If you’re already a fan of Rober B Parker’s Spenser novels you will definitely be familiar with the snappy dialogue, the gentle characterisations, the entertaining plots … and the utterly brilliant wisecracking sleuth who is the central character. And if you’re not a fan but like detective fiction, then you should be. After all, Netflix…
It ain’t easy for an author writing British crime fiction to find that pivot-point between a realistic, believable situation and a genuinely gripping storyline. While the UK crime-rate is far from ideal, blazing gun battles, weird serial killings and helicopter chases aren’t exactly part of everyday life. So BritCrime thrillers tend to veer from one…
Original and inventive, Northtown Eclipse takes the typical crime cliché of a seedy private eye and subverts the standard hardboiled detective story into something significantly more substantial. Author Robb White twists the tropes of the genre to tell a much more meaningful story, one which explores the human condition at its most personal – a…
Many readers typically discuss the darker, arcane side of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series but – as the 16th book brilliantly demonstrates – there’s a solid private detective story at the core of this convoluted story. So while a dark cabal plots the end of everything and the rise of apocalyptic gods, social issues and…
Comedy-crime is a tough nut to crack. Too frothy and it’s nothing but a gaggle of giggles with no grit to grab a hold of. It’s gotta have some heart. It also need a proper plot, not simply a sequence of entertaining set pieces. There must be a mystery; maybe a murder, a puzzle to…
‘Let me paint you a theatrical picture, McCall,’ Logan said, ‘so your half-baked, off-off-off-off-Broadway brain can somehow wrap itself around these particular, fucked-up fences that you yourself have no doubt constructed.’ Buckle up boys and girls, for the full-on non-stop wild ride that is Emboozlement – the new wise-cracking crime caper which is just perfect…
The autumn reading season delivers Nordic noir, cosy crime, sci-fi thrillers, feisty female detectives, murder in the Outback and sleaze in Sicily: detectives, vendettas, hardboiled heroes and even some gore-splattered horror. Oh, and the George Smiley spy story which everyone’s been patiently waiting for… A LEGACY OF SPIES by John Le Carre A throwback…
Murderers, thieves, political killers and private investigators – these are the people who populate Simon Maltman’s new collection of 12 short stories. I say ‘new’, but if you’ve read his novel, ‘A Chaser On The Rocks’ then you’ll recognise Billy Chapman, a private investigator who plies his trade in the 1940s while Belfast suffered its…
The very first of Philip Kerr’s WW2 Bernie Gunther investigations arrives as a republished stand-alone ebook (previously it was packaged up with The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem to form the ‘Berlin Noir’ trilogy) with perfect timing, just as the 12th book in the series is launched. It’s a clever move. March Violets is…
There’s a great story in this snappy detective novel. A nifty murder mystery, with an unlikely anti-hero PI, a sassy female sidekick and a cleverly constructed plot. In the manner of a modern day Sherlock Holmes, Lemons (based in sweltering California and hating every second of its artificial sheen), attends murder scenes, draws sweeping conclusions…
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