The return of Philip Marlowe!
On the Radar — Well, whaddaya know? Philip Marlowe is back on the crime bookshelf this week, a result of Raymond Chandler’s estate inviting journalist and travel writer Lawrence Osborne to create a new mystery for the world’s most famous private eye. We’ve got new…
Britain's best new women crime writers
Women may be battling the glass ceiling in many professions, but in the world of crime writing they’ve shattered it with all manner of sharp implements. Names like Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and PD James will always spring to mind, and Val McDermid and Ann…
A Patient Fury
Sarah Ward’s third novel, A Patient Fury, is once again set in the rural Peak District. This time the mentally frail DC Connie Childs is investigating a brutal matricide – the mother appears to have killed her husband and young son before setting fire to the house…
A Patient Fury
Written by Sarah Ward — Detective Inspector Frances Sadler receives a phone call late one night. There’s been a fire over at a large house on the other side of Bampton, a rural town in the Derbyshire Peaks. The constable on the other end of the line can’t say…
Throwing stones
On the Radar — Given the title of Louise Penny’s latest novel, we’re expecting some stone throwing, or at least some of the double standards hinted at in the old adage, as her latest novel leads our new books column this week. Penny has a…
Keith Nixon: Top five books of 2016
This has been a particularly great year for crime fiction, so this has been a difficult list to compile. The gems started piling up from January, in fact one of the first novels I reviewed in 2016 made it all the way to the top of the…
A Deadly Thaw
Written by Sarah Ward — Bampton, the Derbyshire Peak District, September 2004. Lena Fisher is arrested and confesses to the murder of her husband, Andrew, suffocating him to death with a pillow immediately after they’d slept together. After a short trial, she is sent to prison…