When a 16 month old boy apparently drowns in a pond, Chief Inspector Sejer feels something is not quite right with the story provided by the drama queen mother, but how to prove it? This is Scandinavian writer Karin Fossum’s eleventh book in a series involving Chief Inspector Sejer, but my first taste of it. […]
Thriller
Closed Casket by Sophie Hannah
Who doesn’t love a good country house party where someone is violently despatched into the afterlife? Hannah hits her stride with this second Agatha-Christie-like outing, wisely keeping it more simple than in The Monogram Murders. Always charming to be back in the company of Hercule Poirot, everyone’s favourite Belgian export. Not including chocolate.
The House on Half Moon Street by Alex Reeve
Really quite good. Leo Stanhope is a coroner’s assistant in Victorian London. He is also a woman dressed as a man and in love with Maria, a prostitute. When Maria turns up dead he is determined to find her killer even though that puts him in contact with a bunch of lowlifes who repeatedly cause […]
Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner
Pretty good, but you do feel Steiner hasn’t quite hit her stride yet. Detective Seargeant Manon Bradshaw is good company, smart and big-hearted with an impressive vocabulary of swears and blasphemes. The others characters around her are, however, less interesting and SPOILER ALERT the resolution of the missing persons case, while plausible, may leave you […]
The Dry by Jane Harper
I am somewhat baffled as to why The Dry has attracted so much attention and praise. The characters are uniformly one dimensional, and the main protagonist, Aaron Falk, is so boring he is almost invisible. What I really object to, though, is the portrayal of a country town and its people. All the people locally […]
An Act of Silence by Colette McBeth
A good juicy political thriller with lots of twists and turns. The former UK Home Secretary, now a disgraced recluse, doesn’t entirely believe her troubled son when he turns up at her house claiming he is being framed for the murder of a woman. But there is much, much more to the story. Everybody has […]
Snap by Belinda Bauer
The assured writing in Snap is what elevates it above your average crime thriller. All the characters are believable, from the slightly hilarious lawn mowing, vampire loving five year old sister Merry to poor sad, stressed Jack, eleven years old and trying to hold his family together after their mother is murdered and their father […]
The Double Silence by Mari Jungstedt
Not quite sure how silence can be doubled, but I guess the title is a reference to two friends from a group of six who go missing. One man is pushed off a cliff and his fall witnessed by a windsurfer. Another woman goes missing on a bike ride on a small Swedish island. Then […]