Book Club

Agents of the State

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Newly appointed State Security Agent Vicki Khan and her surf bum/private investigator boyfriend Fish Pescado find echoes of South Africa’s apartheid past in Mike Nicol’s espionage thriller. Vicki is sent to Europe to bring in a crucial witness in a child trafficking case, while Pescado…
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Book Club

Rather Be the Devil

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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…
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Book Club

Magpie Murders

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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…
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Book Club

The Exiled

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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…
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Book Club

The Bird Tribunal

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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…
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Book Club

In Sunlight or In Shadow

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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…
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Book Club

Hell is Empty

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Conrad Williams provides a fitting finale to his Joel Sorrell trilogy. The London-based PI finally gets the chance to match wits with his wife’s murderer after a gang of killers escape from a maximum security prison. From the very beginning, these books have been distinguished…
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Book Club

Murderabilia

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A tale that begins with a neat pile of clothes at the side of a busy Glasgow railway track doesn’t sound all that promising, does it? But in the talented hands of Craig Robertson that abandoned clobber marks the start of a darkly disturbing, gut…
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