Anyone who has walked England’s moors, particularly those in the northern part of the country, knows their mesmerising mix of majestic beauty, layered cultural heritage and frequent fickle extremes in weather. They are both breathtakingly alluring to tens of millions of visitors and lethal to the unwary and unprepared. In…
Review: Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 is far from your average ‘who done it’.
Jon McGregor’s much anticipated novel, Reservoir 13, has all the ingredients for a thriller: mysterious disappearance of a 13-year-old girl, mesmerising but brooding landscapes, close-knit community, dodgy characters, illicit relationships. And of course: Secrets. What he delivers is an elegant, almost poetic rendering of the evolving impact of a tragedy, not just on…
Eleanor Oliphant’s story is more than completely fine, it’s funny, thought provoking and very moving
I fear that, like many others, I wouldn’t have really noticed Eleanor Oliphant. I’d probably have smiled automatically if I encountered her in the corridor at work, perhaps even said “hi” but not noticed when my greeting prompted no response, as I’d have already moved on. I’d no doubt have…
Crime File: a deadly duo
Say Nothing By Brad Parks How far would you go to protect someone you love? Lie for them? Interfere with the course of justice? Kill someone? That’s the premise at the heart of Say Nothing, a clever, pacy new thriller from American author Brad Parks best known for his award-winning books…
My Top Ten novels from 2016
I was late compiling my list of my top 10 reads for 2016. But that turned out to be a good thing. I have only just finished News of the World by Paulette Jiles, and, it seems, I had saved one of the best for last. News of the World is set in 1870 in an America still devastated by war. Captain Jefferson Kidd, a 70-year-old veteran, travels the country earning a living readings newspapers to a population desperate for information. He agrees to return Johanna, a 10-year-old girl who had been captured years before by
Dark Town by Thomas Mullen: a confronting insight into the early days of black cops
It’s 1948 and Atlanta is a city divided by race, teetering on the cusp of change. Dark Town, the subject of a new book by Thomas Mullen, is the city’s black area, defined by poverty, unemployment and violent crime.
When the mayor decides to set up a black police force, Lucius Boggs, son of an influential preacher, and Tommy Smith, a war hero decorated for bravery, are among the eight selected. Right from the start it’s a poisoned chalice. The white police force is overtly antagonistic, often violently so. Unwanted at the main police station their headquarters is instead the dilapidated basement of the local YMCA. Their powers are
Review: Black Night Falling by Rod Reynolds
One of my favourite crime books last year was The Dark Inside, the debut novel by 
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
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad gives a striking take on history’s brutal past
American author Colton Whitehead has already garnered a swag of accolades for his work – a Guggenheim and Whiting “genius” awards plus being short-listed for the Pulitzer – making his new novel, The Underground Railroad, highly anticipated. An excerpt was published in a special lift-out in The New York Times. But it was the book’s selection as the subject of Oprah’s Book Club that lit the “destination stratosphere” fuse.
His subject isn’t new. The underground railroad was the metaphorical name for the loose network of people and secret routes that helped slaves escape the antebellum south to the more benign northern states. First operational in the early 19th Century it was most active in the 1850s and early 1860s, and has been the subject of countless fiction (perhaps most notably Toni Morrison’s Beloved) and non-fiction, films, documentaries and scholarly research. What Whitehead does is give the railway an architectural structure,
Ian McGuire’s The North Water: a vivid, compelling journey into the darkest of places
Rug up when you settle down to read The North Water, or strongly defend your spot in front of a blazing fire. Author Ian McGuire has created a world so physically, emotionally and psychologically bleak that, from the first few pages, you know you’re going to be in for a chilling time.
It is the 1850s and former army surgeon Patrick Sumner has signed up for a six-month voyage on a whaler, The Volunteer, out of Hull, a town on England’s north east coast that was once the heart of a booming whaling industry. But Volunteer is putting to see, heading into the treacherous Arctic waters in the twilight of an industry overtaken by new fuels like coal oil and paraffin.
A clever and sinister twist to Scandi-Noir queen Anne Holt’s The Final Murder
The Final Murder is the second in Anne Holt’s crime series starring senior Norwegian
police Superintendent Adam Stubo and psychologist Johanne Vik. The two met in the series debut, Punishment which was released in translation earlier this year, and quite apart from working well together they obviously hit it off socially in a big way.
When The Final Murder opens they are now married and Stubo is on paternity leave after the birth of their daughter, Ragnhild. It’s a sad commentary on the marital skills of many factional cops, that he flatly refused, even when ordered, to return to the back in the office due to a particularly high-profile killing of an attractive TV presenter. Stubo is a refreshingly normal character. Humane and caring. Apart from the occasional forbidden cigar and glass of wine to assist contemplation, he’s devoid of the traits that tend to single out the modern crime buster. He’s a good father both to Ragnhild and to the strangely quirky Kristiane, Vik’s daughter by an