Vengeance, Italian style
A week or two ago we brought you a review of one of the classics of Italian crime fiction, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, written 65 years ago. If stories set in Italia in the 1930s take your fancy, then keep an eye…
Sanctus by Simon Toyne
The fictional city of Ruin in modern day Turkey. Over it towers the Citadel, where the very first Bible is believed to have been written. Built into the Taurus mountains where the Carmina, a society of monks, has been living for a couple of millennia,…
Ashes to Dust
Written by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir — In the early hours of 23 January 1973, the Eldfell volcano erupted on the island of Heimæy; the only inhabited island in the Vestmannæyjar volcanic archipelago, an area now known as The Pompeii of the North. The severity of the…
Competition: Invent a spy and WIN
We don’t normally cover much espionage here at Crime Fiction Lover, otherwise we’d be called Spy Fiction Lover. (Hey… now there’s an idea.) But when Focus Features got in touch about the US release of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – the motion picture adaptation of…
The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty
The premise behind this story is enough to catch your interest straight away. It’s set in Northern Ireland in 1981, right in the middle of the IRA hunger strikes. The police have plenty to deal with as nationalists riot in the streets, fought back by…
That Awful Mess at the Via Merulana
Written by Carlo Emilio Gadda — I’m going to get the bad part out of the way first – this book is unfinished. It’s also 65 years old and Italo Calvino considered it to be a landmark work of modern Italian literature. Still with me?…
The Low Road
Written by Chris Womersley — At what point did Australian crime fiction become dissatisfied with the confines of the genre and aspire to be something closer to literature? It probably started with Truth, the 2010 novel by Peter Temple, which won a heap of gongs,…
Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen
Translated by Lisa Hartford — This is the first of four books in the author’s Department Q series to be translated from Danish into English. And, if you’re into your Scandinavian crime fiction like I am, I’d be very surprised if you don’t find it…