Death Angel by Linda Fairstein
Have you ever been lucky enough to take a tour with a Blue Badge guide? I once toured Covent Garden with one, and they tell you all kinds of little snippets that you’d never find in a guide book, really bringing history to life. Reading Death…
Red Winter by Dan Smith
Dan Smith’s previous novel The Child Thief, an intense thriller set among the Bolshevik-infested forests of 1930’s Ukraine, was one of my novels of 2012, so I had high expectations for Red Winter. And I’m glad to say that it more than lived up to…
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith
The mystery surrounding Robert Galbraith was solved this month when it was revealed that this debut novelist was in fact JK Rowling writing under a pseudonym. The Cuckoo’s Calling is the Harry Potter author’s first foray into crime fiction. So is it any good? After…
Scafell by Matthew Pink
Stephen ‘Sparky’ Markham is washed up in all kinds of ways. After a career in the forces, and a stint with the Metropolitan Police in London, he has pretty much dropped out, and has taken refuge in his inherited cottage on the fells above Wastwater,…
The Last Whisper in the Dark
Last year’s literary crime thriller The Last Kind Words went down a storm with us. We reviewed it and gave it five stars, and MyBookishWays included it in her top five books of 2012. In that book career, thief Terrier Rand was called home to…
Children of the Revolution by Peter Robinson
In a cutting which once carried a railway line that Dr Beeching took his knife to in the 1960s, a corpse is discovered. It is Gavin Millar, a disgraced former lecturer. Most oddly, despite his emaciated and scruffy appearance, he was carrying £5000 in cash….