Thrillers

The chase looms large in the best new thrillers

23 September 2023 9:00 am

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

How I’d write Covid: The Thriller

13 March 2021 9:00 am

How I’d write Covid: The Thriller

Murder most casual: why Patricia Highsmith’s thrillers are so chilling

16 January 2021 9:00 am

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

23 February 2019 9:00 am

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

3 March 2018 9:00 am

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

13 January 2018 9:00 am

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

9 December 2017 9:00 am

It’s difficult to keep a crime series going after 11 books but Boris Akunin manages it well in All the…

Latest crime fiction

15 July 2017 9:00 am

Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (Pushkin Press, £14.99) is set in 1972 and moves back and forth between a North African city…

Riots and gang warfare provide the spark for the best latest thrillers

9 April 2016 9:00 am

All it takes is a spark. In her compelling new thriller, Ten Days (Canongate, £14.99), Gillian Slovo tracks the progress…

If you read one spy novel this year, read Real Tigers

6 February 2016 9:00 am

Most spy novels have a comfortable air of familiarity. We readers can take moles in our stride. We have grown…

Writing a bestseller ‘on the verge of a stroke’

16 January 2016 9:00 am

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

17 October 2015 8:00 am

Ruth Rendell’s final novel, Dark Corners, is about how psychological necessity can drive perfectly ordinary people either to terrible deeds…

From conspiracy to childhood secrets: a choice of recent crime fiction

27 June 2015 9:00 am

The act of reading always involves identification: with the story, the characters, the author’s intentions. Renée Knight takes this concept…

Tippi Hedren helps save schoolchildren in The Birds. Hitchcock confided to François Truffaut that he’d had ‘some emotional problems’ with Hedren during the shoot. For the final scene, live birds were attached to Hedren’s clothes. The actress became increasingly hysterical over the course of the week it took to film it, and when a bird finally went for her eyes, she collapsed

A profile of the worlds’s most famous film director — with the most famous profile

18 April 2015 9:00 am

‘Do it with scissors’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us…

Maigret's new clothes – this month's best new crime novel, published 1931

28 June 2014 9:00 am

The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the…