Book Club

Strange Tide

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Christopher Fowler takes risks. His two detectives, Arthur Bryant and John May, are improbably ancient. I think they were old in their WWII debut mystery, Full Dark House. He cracks endless jokes based on English popular culture, and if you can’t keep up with his…
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Book Club

Black Wings Has My Angel

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This re-issued Elliott Chaze novel offers up a delicious trip into the noir past, and holds you in its grip. Originally published in 1954, the first-person narrator of Black Wings has all the sardonic humour of Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, but instead of a PI he’s…
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Book Club

Thin Ice

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Quentin Bates brings us a delightful romp of a chiller, with a story line nicely balanced between the point of view of the criminals and the police. A catalogue of errors, from a missing getaway car, to kidnappers running out of petrol, to inquisitive neighbours,…
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Book Club

The Poison Artist

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Jonathan Moore appreciates the love affair that bloomed in the Golden Age between mystery authors and the dazzling variety of concoctions killers used to despatch their victims. In this remarkable debut novel we meet a San Francisco toxicologist, Dr Caleb Maddox. He has a row…
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Book Club

Three Little Pigs

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Apostolos Doxiadis used to write graphic novels, but here brings a fresh take on mafia revenge, told from the perspective of a mysterious old man. When a man in old Brooklyn kills another in a drunken brawl, it turns out the victim is the local…
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Book Club

Rain Dogs

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Adrian McKinty has been playing with the history of Northern Ireland, and the rest of the UK, throughout the Sean Duffy series. From the hunger strikes in the Maze in 1981 through to the Brighton bombing… and now the depraved activities of Jimmy Savile drift…
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Book Club

Jihadi: A Love Story

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Yusuf Toropov’s novel deals with topics that may seem more at home on the pages of the daily papers – like terrorism and torture. Told alternately by the prisoner Ali Liddell and his interrogator/torturer/former partner, it recounts the tension between occupying forces and fundamentalists in The Islamic Republic, a…
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Book Club

Real Tigers

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Mick Herron has carved out something of a niche with his accounts of the more disfunctional side of the espionage industry. London’s Slough House may sound imposing, but it is basically a scrapyard for spies who, for whatever reason, screwed up their careers with MI5. We…
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