Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw George Pelecanos, The Turnaround Ian Rankin, Doors Open Alan Furst’s espionage novels have a melancholic tinge, depending, as they so often do, on the debacles of recent history and, on a personal level, on the mechanics of betrayal. His tenth, The Spies of Warsaw (Weidenfeld, £16.99), is set in
Andrew Taylor reviews a selection of recent crime novels The Murder Farm (Quercus, £8.99) is Andrea Schenkel’s first novel and has been hugely successful in her native Germany and elsewhere. Based on a real case, it is set in the 1950s and deals with murder of a farmer, his wife, daughter, grandchildren and maid. It
Kate Atkinson’s previous novel, Case Histories, was a successful experiment in crime fiction. One Good Turn is its sequel. In the first book, which was set in Cambridge, Brodie Jackson was a standard-issue private eye — ex-army, ex-police, with a broken marriage and a penchant for country music. Now, thanks to a £2 million inheritance
Andrew Taylor reviews the fourth novel in Susan Hill’s crime series The Vows of Silence is the fourth novel in Susan Hill’s crime series. Like its predecessors, it is concerned with murder and its investigation in and around a cathedral city known as Lafferton, and with the lives of those concerned. The central character of the
C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake series concerns the activities of a hunchback lawyer struggling to make a living in the increasingly dangerous setting of Henry VIII’s reign. The first three novels have been deservedly successful, not least because of Matthew Shardlake himself, a man of intelligence and integrity who has managed to survive with his essential
Laura Wilson specialises in acutely observed psychological thrillers, in most cases set in the recent past. Stratton’s War (Orion, £18.99) marks a departure for her in that it is the start of a series. Set in London during the phony war before the Blitz, it kicks off with an ageing and almost forgotten silent film
On the morning of Saturday 30 June 1860, the mutilated body of three-year Savill Kent was discovered in an outside privy at Road House, Wiltshire. The circumstances suggested that the murderer was almost certainly a member of the boy’s family or one of their servants. The case became something of a national obsession because of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (MacLehose Press, £14.99, translated from the Swedish by Stephen Murray) is the first volume of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Larsson was a journalist who sadly died of a heart attack before publication. But the books are selling in their millions across Europe and, once you read the first of
Name to a Face (Bantam, £14.99) is Robert Goddard’s 19th novel. With characteristic brio, he combines the Black Death, the wreck of Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s flagship off Scilly in 1707 and the theft of an 18th-century ring with adulterous shenanigans in modern Monaco, a drowned journalist, near-identical twins and major-league EU fraud. Tim Harding, a
The war in Iraq cast a long shadow over Minette Walters’ previous novel, The Devil’s Feather, and it also plays a part in her new one. Lieutenant Charles Acland suffers horrific head injuries, including the loss of an eye, when he runs into an ambush while leading a convoy on the Basra-Baghdad highway. The two
Since the 1990s, a tartan tide has flooded the coasts of crime fiction, and it still shows no sign of ebbing in terms of either quality or quantity. Broken Skin (HarperCollins, £12.99) is Stuart MacBride’s third investigation set on the wilder shores of Aberdeen and featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. The novel opens as Logan’s
The modern crime novel tends to be a serious matter involving body parts and serial killers, sometimes with a spot of social analysis thrown in for good measure. It was not always like this, and Simon Brett is among the handful of distinguished contemporary crime writers who remind us of those far-off days of innocence
Death puts a different value on a person, usually a smaller one than in life. Sometimes, how- ever, the opposite happens. For instance, how many medieval Archbishops of Canterbury can most of us name off-hand apart from St Thomas Becket? In some cases, death makes the man. It is likely that Alexander Litvinenko will be
Any new novel by John Harvey is cause for celebration. He produces beautifully written, solidly engineered crime stories that probe the flaws and sensitivities of British society. Gone to Ground (William Heinemann, £12.99) begins with the murder of Stephen Bryan, a lecturer in media studies bludgeoned to death in the shower of his house in
As Hitchcock knew, the best thrillers use the very simplest materials to achieve their sinister purpose of enthralling and terrifying their audience. Nicci French’s previous novels have shown an impressive ability to dramatise the darkest concerns of her readers. Her latest book taps into the universal fear of parents: what do you do when your
Natasha Cooper’s heroine, Trish Maguire, is a barrister who subverts the stereotypes, an outsider whose troubled background sometimes gives her more in common with clients than colleagues. At the start of A Greater Evil (Simon & Schuster, £17.99), the latest novel in the series, Trish’s private life is on a relatively even keel. At work,
This is the fourth of Fred Vargas’s crime thrillers to be published in English — the third, The Three Evangelists, won last year’s inaugural Duncan Lawrie Dagger for translated crime fiction. Vargas is the pseudonym of a French archaeologist and historian. Don’t let the ‘Fred’ mislead you about her gender. Wash This Blood Clean From
The Silence of the Grave, Indridason’s previous novel, won the three international crime-writing awards, including Britain’s Gold Dagger. It featured his Icelandic series detective, the lugubrious policeman Erlendur, who returns in Voices to investigate the murder of a doorman at one of Reykjavik’s smartest hotels. It’s just before Christmas, and the hotel management is less
Listing page content here Women in peril flit through the pages of traditional Gothic fiction, murmuring ‘Had I but known!’ as they fall for the wrong man, open the wrong door or apply for the wrong job. The poet Sophie Hannah takes the trusty formula in both hands, gives it a vigorous shake and uses
Listing page content here As a genre, perhaps the most important question that the thriller asks is this: do we care sufficiently about the hero to want him (or, of course, her) to survive? In this case the hero is Nick Atkins, who in 1989 is just down from Cambridge. On the brink of law