Murder
Sex and squalor in San Francisco
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…
Must every quality TV show begin with a young woman’s corpse?
It was Shetland that tipped me over the edge. Not the place, but the TV series. Although that’s set in…
Loss, grief and guilt
About 30 pages in and unable to find my bearings, I flipped to the end of this novel — well,…
Guns and neuroses
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…
Divinely decadent
With an eye to the blasphemy underlying some of the loveliest Renaissance painting, Honor Clerk will be choosing her Christmas cards more carefully this year
Saints and sinners
There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is…
