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The Western Banker, Joe Barrett16/10/2007 - 2:20pmTHE WESTERN BANKER is Barrett's first book, set in the world of International Bankers and high finances, a world that the author undoubtedly knows a lot about. The book takes a slightly unusual approach in that the central character is... not to put too fine a point on it .... a bit of a bastard. Obsessed with the pursuit and the trappings of money, he's pretty well amoral in his working life, and a bit tacky in his personal life. There's also just a hint of sadness (and self-awareness of that sadness) in Alex that makes him a fascinating character. On one hand he could quite ... Read Review |
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Thirty-Three Teeth, Colin Cotterill15/10/2007 - 6:41pmTHIRTY-THREE TEETH is the follow up to THE CORONER'S LUNCH featuring the elderly, reluctant Laotian National Coroner Dr Siri Paiboun. In THIRTY-THREE TEETH it is summer in Vientiane and it is hot, bloody hot. Laotians greet each other with that phrase as they steam away in the unrelenting heat. In Vientiane, a much tormented Asian Bear escapes from cruel confines in a local hotel garden just before there is a slow build-up of viciously savaged corpses in Dr Siri's morgue. The injuries that these victims have endured appear to indicate that they have been mauled by a very ... Read Review |
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Frankie, Kevin Lewis15/10/2007 - 5:12pmIf "About the Author" in the press release is to be believed, then in FRANKIE, Kevin Lewis is writing about a world not that far from the one he grew up in. On a cold London evening Frankie, a young woman with a sad past, now living on the streets, has no choice when a drug dealer, pimp and lowlife targets the very young Mary - a recent street kid, still pretty, still not drawn into addiction and degradation. Frankie fights for Mary and the pimp dies. Frankie is now not just on the streets with her own past to deal with, but she's running from the police, from the ... Read Review |
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The Reckoning, Sue Walker15/10/2007 - 1:52pmIn the summer of 1973, 11 year old Miller McAllister is very happy. His family own a house overlooking the sea on the East Coast of Scotland and the small island, Fidra, that's visible from the mainland house. The youngest of three children, Miller and his father Douglas love the island, with its birds, wildlife, old ruins and the simple cottage residence. When Douglas is arrested, tried and found guilty of the rape and murder of three young girls, Miller is profoundly affected. To start with he believes in his father's innocence, but when the girl bodies are found on ... Read Review |
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Plaster Sinners, Colin Watson15/10/2007 - 1:51pmWandering around in Wormhole Books in Belgrave South last Saturday, you have no idea how pleased I was to find a copy of Plaster Sinners by Colin Watson. This is the last of his 13 Flaxborough novels that I've been looking for for such a long time. Colin Watson is one of the great under-appreciated and discussed British Writers as far as I'm concerned. His Flaxborough Series, written between the late 1950's and 1980 (he died in 1982) are a magnificent example of the slightly cheeky, irreverant but never scorning, school of the ever so slightly absurd Crime Fiction. ... Read Review |
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The Colour of Blood, Declan Hughes15/10/2007 - 12:43pmTHE COLOUR OF BLOOD is the second Ed Loy novel by Declan Hughes, the first being The Wrong Kind of Blood, published in 2006. Ed Loy is a Private Investigator in current day Dublin, Ireland - a place that's part gritty, poor, desperate and part rich, privileged, twisted. Shane Howard is a Dublin dentist, and the son of Dr John Howard, a pillar of Dublin Irish Society, famous in the local area, with a legacy that is maintained by his family. Shane's 19 year old daughter Emily has gone missing and now he is getting blackmail threats and sexually explicit photographs of her ... Read Review |
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Crow Stone, Jenni Mills14/10/2007 - 2:58pm"Corax the Raven - the messenger of the gods. Just when you think life is on track, along comes a socking great bird, squawking news of a divine quest. My advice is, shoot the bloody thing....." The quote at the start of CROW STONE hinted at something with a very dry, quirky sense of humour and it definitely delivers - on the lighter moments, with good characterisation and a tremendous, taut, tense and frequently disturbing plot. Katie was a little girl in Bath, living with her overbearing father, her mother left them when she was only a toddler. In many ways ... Read Review |
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The Murder Bird, Joanna Hines14/10/2007 - 2:53pmTHE MURDER BIRD is the story of a young woman who refuses to believe that her mother's death was a suicide. Sam is the young girl, her mother, Kirsten Waller is a famous poet who was working on a major new poem when she is found electrocuted in her bath in a remote Cornish cottage. Sam refusal is strengthened by Kirsten's estranged third husband, Raph Howes, being one of the first on the scene at the cottage and Kirsten's current poem "The Murder Bird" and her journal are missing. Sam is stranded somewhere between two families - her own father Davy Boswin and his new wife ... Read Review |
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All She Ever Wanted, Patrick Redmond14/10/2007 - 2:31pmIf you're looking for a disconcerting psychological thriller, with the lead up to the crime as the focus of the story, ALL SHE EVER WANTED could be the book for you. Tina was a weak, bullied, vulnerable child. Deserted by the father she adored, belittled by a mother that blamed her for everything that had gone wrong in her own life, Tina was a scrawny, ugly duckling child - the object of derision and cruelty by nearly everyone around her. Her only real emotional support, her aunt, tried to care for the girl that everybody else, if she was lucky, ignored. All she ever ... Read Review |
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Murder is Never Pretty... Even When the Corpse is a Blonde, Joe Blake13/10/2007 - 3:06pmLatter day Australian Pulp Fiction at it's best, Murder is Never Pretty... is, well hilarious. Part of the attraction is that it's 100% true to the style and phrasing of the pulp writers of bygone times - but it's all set in current day Perth - dare one say the mean and dirty streets of Perth? When a beautiful (are there other kinds in pulp?) blonde is murdered (shot / naked of course) in her suburban unit the local police put a call through to Joe Blake (who fortunately is chatting up another girl in his hot police car which he uses to hoon away to the call ... Read Review |
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The Laughing Policeman, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö13/10/2007 - 1:03pmHarper Perennial have recently started republishing the Martin Beck series by Sjowall and Wahloo - originally written between 1965 and 1975. (The full series as at this book, is outlined below.) These books are often included in lists of the great classics of crime fiction. They integrate a wide range of social and cultural issues alongside their crime fiction base, making some very pointed observations and statements about Swedish society at the time that they were written. Even allowing for the way that they mirror society, as seen through the author's joint eyes at that time, they ... Read Review |
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The Savage Garden, Mark Mills12/10/2007 - 3:57pmDuring the German occupation of Italy in the Second World War, the Villa Docci was taken over by them as a command post. The German Officer in charge of the contingent was a lover of art and culture and he, and the Docci family were able to come to an arrangement that meant that the beautiful fresco's, artworks and antiques in the house were respected and the gardens were allowed to be maintained. As the Germans withdrew and the Allies moved forward, a couple of German soldiers left behind to destroy the unit's records unfortunately didn't honour the gentleman's agreement and in a ... Read Review |
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Ice Trap, Kitty Sewell12/10/2007 - 2:55pmDafydd Woodruff was a very young surgeon when he made a nearly fatal mistake on the operating table. Shaken to the core by this event, he takes a locum position in the northern Canada wilderness to recover from his guilt and reassess. He spends a year in Moose Creek - just enough time to experience the frontier style life. Fifteen years later, Dafydd is a consultant surgeon in Wales, trying to start a family with his wife, the marriage struggling under the pressure of infertility, when he receives a letter from Moose Creek. The letter is from a young girl who says she ... Read Review |
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Ice Moon, Jan Costin Wagner12/10/2007 - 2:43pmRecently finished, ICE MOON by Jan Costin Wagner was an unexpected pleasure. It seems that Wagner has a bit of a reputation in his homeland of Germany for turning the "traditional" form of crime fiction on its head and if that's the case then he's done it again with ICE MOON. Whilst there is murder, and an obviously very disturbed serial killer, in many ways ICE MOON is more an exploration of grief. The book opens with Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa confronted with the death of his young wife from cancer. Returning to work straight away, he is left trying to understand ... Read Review |
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The Torso, Helene Tursten12/10/2007 - 1:52pmThis is the second book translated from this author and it starts out with a torso in a bag being found on a beach in Sweden. The only clue to the identify of the body is a tattoo, and the body, as well as dismembered, has been horribly mutilated. This crime is soon connected with a similar mutilation murder in Denmark, so the investigation moves between Goteborg, Sweden and Copenhagen in Denmark with Irene Huss and her colleagues working closely with Danish police. The mutilations are pretty graphic and the violence is extreme, but strangely there are suddenly a series ... Read Review |
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Cross, Ken Bruen12/10/2007 - 1:40pmJack Taylor is changing. Shattered by the shooting of Cody, the young man who came to him for a chance, Jack feels for Cody like a man would for his natural son. Cody is comatose in hospital and even though he didn't pull the trigger, Jack feels responsible for Cody's fate. This has given him a real reason and he's given up drinking, smoking and drugs. Jack's not pretending - it's hard, and he's not found an exactly “normal” way of resisting a drink, but he's serious and he's really trying. As usual with Jack he's pulled into strange events and strange places. A young boy ... Read Review |
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The Man on the Balcony, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö12/10/2007 - 12:46pmHarper Perennial have recently started republishing the Martin Beck series by Sjowall and Wahloo - originally written between 1965 and 1975. (The full series as at this book, is outlined below.) These books are often included in lists of the great classics of crime fiction. They integrate a wide range of social and cultural issues alongside their crime fiction base, making some very pointed observations and statements about Swedish society at the time that they were written. Even allowing for the way that they mirror society, as seen through the author's joint eyes at that time, they ... Read Review |
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The Moon Tunnel, Jim Kelly10/10/2007 - 4:23pmEly is a small town, deep in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It's situated near low lying marshes and the canals that formed the trading routes of old. Current day Ely is slow and quiet. It's also deeply shrouded in heavy smog – part mist / part smoke from the local dump. The dump is a huge pile that's been building up for decades, and it's burning, deep in its centre, pumping pollution out to mingle with the mist. Philip Dryden is a reporter with the local small newspaper. Philip was a bigger fish in a bigger newspaper / reporting pond until a car accident that nearly killed ... Read Review |
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A Stain on the Silence, Andrew Taylor10/10/2007 - 4:03pmJames and Nicky are a happily married couple, no kids, new big fancy house, everything seemingly idyllic between them. Until the day that James receives a call on his mobile: “Jamie .... It's me!”. The only woman who has ever called him Jamie was Lily Murthington. When James was a young boy his father was killed in a car accident and his mother worked overseas, eventually remarrying. James was bundled off to boarding school where he met Carlo Murthington. Carlo had a younger sister, Felicity and a stepmother – Lily. James spent a lot of school holidays with the Murthington family, but ... Read Review |
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Torch, Lin Anderson10/10/2007 - 3:48pmYou can probably imagine the reaction - firstly the blurb "oh no, extreme dislike segueing into romantic tension AGAIN". The front of the book - Stalker. Arsonist. Killer. "deep groaning". The opening lines where a young homeless girl is dying - not caring what happens to her if her much loved German Shepherd dog is dead - and we've got another thing that I struggle with - dog's in jeopardy / animal cruelty. But on the other hand there's an intriguing comment by Stuart MacBride, and the thought that I find it really hard to justify reading all about cruelty to people but struggle when ... Read Review |