iBookKindlePrintReviews

CIS: Frequent Hearses

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Written by Edmund Crispin — Between 1944 and 1977, Robert Bruce Montgomery wrote a string of novels under the name Edmund Crispin. Today he is considered to be one of the underappreciated masters of the Golden Age of crime fiction. His novels featuring eccentric Oxford professor…
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Features

CIS: Rim of the Pit revisited

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Today, when lists of new crime and thriller books are saturated with stories involving ever-more numerous and gruesome deaths for their fictional characters, a look back at the kinds of mysteries that emphasise puzzles over gore can be more than a bit refreshing. A classic…
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Features

CIS: Nicola Upson interviewed

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Her debut novel, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of classy crime novels by Nicola Upson, whose main character is Josephine Tey – one of the leading authors of the Golden Age of crime fiction. Tey’s detective novels were hugely popular…
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Book Club

The Lighthearted Quest

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Ann Bridge’s series of novels featuring dilettante journalist Julia Probyn are unfairly forgotten gems of the later Golden Age – wonderfully revived by Bloomsbury Reader. In the first book in the collection, Julia sets off to Morocco to find her cousin, next in line for…
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KindlePrintReviews

The Allingham Casebook

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Written by Margery Allingham — Writing a short story is like packing for a low cost holiday. When you’ve got a limit on how much you can put in, you have to make choices. You have to make sacrifices. This collection of 18 stories by Golden…
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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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