The Far Empty
If it was down to cover alone, J Todd Scott’s effort might just end up as book of the year. But it’s what’s inside that really matters and The Far Empty is set in the outlaw country just inside Texas on the Mexican border. The…
Hard Light by Elizabeth Hand
You know you’re on a weird ride when out of the blue an 11-year-old girl in the story asks, “Do you want to see the dead babies?” That happens about two-thirds of the way into Hard Light, the third Cass Neary novel by American writer…
The Far Empty by J Todd Scott
It’s hard to believe this well-crafted crime thriller is a debut novel. The author’s experience as a DEA agent lends authority to his prose, and his meticulous rendering of the Big Bend country south and east of El Paso, Texas, and its fictional town, Murfee,…
First look: False Hearts by Laura Lam
Feast your eyes on this new book from Macmillan, which hits the shelves on 16 July. In her crime fiction debut, Scotland-based Californian author Laura Lam has come up with a strange and futuristic thriller, which is alluded to in design terms by that brushed…
The Vinyl Detective by Andrew Cartmel
The Vinyl Detective isn’t actually a real detective. He’s just a young, single Londoner whose name is never revealed. A jazz fanatic, he makes his living digging through the crates at record fairs and in charity shops looking for rare vinyl being sold cheap. When…
Sunset City by Melissa Ginsburg
In poet Melissa Ginsburg’s debut crime novel, her home town of Houston becomes as much a character as the protagonist, Charlotte Ford, a young woman in her early 20s. Houston’s suffocating heat and dark corners, its breakneck freeways, its seedy bars and lush suburbs –…
Dodgers by Bill Beverly
A modern crime classic in the tradition of Richard Price’s Clockers, Dodgers is the story of a youthful soldier in the south Los Angeles drug trade. East, a black 16-year-old, is a yardman for a drug house, which means he runs a team of younger…