A flying start
On the Radar — 2017 is off to a flying start, and January could see some of the year’s biggest crime releases, with the 26th a big day on the publishing calendar. This week we lead off with Perfect Remains, a debut from Helen Fields,…
Deep Down Dead by Steph Broardribb
The action thriller never seems to go out of fashion, and fans of writers like Lee Child and David Baldacci seem to welcome each new release with relish. From John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps through Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male and on to Child’s Reacher series, books…
RebusFest is coming to Edinburgh
It all started on 19 March 1987. That’s the date Knots and Crosses, the very first Rebus novel, was released. To celebrate 30 years of the great Scottish detective, author Ian Rankin and publisher Orion Books are to stage RebusFest in Edinburgh. The city is…
Rather Be the Devil
Thirty years a crime author, 21 Rebus novels, and Ian Rankin is still going strong. Having retired and later returned to the force to help solve cold cases, John Rebus has always scratched his head about one particular murder. The socialite Maria Turquand was found…
Magpie Murders
He writes young adult mysteries. He writes for TV. He writes books set in the Sherlock Holmes universe. He’s even written James Bond. The ever-inventive Anthony Horowitz here tries his hand at a throwback style story partly set in 1955, and partly set in the…
The Exiled
The crunch of ice under boot, and the hard, grey streets of Finland are left behind in the latest Anna Fekete story by Kati Hiekkapelto. The author takes her heroine back to the place of her birth, a Hungarian town but in contemporary Serbia. Anna just…
The Bird Tribunal
Having quietly swept many crime fiction top lists for 2016, this title is a personal fave for such authors as Ragnar Jónasson and Sarah Ward. Set in Norway’s isolated fjords, this stark drama contains only two main characters. A young woman flees her past to become…
In Sunlight or In Shadow
Lawrence Block edited this collection of 17 stories that are all inspired, based on or riff off the paintings of the great Edward Hopper. Block makes the point in his introduction that Hopper paintings don’t tell a story but open up the possibility for a story…