The Dark Inside – Still Not Fussed

Review: Black Night Falling by Rod Reynolds

Books August 29, 2016

One of my favourite crime books last year was The Dark Inside, the debut novel by blacknight
British writer Rod Reynolds. It was set in 1946 and Reynolds had managed to capture the all-pervasive fog of casual menace and violence that makes shows like True Detective so compelling. Now comes the sequel, Black Night Falling. It’s just a few months after The Dark Inside. Journalist Charlie Yates, bruised and bloodied, has left Texarkana hoping to pick up the jagged pieces of his life in the more benign atmosphere of America’s west coast. But a desperate phone call from a former colleague, Jimmy Robinson, pushes all the right buttons: “Dead girls. Unfinished business. The right thing.”

Yates heads for Hot Springs, Arkansas, and from his first footsteps on the airport tarmac

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Review: Stasi Child by David Young is a chilling debut novel

Books February 25, 2016

Stasi Child, David Young’s debut novel, is set in 1975, fourteen years after East Germany
erected the Berlin Wall, the “iron curtain” designed to stem the exodus of its population to the freedom of the West. To most of the world East Germany became a closed book, led by a secretive, repressive regime. Its most powerful weapon was fear.

Oberleutnant Karin Muller is the first female to be in put in charge of a team at the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), East Germany’s civilian police investigative unit. She and her ambitious deputy, Werner Tilsner, are specifically directed by the Stasi to investigate the mutilated body of a teenage girl, found lying in the snow within sight of the Wall, apparently shot by Western border guards while escaping into the east. As the Stasi officer at the scene says: “It is, I admit, an unusual scenario.”

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Review: The Dark Inside, a gripping crime thriller with shades of True Detective

Books January 5, 2016

It’s always a dangerous game for publishers to attempt to compare a new offering with something as popular and stylized as True Detective, the hit TV series starring Colin Farrell. That’s a tough enough gig at any time but particular so for a debut novelist. In The Dark Inside, by Rod Reynolds, Charlie Yates is a disgraced New York reporter, banished by his vengeful boss to the do-nothing town of Texarkana on the Texas-Arkansas border to report on a spate of murders at a popular dating spot. So low has he fallen in his boss’s eyes that whatever story he files will probably only make it to the spike.

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