The Sleepwalker
Thrillingly dark Manchester noir from Joseph Knox. Detective Aidan Waits has been pulled off nightshift to guard a mass murderer, Martin Wick aka The Sleepwalker. Wick is terminally ill and has been transferred from Strangeways to die in hospital. Then a brutal and audacious attack…
Blood Song
With Blood Song, Johana Gustawsson not only succeeds in writing a riveting crime story with multiple twists, turns and surprises, but she also manages to skilfully weave an atrocious part of Spain’s history into the storyline. When a family is brutally murdered in their home…
Wolves at the Door
Gunnar Staalesen’s beleaguered PI Varg Veum is a perennial Nordic noir favourite and here the world-weary Norwegian PI is on another thankless mission. Escaping a frame-job for paedophila, Varg struggles to keep his relationship afloat when members of the same paedophile ring start turning up…
This Storm
This brutal, but redemptive masterpiece confirms that 2014’s disappointing Perfidia represented just a bump in the road of James Ellroy’s stellar career rather than presaging a terminal decline. This Storm is set in Los Angeles in 1942 as the government begins preparing for the internment of…
Joe Country
For his sixth Jackson Lamb novel Mick Herron takes his failed spies out of London and into the Welsh countryside. Louisa Guy is caught in a snow storm while out looking for her dead partner’s missing son. Hypothermia will turn out to be the least…
Conviction
A true crime podcast becomes the spur for Anna and Fin – discarded by their respective spouses who run away together – to investigate the mysterious sinking of the yacht Dana off the coast of France. In Anna, Denise Mina has created a feisty, entertaining,…
Black Summer
Readers and reviewers alike raved about The Puppet Show, MW Craven‘s 2018 release which introduced the decidedly different crime fighting duo of DS Washington Poe and analyst Tilly Bradshaw. Now they’re back in a case that will test them both to the limits. Six years…