The Plague: Spanish historical crime drama comes to BBC Four
After all those moody Scandinavian crime dramas, as well as Nordic-inspired shows from France, Canada and even Wales, BBC Four is changing tack with its Saturday night crime offering. On Saturday 1 September at 9pm the station will be airing The Plague, a Spanish historical…
Russian Roulette
Written by Sara Sheridan — When Sheridan’s first Mirabelle Bevan book, Brighton Belle, was published in 2012 I was quickly hooked by the story of an ex-Secret Service backroom girl, Mirabelle, who thinks her life is over after World War II. Like many women who are…
Juliet & Romeo
Written by David Hewson — Violent gangs roaming city streets looking for trouble. Murder. Illicit love. Poison. Suicide. And what amounts to the sale of a human being. It’s hard to argue that Shakespeare wasn’t a crime writer, and these elements come to the fore…
Smoke and Ashes
Abir Mukherjee’s third mystery featuring Captain Sam Wyndham, an ex-Scotland Yard detective policeman in 1920s colonial Calcutta, sees him caught in the crossfire of the campaign for Indian independence from the British. Wyndham’s addiction reaches a critical stage, but it is a visit to an opium…
The Martian Girl
Written by Andrew Martin — What a great title for a crime novel, and with the cover swirling together current and historical London landmarks and a locket holding a photograph of a blindfolded young woman in the middle, perhaps you’re getting a good idea where this…
The Cypher Bureau by Eilidh McGuinness
Although readers around the world are familiar with the accomplishments of Alan Turing and the British code-breaking team at Bletchley Park – most recently popularized in the Benedict Cumberbatch movie, The Imitation Game – the substantial contribution of Polish mathematicians to the unraveling of the…







