KindlePrintReviews

The Ginza Ghost and Other Stories

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Written by Keikichi Osaka, translated by Ho-Ling Wong — Tokyo has changed a great deal in the past century or so. There have been two catastrophic earthquakes, heavy bombing during World War II, and spiralling property prices that led to an eventual collapse. On the…
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KindlePrintReviews

A Dangerous Crossing

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Written by Rachel Rhys — Late July 1939. A young woman named Lillian Shepard boards the Orontes, docked at Tilbury in Essex and set to sail for Australia. She has assisted passage to work in Australia as a domestic servant. Her family sees her to the cabin…
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KindlePrintReviews

Rogues' Holiday

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Written by Margery Allingham writing as Maxwell March — The Golden Age author Margery Allingham is often lauded as a worthy contemporary of the beloved Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. Allingham’s work deals with the same puzzle-like structure that British crime fiction from the 1920s and 30s…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

Corpus

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Written by Rory Clements — It is 1936 Berlin and Nancy Hereward is a privileged young woman with left wing ideals who is dodging Nazis to deliver papers to a Jewish scientist. Nancy has a predilection for morphine and a few months later is found dead…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

Crime at Christmas by CHB Kitchin

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British crime fiction from the so-called Golden Age grows in popularity. Sometimes modern writers produce pastiche versions, and sometimes publishers re-issue the genuine article, and this is the case here, with Faber & Faber unearthing a seasonal original dating back to 1934. The crucial thing…
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KindlePrintReviews

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada

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Translated by Ross and Shika Mackenzie — Author Soji Shimada, whose groundbreaking 1981 novel has recently been translated afresh by Pushkin Press, is considered the godfather of the Shin-honkaku school of crime fiction in Japan. He inspired the New Orthodox group that aimed to return mystery fiction in…
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Book Club

Naked Shall I Return

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Christopher Bartley introduced his craggy anti-hero Ross Duncan in Every Secret Thing, and now the chain smoking tough guy returns. He leads us on a mesmerising journey through San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1930s, where he encounters every vice he has ever heard of –…
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