Features

RoughJustice: Top five books of 2018

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2018 may have been a pretty terrible year for politics, but a look at the books selected below, as well as those in the lists of my fellow contributors, will confirm it’s been another banner year for crime fiction. In fact, politics and crime fiction…
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The Drop by Mick Herron

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The Jackson Lamb series of satirical espionage novels have gained an impressive readership, and garnered considerable critical praise. Set in contemporary London, they feature a group of MI6 outcasts who, despite their failings, somehow manage to get their superiors out of the fire. Beginning with…
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The Contract

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Written by JM Gulvin — The focus of JM Gulvin’s hardboiled crime series is Texas Ranger John Quarrie. He’s a Vietnam vet who rose to national prominence after he wrote to the president requesting clemency for a fellow soldier court-martialled for cowardice. In fact, Pious…
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November Road by Lou Berney

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Lou Berney’s 2015 novel The Long and Faraway Gone won a string of awards including the Edgar, Barry, McAvity and Anthony gongs. The author sets his latest novel in the aftermath of one of America’s defining moments, the assassination of John F Kennedy, and uses the…
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A House of Ghosts

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Written by WC Ryan — Blackwater Island lies of the Devon Coast. The year is 1917 and the Great War, still raging, has made the already rich arms manufacturer Lord Highmount even richer. However, the same conflict has also made him indescribably poorer. His two sons…
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Book Club

Charlesgate Confidential

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Scott Von Doviak’s debut is the complete package. It has ambition. The narrative is split in to three parts, 1946, 1986, and 2014. There is no shortage of intrigue as ex-cons, students and detectives all try to acquire the missing fruit of an unsolved museum…
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Book Club

The Martian Girl

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Themes of mesmerism and the blurring of identities inhabit this standalone novel from Andrew Martin, author of the Jim Stringer steam detective series. In London in the 1890s, Kate French is trying to make her way on the stage as part of a variety act….
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Suspended Retribution by Rob Ashman

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Acting Detective Chief Inspector Rosalind Kray is called to investigate a hit and run in one of Blackpool’s side streets. There’s a certain poetic justice to the scene. The victim, Jimmy Caldwell, had himself just received a two-year suspended sentence for vehicular manslaughter. While texting…
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