young couple searching for a treasure buried in the Highlands back during World War II get more than they bargained for when they discover a body along with the legacy. However, the corpse is a bit more recent than the trove and just as Pirie gets her nashers into the case another one crops up, which suggests that a past investigation is anything but closed. Past. Present. Future: put 23 August into your diary.
Pre-order now on Amazon
Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn
No Exit Press is taking us back to 1984 and the setting is Huntington Beach – AKA Surf City USA – in Kem Nunn’s classic SoCal noir novel. The sun beats down relentlessly on Ike but also casts a permanent shadow across him. Two years back his sister ran away from the central Californian desert town where they lived, and now a kid has rolled up in a Camero with news. The girl has gone missing. He slips Ike a note listing the names of three surfers who might have taken Ellen Tucker to Mexico and left her there… dead. Ike sets off on his own to embed himself in surf culture and discovers a very dark side to life on the beach. Out 23 August.
Pre-order now on Amazon
Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill
Released last year in Canada and already available for Kindle in the UK, Bellevue Square is about Toronto bookstore owner Jean Mason, who has been told that she has a doppelgänger out there stalking the city streets. She sets out to investigate and begins by hanging out in Bellevue Square, obsessed with the idea of meeting her twin and enlisting the help of locals to find the lookalike. But then one or two of these helpers go missing…
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Door to a Dark Room by Danny Smith
We’re going back to Cali with the second Dickie Floyd series novel, which has hardboiled written all through it. The author is a retired homicide detective, and here his detectives Dickie Jones and Matt ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ Tyler are on the case after a decapitated woman is found in the suburb of Santa Clarita. Soon, one of them is the killer’s target. Out 21 August.
Pre-order now on Amazon
Murder Mile by Lynda La Plante
The fourth in Lynda La Plante’s origin series looking at the early years of her TV heroine Jane Tennison reaches the year 1979. With the economy in disarray due to the Winter of Discontent, DS Tennison’s working at Peckham CID. The bin workers are on strike, rubbish is piling up in the street… and so are bodies. Two victims in two days on the so-called Murder Mile, and the press is saying there’s a serial killer on the loose. Out 23 August.
Pre-order now on Amazon
Boise Longpig Hunting Club by Nick Kolakowski
Boise is a city in Idaho where the pigs are 21.8 per cent longer than pigs in other parts of the world. Well, actually, that’s just something we made up but ‘long pig’ actually has a more serious meaning: human flesh. Bounty hunter Jake Halligan has been hunting people down for a long time, but now it seems the tables are turned. First, he finds a body in his gun safe. A warning? He teams up with his sister Frankie, who’s just as hard as he is, and sets out to find out what’s going on. Turns out the creeps he’s put away in the past are nothing compared to who’s actually after him. Out 13 August.
Pre-order now on Amazon
