The Language of Secrets
Written by Ausma Zehanat Khan — Now out in paperback is Ausma Zehanat Khan’s second Toronto-based thriller featuring Esa Khattak, head of the Community Policing Section, and his sergeant and chief sounding-board, Rachel Getty. Winter is coming on, but the atmosphere is hot. The Integrated…
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…
A Noise Downstairs
Written by Linwood Barclay — This could be called The Case of the Haunted Typewriter, because an old-fashioned typewriter is one of the eeriest images in Linwood Barclay’s new psychological thriller. Paul Davis is a professor at a small Connecticut college living with his second…
Paris in the Present Tense
Written by Mark Helprin, narrated by Bronson Pinchot — For those days when you just can’t face another serial killer and would like a crime novel more akin to eating a warm and soothing dish of crème caramel, this literary novel, which includes crimes great and…
Death in the Woods by Bernie Steadman
The first book in the A West Country Crime Mystery series begins appropriately enough with a group of boys discovering the body of 16-year-old Carly Braithwaite in the woods behind St Andrew’s Academy, Exeter. Carly was an unremarkable pupil at the school and her murder…
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…
We Were the Salt of the Sea
French-Canadian author Roxanne Bouchard’s fifth novel is also her first to be translated into English thanks to Orenda Books. It’s set in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, where inhabitants live by, and make their living from, the sea. Two new arrivals into the insular community are about…