iBookKindlePrintReviews

A Man's Head by Georges Simenon

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Translated by David Coward — Having accrued an incomplete collection of dog-eared, yellowed and slightly foxed editions of Simenon’s Maigret novels by scavenging second hand bookshops, Penguin’s project to reprint all 75 of them was music to my ears. This set is being translated afresh…
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The Hunting Dogs

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“Where have you been all my life?” asked our reviewer Jeremy Megraw when he discovered this Glass Key winning novel by Jorn Lier Horst. The Norwegian detective William Wisting is shocked when he hears that his own department is implicated in a corruption scandal. His…
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Land of Shadows

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There’s certainly no shortage of fictional LA cops and PIs. Marlowe, Rawlins, Bosch and Cole, to name but four, have all trodden the mean streets. Elouise Norton is the new kid on the block in this taut procedural. Her new partner, Colin Taggart poses a…
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The Lying-Down Room

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“I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles”, goes the old song. Certainly, the August heat is a trial for Chief Inspector Serge Morel as he tries to solve a puzzling and brutal series of murders. Not only is Morel finding the temperature a…
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The Corpse Bridge by Stephen Booth

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The Corpse Bridge marks the 14th outing in this Derbyshire set police procedural series featuring detective duo Ben Cooper and Diane Fry. Despite my preference for the more gritty or psychologically dark purveyors of crime fiction, this is a series that has remained firmly on…
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Present Darkness by Malla Gunn

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Present Darkness is the fourth installment in Malla Nunn’s series of novels starring Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. The cover – a picture of two rhinos ambling across a dry plain – could be a South African tourism advertisement, except for the grey clouds and burnt…
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