Hard Labour
Written by Bill Bateman — Medical crime fiction is not the most mined of the sub-genres we cover, which is strange because doctors hold life and death in their hands every day. And of course things don’t always go the way they planned. In Hard…
Lola
Written by Melissa Scrivner Love — Lola, the energetic protagonist of this Los Angeles-based crime thriller, is an eminently likeable young woman, flirting with death at the hands of rival drug operatives and flouting the legal establishment. She lives with Garcia, the supposed leader of the Crenshaw…
The Last Night at Tremore Beach
Written by Mikel Santiago, translated by Carlos Frias — Musician Peter Harper has tasted the big time. He’s won awards for his movie soundtracks and television theme tunes and his career is on the crest of a wave. Then it all comes tumbling down. His…
Ragdoll by Daniel Cole
Rag dolls are harmless toys, right? Something for your kid to cuddle up with in bed or to chuck out of the buggy at tantrum time. After reading this book, you’ll never look at them in the same way again. Perhaps the strange truncation of the two words…
The Dry by Jane Harper
The town of Kiewarra, somewhere in rural south-eastern Australia, is a community on the brink. A drought is making life extremely difficult for the locals. So nobody is really surprised when farmer Luke Hadler is found with a self-inflicted shotgun wound, his wife and eldest son…
Blue Light Yokohama
Written by Nicolas Obregon – What an entertaining debut! Told almost exclusively from the perspective of Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Inspector Kosuke Iwata, it’s a multilayered police procedural involving murder, official corruption, and dangerous secrets. A brief prologue set in 1996 describes the death of…
Rattle
Written by Fiona Cummins — When a debut author is an award-winning former showbiz journalist on a national newspaper, you might expect them to write about what they know – vacuous celebrities, star-studded premieres – that kind of thing. But there’s precious little glitz and…