Features

Interview: Belinda Bauer

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Five novels into her crime career, Belinda Bauer has become a favourite among critics and readers alike. Her 2010 debut, Blacklands won the CWA Gold Dagger in 2010. Rubbernecker, which features an anatomy student who stumbles across a crime amidst the cadavers, was recently longlisted…
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From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell

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May 2014 is the 50th anniversary of Ruth Rendell’s debut novel, From Doon with Death. It is being reissued with an introduction by Ian Rankin, who describes her as “probably the greatest living crime writer in the world”. Hopefully, the typographical errors that sneaked into…
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The Ties That Bind by Erin Kelly

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“Brighton is a town that always looks as if it is helping police with their inquiries,” said the writer Keith Waterhouse. It’s an aphorism that chimes with Erin Kelly’s new novel about a former gangster who once ruled the Sussex coast. Joss Grand is now…
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The Dead Beat by Doug Johnstone

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With a story that features suicide, clinical depression and the struggling newspaper industry in Edinburgh, The Dead Beat might sound like a gloomy read. It’s certainly a hard-hitting psychological thriller, though its 90s grunge soundtrack and troubled, headstrong protagonist give the novel an angsty energy…
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Duffy by Dan Kavanagh

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You don’t find many crime novels with a blurb – “exciting, funny and refreshingly nasty” – by Martin Amis. That literary connection is a clue to the real identity of Dan Kavanagh. According to the entertaining yet spurious author biography, Kavanagh is an Irishman who…
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Dog Will Have His Day by Fred Vargas

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Translated by Sian Reynolds — A four-time winner of the CWA International Dagger, Fred Vargas is arguably France’s finest contemporary crime writer. With every book, you enter a familiar fictional landscape that is not quite reality but rather a uniquely Gallic mélange of the whimsical,…
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