It’s the old battle of wits between a discredited investigator and his ultimate enemy: an intelligent, ruthless and unpredictable sociopath who doesn’t stop at mere murder. Instead he destroys his victim’s lives: literally buries their loved ones and watches with clinical fascination as his opponents attempt to out-manoeuvre him. It’s hard to imagine that anyone…
There have always been women detectives: imagine how empty the golden age of classic crime would have been without Miss Marple! But for many years, men stole the show in mystery and thriller fiction, until enterprising authors finally started letting the women off the leash. These days, thrillers are full of compelling female characters. Let’s…
This is no humdrum parochial British police procedural – in fact, with all the pigs, blood, gore, kidnapping and brutality it’s more like Hannibal than Morse. Which of course snagged my attention at the get-go… The gruesome abduction of a loner schoolboy is just the start of a deftly executed campaign of revenge against an…
Here at MMM, the last twelve months have been crammed with mystery and intrigue, betrayal and revenge, bitterness and redemption – and some simply stunning plot twists. We’ve read and reviewed almost a hundred different crime titles across all aspects of the genre, from literary works of art by established grand-masters, to pulp fiction by…
In the Hannibal Lecter series, investigator Will Graham exerts his psychoanalytic expertise and his emotional empathy to ‘get inside’ the heads of murderers and monsters. In an entirely matter of fact way, author Matthew Franks takes that premise one step further and gives his protagonist, Max Crawford, the ability to read people’s thoughts in the…
Imagine a snake and a mongoose, circling each other with vicious, deadly intent. That’s the nub of this battle of wits between a sadistic killer and the FBI investigator hunting for him. If you suffered withdrawal symptoms when the TV series ‘Hannibal’ drew to a close then ‘Chaos’ will get that monkey off your back.…
This intriguing mix of investigative procedural and road trip, wrapped around a tale of personal redemption, is given a chilling menace by a calculating, appallingly accomplished serial killer. Representing the good guys, Gerry Stokes is an actively unsympathetic protagonist. He starts the novel as a callow coward, the worst kind of journalist who sees only personal advancement…
This is an extremely cleverly-constructed first person narrative, told from the perspective of a psycho serial killer who in many ways resembles a certain Dr Lecter. But this guy lives in England (even though he spells tyres with an ‘I’) and flirts less with authority while he wields the knife, strangles the spark of life,…
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