Shank: Tool's Law I by Roy Harper
David Roney has done bad things and he is paying for his transgressions. He is locked up in the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known in music, myth and legend as Parchman Farm. It is full of brutal men, kept under lock and key by equally…
The Hanging Club by Tony Parsons
Our main character here, DC Max Wolfe, has appeared in The Murder Bag and The Slaughterman. He’s based at West End Central police station, which sits among London’s finest tailor shops on Savile Row. The case Wolfe faces in The Hanging Club bursts into gruesome life when the video of an apparent…
The Second Life of Nick Mason by Steve Hamilton
Shall we start with the first life of Nick Mason? He was born in Canaryville, an Irish suburb of Chicago. He grew up in difficult circumstances, without a father, and gravitated to crime. From stealing cars he graduated to robbing dealers and then to armed…
The Birdwatcher by William Shaw
The first lines of this contemporary police procedural set up the defining characteristics of the protagonist: “There were two reasons why William South did not want to be on the murder team. “The first was that it was October. The migrating birds had begun arriving…
Behind Dead Eyes by Howard Linskey
Tom Carney, true crime author, keeps receiving letters imploring him for help. These are no ordinary pleas, the writer no ordinary person. The letters are from convicted killer Richard Bell who is languishing in prison for murdering his lover. Bell claims he’s innocent and believes…
Psycho: Sanitarium by Chet Williamson
Robert Bloch (1917-1994) left a considerable body of work in the fields of crime, horror, and science fiction, but is best remembered for his psychological horror, Psycho (1959). Its protagonist, Norman Bates, was immortalised in Alfred Hitchcock’s film the following year. There were sequels to…