Book Club

True Crime Story

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Joseph Knox presents a perfectly-pitched melange of fact and fiction in his first standalone novel. The story of the disappearance of Manchester university student Zoe Nolan is told in a series of interviews and emails conducted and exchanged seven years later. The plot is set…
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True Crime Story by Joseph Knox

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True Crime Story is Joseph Knox’s fourth novel. It’s his first standalone after three instalments of his urban noir series featuring Detective Constable Aidan Watts of Greater Manchester Police. The ‘true’ in the title and the ‘novel’ in the subtitle immediately establish a tension between…
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Holmes Entangled

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Written by Gordon McAlpine – Holmes Entangled is a great title for this complex metafictional novel. Nominally a private detective mystery with a host of familiar characters, it is about as far removed from the original Conan Doyle canon as it’s possible for a Sherlock…
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Book Club

The Word is Murder

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Anthony Horowitz’s latest novel – the first in a series – has it all. There’s a challenging mystery in which a wealthy middle-aged widow appears to predict her own murder; an intriguing protagonist in the form of disgraced ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne, who has a nose…
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Book Club

Three Little Pigs

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Apostolos Doxiadis used to write graphic novels, but here brings a fresh take on mafia revenge, told from the perspective of a mysterious old man. When a man in old Brooklyn kills another in a drunken brawl, it turns out the victim is the local…
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The Human Flies by Hans Olav Lahlum

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When you pick up this Norwegian crime novel, don’t expect something out of the Nordic noir tradition. Instead prepare yourself for a classic whodunit of the highest calibre, a deviously challenging murder mystery set in an apartment complex in 1960s Oslo. Kolbjørn Kristiansen, a rookie…
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