Book Club

Blood on a Saint

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Last time we caught up with Father Burke and Monty Collins, they were back in the old country for Death at Christy Burke’s. Now they’ve returned to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a woman’s claim to have seen the Virgin Mary in the churchyard of St…
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Book Club

A Land More Kind Than Home

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Chosen by David Prestidge as his top crime book of 2013, A Land More Kind Than home was a debut novel for Wiley Cash. There is crime, and crime of the darkest kind, but for atmosphere, a sense of brooding evil disguised as piety, and…
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Book Club

Police

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There is nothing new about bringing treasured characters back from the dead. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle responded to unprecedented public dismay by resurrecting Sherlock Holmes after his apparent demise at The Reichenbach Falls. After Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole appeared to meet a similarly violent end…
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Book Club

The Funeral Owl

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A dark, menacing and resentful land, where the people are as hard and edgy as the relentless landscape? No, this isn’t set in the hard-scrabble Midwest, or among the endless cotton fields of Mississippi. It is set in England. In Cambridgeshire. In Fenland, to be…
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Book Club

The Chessmen

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Those strange little figures – squat and grumpy, kings and bishops, still evocative after 800 years. They provide a haunting backdrop to this, the final book in Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy. Please don’t feel that you are coming late to the party, because this book…
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Book Club

The Blood Whisperer

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Good authors are confident enough to leave an established character behind, and introduce a new one. Zoë Sharp fits that bill. After establishing bodyguard and investigator Charlie Fox as a readers’ favourite, she now brings us forensics expert Kelly Jacks. Jacks has a past, which…
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Book Club

Norwegian by Night

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Another gloomy Scandinavian angst-fest? Well, hold on now… For starters, the author’s name – Derek B Miller – doesn’t seem very Nordic at all. Yes, the book is set in Oslo, but there is a major difference. For starters, the central character is an 82…
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Book Club

Matador

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Against all odds? You would think that when the main character in a book is introduced as being buried alive, with one bullet in his head and another in his body and his memory gone, then things can only improve. Well, they do. After a…
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