Predator by Zoe Caldwell
There’s a predator loose in West London. No, it hasn’t got dreadlocks, an invisibility hunting suit and strange talons where its mouth should be. Arnie ain’t gonna take this predator down. She comes wearing Jimmy Choo heels and Givenchy jewellery. By day, she edits the…
The Book of Lamps and Banners by Elizabeth Hand
When we interviewed Elizabeth Hand way back in 2013, the multi-talented author described her crime fiction character Cass Neary as being in a “…self-inflicted emotional lockdown”. It’s an apt phrase with the fourth book in the series arriving in the middle of a pandemic and…
The Mathematical Murder of Innocence by Michael Carter
Here’s a courtroom drama that perfectly illustrates how there’s a crime thriller exactly suited to every taste, no matter how specific – even one tailor-made for a statistician accustomed to dealing with the intricacies of prediction. In some ways, you’d think that calculating odds (except,…
Oranges and Lemons by Christopher Fowler
Nursery rhymes, as we all know, often have disturbing and violent messages. The old London rhyme Oranges and Lemons is no exception. When the speaker of the House of Commons Michael Claremont is badly injured under a delivery of citrus fruit near St Clement’s Church,…
A classic revisited: Layer Cake by JJ Connolly
With Duckworth Press issuing a 20th anniversary edition of Layer Cake, we asked Brit Grit expert Paul D Brazill to slice it up for us… “You’re born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher,…
Rabbit Hole by Jon Richter
Elaine Napier is 40-ish and has lost her job as a journalist. Those investigative skills – what to do with them? Well, she has set up a true crime podcast that looks into cold cases. Her first investigation is into the disappearance of Katrin Gunnarsdottir,…
Tell Me How it Ends by VB Grey
England in the early 1950s must have been a pretty grey and dismal place to live. The country was still recovering from World War II, and rationing didn’t end until 1954. No wonder, then, that the 1960s were ‘swinging’ as a new sense of freedom…