Norwegian detective William Wisting has taken over where Wallander left off – which delights me, because I’ve always found Jorn Lier Horst’s world rather more rewarding to visit. This is a long-running series but if you’ve just come to the books – perhaps because you’ve seen the TV version – then this story is skilfully…
There’s a gritty elegance to Ed McBain’s 87th precinct detective series. The writing might be more than half a century old, but it packs all the punch of a modern murder investigation – and suffers from a lot less of the fluffy filling. I’m a big fan of series like Michael Connelly’s Bosch, John Sandford’s…
This month’s selection of recommended reads includes a couple of slightly supernatural stories, a BritCrime police procedural with an intriguing central character, an atmospheric Alaskan adventure with the Aleut, snappy short stories, soulful investigations – and, as usual, one book which we rather wish we’d not bothered with. We’ll come to that a little later.…
An old-school serial killer manhunt, The Puritan undoubtedly owes a lot to the books of Thomas Harris – notably The Silence of The Lambs and Red Dragon – and to TV series like Criminal Minds and Mindhunter. In particular there’s a big tip of the hat to Agent Clarice Starling: not only is the protagonist…
The female of the species might be a police detective, a contract killer, a lawyer in the DA’s office or an analyst at MI6. But in modern crime fiction she’s likely to be smart, skilled and assertive, as these four thrillers demonstrate in fine style… The Late Show by Michael Connelly If you’ve somehow swerved…
This series of Icelandic investigations has reached that ‘mature’ stage in its evolution – the point where regular readers are intimately acquainted with the core characters and eagerly anticipate catching up with them in a new instalment. Officer Gunnhildur’s fans definitely won’t be disappointed this time around. After an atypical assignment in the preceding book,…
There’s a new Icelandic murder mystery out this week – in which one man comes back from the dead, a dead man reveals the truth about a suspicious accident, and a spur of the moment act of revenge has unforeseen consequences. Officer Gunnhildur returns to piece together this peculiar puzzle, never pulling her punches or…
This unpredictable debut novel is massively informed by the author’s first-hand experience of every day British policing. Tony Ryan brings immense depth and detail of actual hands-on police work to his tale, down to every minor detail. Like the officers who illicitly smoke in a squad car and stink it up; the intricacy of the…
Take an Aztec priest and plonk him down in a small town in southern England, ready to start sacrificing the sad, the lonely and the unloved. What a brilliant premise. Better yet – give him a killer octopus! I’m obviously a sucker for a good gimmick, and this bizarre set-up certainly makes The Repenting Serpent…
Motive X is most definitely a story which starts in the middle. Amid the multiple plotlines there lurks a self-contained mystery of grisly killings, but that plot is almost overwhelmed by the series’ ongoing themes: the catastrophic domestic situation of police detective Fabian Risk and his dysfunctional family; the catastrophic personal life of his boss…
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