The boy who would be king: The Pretender, by Jo Harkin, reviewed
A magnificent imagining of the life of Lambert Simnel traces his progress from farm boy to coronation in Dublin to turnspit in the Tudor palace kitchens to plans of dark revenge
The spy who came back from retirement: Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway, reviewed
Given a new lease of life by John le Carré’s son, George Smiley gets embroiled in a murky affair involving the Circus’s key Stasi asset and a missing Hungarian literary agent
Turf wars in Las Vegas: City in Ruins, by Don Winslow, reviewed
The concluding volume of the Danny Ryan trilogy sees the gangster hero involved in a bitter feud over the purchase of a crumbling property on the Las Vegas Strip
The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican
Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty’s thrilling mission to save the lives of 6,500 Jews and Allied soldiers in Nazi-occupied Rome doesn’t quite get the memorial it deserves
Whodunits shouldn’t be dismissed as a guilty pleasure
What a weird lot crime writers are. I don’t come to this conclusion lightly, since I’m a crime writer myself,…
For Glasgow – with love and squalor: The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh, reviewed
Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can…
Fiction’s most famous Rifleman returns — and it’s miraculous he’s still alive
It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…
Glasgow gangsters: 1979, by Val McDermid, reviewed
Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could…
Older and grumpier: A Song for the Dark Times, by Ian Rankin, reviewed
By my reckoning, this is the 24th outing for John Rebus, Scotland’s best known retired police officer. One of the…
Oxford skulduggery: The Sandpit, by Nicholas Shakespeare, reviewed
Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is…
Let’s swap murders: Amanda Craig’s The Golden Rule reviewed
It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering…
A choice of classic crime fiction
A guide to reading in lockdown. My involvement with crime and mystery fiction started when I was four. The first…
Brexit has at least inspired John le Carré — his thriller on the subject is a cracker
Since 1903, when Erskine Childers warned of the rising tide of German militarism that preceded the first world war in…
Capers in crime: Life for Sale, by Yukio Mishima, reviewed
Few biographies are quite as impressive as Yukio Mishima’s. One of Japan’s most famous authors, he wrote 80 plays and…
Nights at the Lyceum: Shadowplay, by Joseph O’Connor, reviewed
‘I am very, very pleased,’ murmured Queen Victoria in 1895, when she dubbed Henry Irving, Britain’s first theatrical knight. He…
Murder in the basement: The Language of Birds, by Jill Dawson, reviewed
Jill Dawson has a taste for murder. One of her earlier novels, the Orange shortlisted Fred and Edie, fictionalised the…
Farewell Bernie Gunther: Metropolis, by Philip Kerr, reviewed
Philip Kerr’s first Bernie Gunther novel, March Violets, was published 30 years ago. From the start, the format was a…
Sadie Jones’s modern morality tale
The love of money, says St Paul, is the root of all evil. The Snakes makes much the same point.…
Where would we be without crime’s heavies? Muscle, by Alan Trotter, reviewed
Let’s hear it for the heavies, the unsung heroes of noir crime fiction on page and screen. The genre would…
Death of a rock star: Slow Motion Ghosts, by Jeff Noon, reviewed
Here is a novel set in the no man’s land between past and present, a fertile and constantly shifting territory…
Kidnapped by Kett: Tombland, by C.J. Sansom, reviewed
Tombland is not to be treated lightly. Its length hints at its ambitions. Here is a Tudor epic disguised as…
Hoping to find happiness: Paris Echo, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a serious novel must be in want of a theme. Paris Echo soon…
Give me Shakespeare’s Macbeth over Jo Nesbo’s any day
It must have seemed a good idea to someone: commissioning a range of well-known novelists to ‘reimagine Shakespeare’s plays for…
Corpses, clues and Kiwis in Ngaio Marsh’s posthumous novel
Publishing loves a brand. Few authors of fiction create characters who reach this semi-divine status, but when they do, even…
A crime novel that continues to puzzle
His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students…
