Newest Crime Reviews
Vigilante by Shelley Harris
Jenny Pepper is a forty-something wife and mother who is stuck wondering where her life has gone. Privately, Jenny is jealous of her husband, he has a wonderful creative career that people can’t wait to hear more about, while Jenny’s work as a mother and her job at a charity bookshop seems to put a stopper on conversation. Jenny envies her daughter, with her youthful figure and a whole life stretched out in front of her. When tidying up one night, Jenny discovers her husband’s secret and just like that her life changes. Full review...
The Wolf in Winter (Charlie Parker Thriller) by John Connolly
Private investigator Charlie Parker is surprised when Jude, a bum he's befriended and worked with in the past, is found hanged in a basement. It looks like suicide but Jude has been looking for his daughter Annie to rekindle their family relationship and has just raised over $100 to help find her. Odd time for suicide? It becomes an even odder prospect when Annie herself goes missing after heading for the small Maine town of Prosperous. Charlie decides to drop in on the good citizens of the small town and starts poking beneath the respectable veneer. It doesn’t take him long but there is a downside: this investigation may have a body count that includes Charlie. Full review...
The Death Season (Detective Inspector Wesley Peterson) by Kate Ellis
When Wesley Peterson was called to investigate the death of a man in a hotel room he thought that it was going to be straightforward, but then there were the credit cards - in different names - and there wasn't a mobile phone. He felt guilty about the little time he'd been able to spend with his family (and about the fact that he was ever so slightly attracted to one of his colleagues...) but the job had to come first and it wasn't long before he realised that there was a complex history to the dead man and that he was almost certainly a murderer. Full review...
The Man With A Charmed Life and his part in saving the planet from WWIII by Graham Fulbright
Englishman Henry Wright is employed by the Common Market (which would become the European Union in 1993) in Brussels and he's not entirely satisfied with his lot: he should be an interpreter but he seems to be restricted to more administrative duties. He could refuse the offer he gets, but the chance to actually use his expertise in Russian, move across to the USA and make a point to his employers is just too tempting. He's also rather taken by Alexy Geary, the attractive woman from the intelligence-gathering agency who makes the offer, and it's not long before he's on his way. Before he does he's peripherally involved in a shooting - and that's not something which usually happens to someone like him. Full review...
Forty Days Without Shadow by Olivier Truc
After an important Sámi relic is stolen from a museum in Kautokeino, a small, isolated village in the middle of the snowy tundra, tensions begin to rise between the residents. Local detective Klemet Nango and new recruit Nina Nansen are called upon to investigate the disappearance, whereupon they discover a second crime: a local reindeer herder has been brutally murdered. Nina soon suspects that the two events are linked, and, together with Klemet, embarks upon a journey full of secrets, mystery and brutality. Full review...
The Vanished Ones by Donato Carrisi
Room 13 in the basement of the state morgue is where the sleepers are kept. These are the unclaimed bodies that have been classified as PHVs. Potential Homicide Victims. They are kept indefinitely, because they are evidence that a crime has been committed, possibly the only evidence. Full review...
Abattoir Blues by Peter Robinson
When DCI Banks returned from a weekend away in Italy the theft of a tractor (even if it was a very expensive tractor) didn't seem all that important. It was difficult to be enthusiastic about what seemed to be simple case of rural crime. Then an ex-soldier walking his dog discovered what looked like a pool of blood in an abandoned warehouse and the two young men who seemed to be the prime suspects for the theft of the tractor both disappeared without trace. Suddenly 'another rural crime' began to take a very much more sinister turn. Full review...
No Known Grave (A Detective Inspector Tom Tyler Mystery) by Maureen Jennings
By the middle of 1942 Detective Inspector Tom Tyler has had a difficult two years and he's making a fresh start in Ludlow. St Anne's Convalescent Hospital is on the outskirts of the town and it's staffed by nursing sisters who are Anglican nuns and they're there specifically to help people who have been maimed and injured by the war. It should be a peaceful place of recovery but then a double murder in the grounds of the home shatters all that has been so carefully built up. Many of the patients are blind or unable to walk and most are suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder - but it seems as though one of the patients must be a murderer as this is almost a classic 'locked room' mystery. Full review...
Sausage Hall by Christina James
Kevan de Vries, food processing magnate and grandson of a Dutch immigrant to Lincolnshire, is trying to help his terminally ill wife Joanne relax on an exotic holiday. Unfortunately the news he receives from home is less than relaxing: a random break-in committed by local opportunistic youths has uncovered a batch of counterfeit passports. Kevan travels back to the UK to answer questions but it gets worse. Skeletal remains are found in his cellar followed by a discovery elsewhere of an all too fresh employee's dead body. This is bread and butter to DI Tim Yates of the Lincolnshire Constabulary but it's another complication in Kevan's all too complicated life. Full review...
Sins of the Father by Graham Hurley
Rupert Moncrieff was beaten to death in his waterside home early one Sunday morning in December 2013. All his money had not saved him from his throat being cut and his face slashed and hooded. One of his sons and his daughter still lived with him, but during the past week an African had been staying with the family. Strangely no one knew his name, but when the body was discovered the man had disappeared. DS Jimmy Suttle is investigating the case but like the family in the waterside mansion he has demons of his own to fight after the abduction and death of his daughter Grace and subsequent separation from his journalist wife, Lizzie. Full review...
The Cinderella Murder by Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke
'Under Suspicion' is a TV show that aims to shed light on cold cases by re-enacting the crime and interviewing those closest to the victim. The pilot episode was a runaway success when it led to the successful apprehension of the murderer and now producer Laurie Moran has been given the green light to continue the series. Her curiosity is piqued by a 20 year old case dubbed the 'Cinderella Murder', in which a bright young UCLA student was found dead in parkland, miles from her car and wearing only one shoe. The investigation will take Laurie and her team to some of the most glamorous locations in California, but it soon becomes clear that certain individuals will do anything to stop the truth from being revealed. Full review...
The Bishop's Wife by Mette Ivie Harrison
Linda Wallheim, to most who know her, seems a woman who has everything. Loving mother to five beautiful children, devoted Mormon, and kindhearted wife of a Mormon Bishop, she lives at the centre of her community and has little to be unhappy about. Full review...
Dying for Christmas by Tammy Cohen
The book starts off promisingly enough with an introduction by Jessica, the narrator, who informs us that she is imprisoned by a stranger who is handsome and charming and extremely sadistic. Jessica then recounts the events leading up to and during her incarceration, which takes place over the Christmas period. Her jailer, Dominic, has prepared twelve presents for her, for the Twelve Days of Christmas, and each present-opening episode builds up a sense of dread while providing a deepening understanding of the sinister and bitter mind at work. Genuinely creepy stuff. Full review...
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries by Otto Penzler (editor)
Nostalgia is a big part of the Christmas experience, and that's provided in sack-loads by this hefty tome of short stories. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Brother Cadfael jostle Morse, Rumpole and Vic Warshawski for space on these tightly packed pages, while lesser known and long since forgotten writers furnish new and unexpected pleasures for even the most well-read of book worms. Full review...
To Kill For (The Killing Machine) by Phillip Hunter
- Contains To Die For spoilers**
Ex Falkland Campaign para Joe is out for revenge. Brenda, a woman he could have loved, is murdered and Joe himself may have been the one forced to kill Kid, an abused young girl he'd sworn to protect. Joe will find the name behind the deaths and make sure they too suffer fatally. The only thing is, in a world of fluctuating loyalties and deceit, he may not survive long enough to carry out his ambition, even if he was the only one searching… But he's not! Full review...
Talking to Ghosts by Herve Le Corre and Frank Wynne (Translator)
French Police Commandant Pierre Vilar's young son Pablo went missing a while ago but he believes him to be alive; a belief that has wrecked his marriage. Meanwhile elsewhere, 13-year-old Victor comes home to a brutally murdered mother. Is there a connection between these two tragedies? That's something that Vilar is desperate to find out, no matter what he has to do or what it does to him. Full review...
Massacre Pond by Paul Doiron
What is best for the great outdoors? Is leaving it to nature is the most sustainable option or does hunting help to protect the ecosystem? Each group has opposing viewpoints and are unlikely to reach common ground, therefore someone is going to have to stand between the two of them and make sure nothing bad happens. Something like murder. Full review...
The Fourth Secret (Inspector Montalbano) by Andrea Camilleri
Early one morning an Albanian construction worker - a legal resident with a work permit - fell from scaffolding and was dead when his co-workers found him. What struck Montalbano was that there had been rather a lot of what were described as tragedies in the workplace - six in the last month, in fact, although he was sure that there would be statistics to prove that this was not abnormal within the EU. Strictly it wasn't his case to deal with, but he received an anonymous letter telling him that Pashko Puka was going to be killed. Admittedly the letter arrived after the death due to a malfunction in the local postal system, but it did mean that it was difficult to think of the death as a 'tragic accident'. Full review...
The Kill by Jane Casey
I'm quite picky with crime fiction. This oversaturated market seems to teem with mediocre products. There are thrillers with excellent plots that are are badly written, some that contain masterful prose but are, well... boring, and others that are so far-fetched that I end up throwing the book away in disgust. I read Jane Casey′s highly enjoyable stand-alone The Missing several years ago. The Kill was my first foray into her Maeve Kerrigan series and I was keen to see how it would stand up. Full review...
Unmanned by Dan Fesperman
Unmanned, the title of Fesperman's latest thriller, refers to the drones, the Predators, that Captain Darwin Cole flew over Afghanistan, from a shed somewhere in Nevada.
It also refers to the state that those missions left Cole in, after one of them went badly wrong. A poor call-down led to a misidentified target, a house destroyed, civilians killed, including two kids lying out in the open running away, and a girl, not dead but wounded. Cole could see her from his thousands of miles away, moving, agonising, separated by a considerable distance from the arm she would never use again.
A one-armed girl would haunt his dreams for a long time to follow. Full review...
The Secret Locket by Suzan Stainforth
Librarian Penny Knight was surprised when she came home on day and found a jacket belonging to her twin brother Joseph hanging in the hall. He was supposed to be in Moscow for six months, working as a croupier. When she went through to the lounge he was lying on the sofa and her immediate reaction was that he was playing a trick on her - until she got closer and realised that there was something dreadfully wrong. And then she saw the blood. His last words were that he was innocent - and that she should look for a necklace in his jacket pocket. He died before he reached hospital. Penny and her parents were devastated - and then they realised that they were being watched. Full review...
The Lion's Mouth by Anne Holt
This is the first Anne Holt novel that I have read and I am going back for more. Jo Nesbo is quoted describing Holt as 'the Godmother of modern Norwegian crime fiction' and judging only from identikit cover design – grey mist, loneliness, treacherous ice, snow-encrusted gun, red typeface to hint at fresh blood – readers could be forgiven for expecting another volume of semi-standardised Scandinavian noir. Full review...
Believe No One by A D Garrett
Scottish forensic science expert Professor Nick Fennimore, and English DCI Kate Simms are both, for various reasons in St Louis, just as Nick planned. Fennimore and Simms have worked together in the UK when Nick's wife was murdered and daughter kidnapped. In fact they were together the night they first went missing having a less than professional dinner. Nick's daughter is still missing but while he follows new leads, he and Kate have other things to work on. St Louis has a serial killer to contend with: the victims are all mothers and their children are taken at the same time. Not so pure coincidence? Nick sees connections so will try to make everyone else see them. Whether his tactics work or not remains to be seen. Full review...
Troubled Waters: An Alice Rice Mystery by Gillian Galbraith
When we left DI Alice Rice she was newly widowed, but time has moved on a little and she's thinking about what to do with her life. Professionally she's more settled and now faced with an investigation into a body washed up on the foundations of the new bridge that's being built across the Forth. Establishing the identity of the young woman is the first problem and this leads Rice back to members of a religious sect with some very strange rules. And then a second body - that of a young man - is washed up on a beach and it's difficult not to assume that there's a connection between the two. Full review...
Tight-Lipped by David Barrie
It's a little bit different in the UK but in Paris intellectuals are lauded in much the same way as rock stars. Jean-Jacques Marsay is a philosopher and equally as famous as his wife, the beautiful and talented actress, Carine Dufour. Marsay is writing a book about Appoghiu Terra - an eco-terrorist organisation - and its leader Gabriel Agostini. His editor is Virginie Desmoulins - or rather was - because Virginie was murdered at her flat in a rather unusual way. The case is being investigated by Captain Franck Guerin of the Brigade Criminelle and he and Agostini have a history. Agostini shot and seriously wounded Guerin when Guerin was with his previous employers, the French version of the security services. He was moved on to the Brigade Criminelle when it was thought that he might have become just a little too sympathetic to Agostini - and Agostini to him. Full review...
The Wolves of London - The Obsidian Heart Trilogy (Book 1) by Mark Morris
Alex Locke has grown from the young petty criminal he once was. Now a psychology lecturer with a beautiful 5-year-old daughter he has every incentive he needs to stay straight. It would take something devastating to make him return to his former life but devastation happens. Alex is coerced into doing on last job: stealing a piece of heart shaped obsidian from someone it didn’t belong to in the first place. What are the consequences? What's so special about this piece of rock? As all hell breaks loose, Alex is about to find out. Full review...
Confidentially Yours by Charles Williams
Carthage was what you might call 'backwoods' and there wasn't really all that much to do there. For recreation, hunting probably came top of the list and John 'Duke' Warren went for an early morning duck shoot before going to work. Whilst in the shoot he heard two shots from an adjoining blind and on the way out saw the car of a fellow shoot member. It was only later that he found out that the shots had caused the death of Dan Roberts. At first it looked like suicide, but Warren and the police realised that it's not often that suicide victims shoot themselves twice. Full review...
