Agents of the State
Written by Mike Nicol — The Rainbow Nation is developing a well- deserved reputation for excellent crime fiction. Perhaps it’s not surprising since its unfortunate history provides fertile grounds for inspiration. Lauren Beukes’ brand of supernatural-tinged mystery and suspense has already achieved breakout international success. Roger Smith’s nihilistic…
All Kinds of Dead
Written by James Craig — The first Inspector Carlyle novel came out in 2011 and already the ninth in the series has arrived. At the same time, Carlyle’s prolific creator James Craig has started a new series set in Germany, and introduced another featuring Daniel Hunter,…
Frailty by Betsy Reavley
Eight-year-old Hope is missing from a sleepy English village. It is every parent’s nightmare. The world keeps turning but Hope’s family has been knocked off their axis, wobbling violently in a new orbit. You can call it domestic noir but it doesn’t quite emphasise the…
Blackout
Written by Marc Elsberg — In this cyber thriller, Austrian author Marc Elsberg takes us into a nightmarish world of power cuts on a massive scale. All over Europe the electricity is going out and the cooling stations of nuclear power plants are in danger of failing. A handful…
What You Break
Written by Reed Farrel Coleman — The latest crime novel by Reed Farrel Coleman features his retired Suffolk County cop John Augustus (Gus) Murphy, first introduced in last year’s Where It Hurts. Coleman knows his Long Island environment so well that his books carry a gritty realism and…
The Breakdown
Written by BA Paris — Readers just can’t seem to get enough of psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators. In her second novel, BA Paris sticks to the domestic noir formula which accounted for the huge success of her debut Behind Closed Doors. It all starts innocently enough on the last…
Stasi Wolf by David Young
David Young’s novel Stasi Child was a memorable debut and a breath of fresh air in crime fiction. It focused on East Germany in the 1970s, a country and period that are less known to readers in Western Europe. By fortuitous coincidence, it arrived at the…