iBookKindlePrintReviews

The Shut Eye by Belinda Bauer

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Expectations are always high for a new novel from Belinda Bauer, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for her debut, Blacklands, and the most recent recipient of the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year (for Rubbernecker). Yet while quality is always assured, you’re…
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The Exit by Helen FitzGerald

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The Exit is a psychological thriller with a fixation on death, though one principal character has to negotiate the maze of dementia before she’s able to reach her final destination. Rose Price is a children’s author and illustrator, though she’s now struggling to write those…
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Little Tales of Misogyny

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Written by Patricia Highsmith — The title of Patricia Highsmith’s story collection, reissued this month by Virago, remains highly provocative even 40 years after it first appeared. As a reader, you wonder if these tales will highlight the cruelty of misogyny from a feminist perspective. Or…
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The Crooked House by Christobel Kent

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Following a series set in Florence featuring private investigator Sandro Cellini, Christobel Kent has shifted the action to an English estuary village for her 10th novel. It feels like a fresh start for the author, who’s been taken on by a different publisher. There’s not…
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Features

Andre: Top five books of 2014

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Re-issues have made up much of my reading this year, from the ambitious reprint project of the Maigret series (alongside the first English edition of Simenon’s startling psychological novel The Mahé Circle) to the scandalous 1980s PI debut from Julian Barnes’s alter ego Dan Kavanagh,…
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Fiddle City by Dan Kavanagh

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When Julian Barnes’s pseudonymous PI novel Duffy was reissued earlier this year, the literary author found himself welcomed into the crime genre. Written under the name Dan Kavanagh, Duffy was a scandalously funny, violent and sordid debut from a writer who was clearly relishing a…
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