Thrillers
A summer of suspense: recent crime fiction
The second world war features in haunting thrillers by Carlo Lucarelli and Andrew Taylor. Also reviewed: A Sting in the Tale, by Mark Ezra; and Kane, by Graham Hurley
The comfort of curling up with a violent thriller
When post-natal depression descends, Lucy Mangan describes reaching for Lee Child, finding catharsis in his no-nonsense villain-bashing
Rebels and whistleblowers: a choice of recent crime fiction
A veteran CIA officer gets involved in an anti-government movement in Bahrain, and a young British intelligence officer infiltrates a news service
Cut to the chase
It’s a brilliant page-turner device and works perfectly in stories set variously during the Algerian war of independence of the 1950s and Norfolk and London in the present day
Stranger than fiction
How I’d write Covid: The Thriller
Dark and twisted
Patricia Highsmith’s life was filled with more eccentric, disturbing brilliance than most readers can normally handle; and so the chief…
Enjoyably contrived: BBC1’s Baptiste reviewed
What’s the best way to start a six-part thriller? The answer, it seems, is to have a bloke of a…
If I were a detective looking for serial killers I’d stake out Frozen
Frozen starts with a shrink having a panic attack. She hyperventilates into her hand-bag and then gets drunk on an…
Channel 4’s Kiri is already shaping up to be one of the TV highlights of the winter
These days a genuinely controversial TV drama series would surely be one with an all-white, male-led cast that examined the…
Midwinter murders: the best Christmas thrillers
It’s difficult to keep a crime series going after 11 books but Boris Akunin manages it well in All the…
Latest crime fiction
Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (Pushkin Press, £14.99) is set in 1972 and moves back and forth between a North African city…
Recent crime fiction
All it takes is a spark. In her compelling new thriller, Ten Days (Canongate, £14.99), Gillian Slovo tracks the progress…
Escaping the Slough of despond
Most spy novels have a comfortable air of familiarity. We readers can take moles in our stride. We have grown…
Anatomy of a bestseller
Every four seconds, somewhere in the world, a Lee Child book is sold. This phenomenal statistic places Child alongside Stephen…
Curtain call for Ruth Rendell
Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is about how psychological necessity can drive perfectly ordinary people either to terrible deeds…
Recent crime fiction
The act of reading always involves identification: with the story, the characters, the author’s intentions. Renée Knight takes this concept…
Fighting fear with fear
‘Do it with scissors’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us…
Recent crime novels
The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the…
