Book Club

A Taste of Ashes

The west coast town of Ayr is the backdrop to A Taste of Ashes, the second of Tony Black’s novels featuring DI Bob Valentine. He is a cop who places himself – literally – at the sharp end, as he is just returning to duty…
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Book Club

The Pale House

Luke McCallin does the next-to-impossible, and  makes a sympathetic and credible character out of a German military policeman in 1945 Sarajevo. Gregor Reinhardt is adrift in a sea of treachery, brutality and panic, as vengeful partisans tighten the noose on the German army. Amidst the…
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Book Club

Bull Mountain

Brian Panowich’s debut Bull Mountain begins in 1949, and we are in pure redneck territory – rural Georgia. A murderous feud between two brothers has lasting repercussions and by 2015 matters are hardly any better in the Burroughs family. This is a family drama set inside…
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Book Club

Naked Shall I Return

Christopher Bartley introduced his craggy anti-hero Ross Duncan in Every Secret Thing, and now the chain smoking tough guy returns. He leads us on a mesmerising journey through San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1930s, where he encounters every vice he has ever heard of –…
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Book Club

Oblivion

As titles go, Arnaldur Indridason’s Oblivion is pretty downbeat, but this is an enthralling look at the younger days of the glum Icelandic Detective Erlendur. Fans of the mature Elendur will know that one of his chief fixations is about missing persons, and this is…
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Book Club

The Lie

CL Taylor’s 2014 novel The Accident won a five star review right here on Crime Fiction Lover and its successor should appeal to those who like their mysteries spiced with a dark psychological edge. After an ill-fated trip to Nepal, which culminates in a disturbing encounter…
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Book Club

The Drowned Boy

Karin Fossum’s latest case for Inspector Sejer is the case of a little boy with Down’s Syndrome who has drowned, apparently, in a pond near his parents’ home. But forensics prove that he didn’t drown in the pond but elsewhere, while his mother swears it…
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Book Club

Thieves Fall Out

Gore Vidal might be the last person you’d expect to find on the pages of a crime fiction site, but the patrician intellectual could, and did, write in almost any style and genre. In classic pulp style, he tells the tale of an American who…
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