Happy New Year, and welcome back to On the Radar, our weekly news column with the latest releases in the world of crime and mystery books. The year 2025 gets underway somewhat fittingly with the death of a bookseller in Bristol. We’ve got crime fiction set in Berlin, the Arctic and New York, plus a book with a supernatural element to it as well. Magic!
The Bookseller by Tim Sullivan
DS George Cross is back on 16 January in the seventh book of Tim Sullivan‘s popular series of police procedurals. As The Bookseller opens, a body has been found in a Bristol bookshop, lying in a pool of blood. Crime is usually kept between the covers of the tomes on sale here – so what prompted this bookseller’s death? It’s up to Cross to find out, but with his personal life causing him problems, the detective reluctantly lets others take the driving seat. In a story involving a rare book and featuring a cast of not-to-be-trusted clever clogs, could this be the case that finally catches our hero off his game?
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Nightingale & Co by Charlotte Printz
Yes, German cosy crime is a thing – and on 15 January we see the arrival of Nightingale & Co, written by Charlotte Printz and translated by Marina Sofia. It’s set in Berlin in the 1960s, where Carla is determined to keep the Nightingale & Co detective agency running smoothly after the death of her father. The arrival of a previously unknown half-sister sets Carla’s plans awry. Wallie is chaotic, fun-loving and now trapped by the overnight construction of the Berlin Wall. Can the mismatched pair work together and get results? When a client is accused of murder, it’s time to find out.
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Death in the Arctic by Tom Hindle
An aspiring travel writer thinks her luck has changed when she’s invited on board a luxury airship flying to the North Pole. It’s the trip of a lifetime – until things turn sour when a fellow passenger is found dead in their cabin. Surely it was just a tragic accident? Well, maybe, but what if it was… murder? Time moves slowly for the group of travellers trapped at the top of the world but as the hours tick by, fear turns to doubt and friendship turns to suspicion. Because someone could be a killer – couldn’t they? Death in the Arctic by Tom Hindle is out on 16 January.
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An Ethical Guide to Murder by Jenny Morris
New year, new author! Mark 16 January on that new calendar, because that’s when Jenny Morris’s debut An Ethical Guide to Murder is published. One touch, and Thea knows how long you have left to live. And if that’s not spooky enough, she can also transfer life from one person to another – as Thea discovers when her best friend Ruth suffers a fatal head injury on a night out… Soon Ruth is coming around and the man responsible is dead. But with power comes great responsibility, and as Thea tests out the boundaries of her new skill, she finds that living with it isn’t quite as simple as she had imagined.
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Double Takedown by Kevin G Chapman
Start spreading the news… The curtain is up on another Mike Stoneman novel from the pen of Kevin G Chapman. This time the NYPD Detective and his partner Jason Dickson must find their way through the smoke and mirrors of the theatre world after a Broadway star is murdered at a glitzy charity reception. All the signs point to the man directing The Godfather: The Musical – the show was floundering after bad reviews and there’s a sizeable insurance payout coming his way. A year on, and Mike and Jason begin to doubt their iron clad evidence… could the killer be someone else, after all? Double Takedown is out now.
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Click here and check out our Most wanted crime novels of 2025!
