Crime Scene: ANN CLEEVES The Glass Room. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
Murder and malice at a writers’ retreat. This is the fifth novel in a series featuring Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope of the Northumberland police. Like many of the more successful English crime series, these books depend heavily on a sense of continued character...CHARLES DICKENS Oliver Twist. Reviewed by Sandra Leigh Price
Nearly 200 years later, Oliver Twist is still a great read. As it is the 200th anniversary of his birth, I decided to revisit Dickens, and read, for the first time, Oliver Twist, which was originally published between 1837 and 1839 in serial fashion. The first...WENDY JAMES The Mistake. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
There’s more than one side to this story of a mother accused of murdering her child. It’s impossible to read Wendy James’s fourth novel and not think of the real-life case of Keli Lane, jailed for the murder of her baby Tegan, whose body has never been found. In...Crime Scene: CAROL O’CONNELL The Chalk Girl. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
‘Before Lisbeth Salander, there was Kathy Mallory.’ So it says on the front cover of The Chalk Girl, and so it is. Set in New York, the first Mallory novel was Mallory’s Oracle, published in 1995; The Chalk Girl is the tenth. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was...LINDY CAMERON Redback. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
A girls’-own-adventure with the lot. A beautiful-yet-deadly commander of a crack retrieval team; terrorists of US, European, Arabic and Asian strains; high-tech comms systems implanted into earlobes; assault helicopters; conspiracies; multiple explosions … Add a frank...ROBIN HOBB City of Dragons, Book Three of the Rain Wild Chronicles. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
The dragons and their attendants have found Kelsingra, but can they keep it? Robin Hobb’s The Rain Wild Chronicles series began as a one-off novel, Dragon Keeper (2009), which was cut into two, producing Dragon Haven (2010) as well. City of Dragons was meant to...The Godfather: Peter Corris on books he’s glad to have read
Recently I was asked to name five books that everyone should read. That old chestnut. I declined; people have such different tastes and read in such different ways that the idea makes no sense. I offered instead ‘five books I’m glad to have read’. This was accepted. I...The Godfather: Peter Corris on historical fiction
Historical novels have always been my favourite kind of recreational reading. From Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel to Georgette Heyer’s Regency bucks to sterner stuff like Henry Treece’s bloody tales of Saxon and Roman Britain, I escaped from a dreary...Crime Scene: LIZA MARKLUND Vanished and JO NESBO Phantom. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
Two new novels add to the Nordic crime fiction tsunami. Liza Marklund and Jo Nesbo are both mega-bestselling international authors, as the covers of their books proclaim, and among the most widely read of the present wave of Scandinavian crime writing. Marklund’s...Crime Scene: PETER MAY The Lewis Man. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
Secrets literally buried in the past come to light in this evocative mystery. This is the second novel in the ‘Lewis trilogy’, featuring Fin MacLeod as the detective brought back to his remote home island of Lewis, the northernmost point of the Outer Hebrides. In The...NICOLE WATSON The Boundary. Reviewed by Linda Funnell
Murder, dispossession and revenge fuel this passionate debut. It may have a body on the first page, but The Boundary is no ordinary crime novel. Yes, there is a lawyer-hero (the troubled Miranda Eversley), there is a good cop and a bad cop, bad lawyers, a weak...
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