Murder

A post-Brexit entertainment: The Proof of My Innocence, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed

23 November 2024 9:00 am

A satire on radical economic libertarianism combines with a cosy Cotswold murder mystery in an ingenious series of stories within stories

Radio 4’s Lord Lucan series is rescued by a brilliant narrator

9 November 2024 9:00 am

It was 50 years ago this week, on 7 November 1974, that Lord Lucan fled what was destined to become…

The court favourite who became the most hated man in England

19 October 2024 9:00 am

Lucy Hughes-Hallett traces the brief, dramatic career of the handsome Duke of Buckingham – scapegoat for the early Stuarts’ extravagance and incompetence

Mounting suspicion: The Fate of Mary Rose, by Caroline Blackwood, reviewed

19 October 2024 9:00 am

Terror and distrust build in the Anderson family after a six-year-old girl is found murdered in a quiet Kent village

How the Rillington Place murders turned Britain into a nation of ghouls

28 September 2024 9:00 am

With titillating newspaper coverage making John Christie’s trial a hot ticket, everyone seemed to want to peep behind the curtains of the house of horror – or even break in

A dark satanic cult: The Third Realm, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Knausgaard’s unsettling novel continues to explore previous themes in the series, including the strange phenomenon of the black metal music scene in socially balanced Norway

Uncomfortable truths about the siege of Leningrad

7 September 2024 9:00 am

The legend of heroic resistance during the 872-day blockade helped many survivors bear the guilt of having robbed, betrayed, murdered and even eaten their fellow citizens

Echoes of Tom Brown’s School Days: Rabbits, by Hugo Rifkind, reviewed

6 July 2024 9:00 am

When 16-year-old Tommo moves to an elite, brutish boarding school, he longs to fit in and even manages to join the inner circle. But can he ever really become ‘one of them’?

Pure Puccini: an opera lover’s melodramatic family history

29 June 2024 9:00 am

Flamboyant theatrics were part of Michael Volpe’s life as CEO of Opera Holland Park. But those of his feuding Italian relatives rival anything seen on stage

Haunted by the past: Winterberg’s Last Journey, by Jaroslav Rudis, reviewed

8 June 2024 9:00 am

A garrulous nonagenarian and his patient carer make a long train trip to Sarajevo, hoping to solve a decades-old murder mystery

Murder in the dark: The Eighth House, by Linda Segtnan, reviewed

20 April 2024 9:00 am

Motherhood prompts Segtnan to research the cold case of Birgitta Sivander, a nine-year-old found murdered in a Swedish forest in 1948

What became of Thomas Becket’s bones?

2 March 2024 9:00 am

Alice Roberts’s examinations of violent deaths in the past take her to the site of Becket’s murder in Canterbury cathedral and the later destruction of his shrine by Henry VIII

An Oxford spy ring is finally uncovered

2 March 2024 9:00 am

Charles Beaumont’s warped group, recruited by an eccentric fellow of Jesus College, seems all too plausible. Other thrillers from Celia Walden and Matthew Blake

Satirical pulp: The Possessed, by Witold Gombrowicz, reviewed

21 October 2023 9:00 am

The 1939 Gothic pastiche which the author was at pains to distance himself from is now considered a delightfully devious work of Polish modernism

An untrue true crime story: Penance, by Eliza Clark, reviewed

15 July 2023 9:00 am

A teasing piece of crime fiction weaves together real and invented murders in a satire on the true crime genre and its devotees

Ireland’s most notorious murderer still casts a disturbing spell

8 July 2023 9:00 am

After months of conversations with Ireland’s most notorious murderer, Mark O’Connell got both more and less than he bargained for, says Frances Wilson

Lies about the Katyn massacre added insult to the horror

17 June 2023 9:00 am

Alan Philps reveals how many western journalists, duped by Stalinist propaganda, rushed to blame the Nazis for the Soviet atrocity

A gruesome discovery: Death Under a Little Sky, by Stig Abell, reviewed

27 May 2023 9:00 am

A police detective inherits a country estate and looks forward to early retirement, but is forced back into action when human bones surface at a village treasure hunt

Evil geniuses

20 May 2023 9:00 am

Does knowledge of the wrongs committed by Caravaggio, Picasso, Roman Polanski and other ‘monsters’ condition our response to their art, wonders Claire Dederer

Was it murder?

20 May 2023 9:00 am

In a beautifully told novel, O’Callaghan focuses on the mysterious death of the footballer Matthias Sindelar in 1939 – possibly as a result of defying Hitler

Murder most foul: The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell, reviewed

27 August 2022 9:00 am

There’s a moment near the end of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ when it becomes clear that the…

Whodunits shouldn’t be dismissed as a guilty pleasure

28 May 2022 9:00 am

What a weird lot crime writers are. I don’t come to this conclusion lightly, since I’m a crime writer myself,…

Murder, suicide and apocalypse: Here Goes Nothing, by Steve Toltz, reviewed

30 April 2022 9:00 am

Angus Mooney is dead. Freshly murdered, he’s appalled to find himself in an Afterworld, having always rejected the possibility of…

Will Macron surrender to the mob?

23 March 2022 11:00 pm

It has been a torrid few days in France. In the early hours of Saturday morning, a former Argentine rugby…

A long-forgotten tale of sorcery and a severed head

18 December 2021 9:00 am

Laikipia Plateau, Kenya Our local chief Panta wore a government-issue khaki uniform with epaulettes, beret and swagger stick. On a…