Thriller
More secrets and symbols
Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In…
Highly charged territory
I first heard of this tragicomic spy romp around Israel and Palestine when Julian Barnes sang its praises in the…
Nut job
The film-maker Darren Aronofsky says he wrote Mother! in five days as if in a ‘fever dream’ and, as a…
Art of darkness
Stephen King, 69, has sold more than 350 million books, and tries not to apologise for being working-class, or imaginative,…
Heavy-handed
Oliver Cotton is an RSC stalwart who looks like a man born to greatness. Google him. He has the fearless…
David Quantick’s The Mule: lost in the world of translation
For those who read the weekly music press during the 1980s, David Quantick’s was a name you could rely on.…
What were they thinking? The Benefactor reviewed
The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one. It’s one of those what-were-they-thinking projects that wastes…
Inside the mind of a molester
This isn’t a book to read before lights out. It’s about a mentally ill man whose mother exiles him from…
The plot has enough holes to file the Albert Hall: The Gift reviewed
Were you ever not very nice at school? A bit of a tosspot to others, perhaps. Ever so slightly a…
Imagine if Are You Being Served? had starred Laurence Olivier: ITV’s Vicious reviewed
Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are…
American Buffalo at Wyndham’s reviewed: ‘magnificent, multicoloured, vast and tragic’
David Mamet is Pinter without the Pinteresque indulgences, the absurdities and obscurities, the pauses, the Number 38 bus routes. American…
Murder in a black Texas Arcadia
Mystery fans and writers are always looking for new locations in which murder can take place. Attica Locke has an…
Hock and partridge help fascism go down in 1930s London
Anthony Quinn’s fourth novel, set in London’s artistic and theatrical circles in 1936, is not the kind in which an…
The Boy Next Door reviewed: a terrible new J-Lo movie that's disturbingly enjoyable
Stateside critics, who panned Jennifer Lopez’s new film The Boy Next Door on its US release last month, may be…
A Most Violent Year, review: mesmerising performances - and coats
A Most Violent Year is a riveting drama even though I can’t tell you what it’s about, or even what…
Foxcatcher: piercing, shattering, spellbinding
Foxcatcher is a crime drama (of sorts) that has already been dubbed ‘Oscarcatcher!’ as it barely puts a foot wrong.…
James Ellroy’s latest attempt to unseat the Great American Novel
Aficionados of detective fiction have long known that the differences between the soft- and hard-boiled school are so profound that,…
David Fincher plays Gone Girl for laughs - at least I hope he is
Gone Girl is David Fincher’s adaptation of the bestselling thriller by Gillian Flynn, a relentless page-turner which I’ve heard people…
You know something’s up when MI6 moves its head office to Croydon
Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they…
Stephen King – return of the great storyteller
Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ —…
A Colder War, by Charles Cumming - review
The title of Charles Cumming’s seventh novel is both a nod to the comfortable polarities of Cold War and also…
A thriller that breaks down the publishing office door
Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides.…
The spy who came in from le Carré
The single most terrifying moment of my adult life occurred at 8.55 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 5 August…
Isabel Allende's Ripper doesn't grab you by the throat
Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to…
Donna Tartt can do the thrills but not the trauma
Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel…
