Features

The best non-Nordic cold climate crime...

A challenging setting often makes for an interesting read, and Scandinavian authors in particular have become renowned for their ability to weave the freezing weather into their crime stories. From Jo Nesbo’s Blood on Snow right back to Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, low temperatures…
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Book Club

The Darkest Heart

Dan Smith is a wizard at conjuring up the atmosphere of inaccessible, hostile locations around the world. This time it’s the mining landscape of inland Brazil, where capitalist greed is rife and human life cheap. This is essentially a rewriting of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

The Darkest Heart

Written by Dan Smith — Set in a little-known part of Brazil, this is a novel which explores the very thin line between darkness and light, life and death, good and evil in this country of contrasts. Yet in the process, it delves into the…
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Features

The dark heart of Brazil

Images of Brazil and the beautiful game are all over our screens at the moment, so it’s a fitting time to see the country represented in crime fiction as well. After books set in very cold places – the Ukraine and Russia – British writer…
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News

1919 and all that

On the Radar — Given it’s the centenary of the beginning of The Great War this year, what better place to start than a book based on that monumental conflict. However, even if you don’t like WWI spy thrillers, there’s plenty more to grab you…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

Red Winter

Written 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…
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