Exclusives

  Welcome to Desert Island Crime, where each week we ask a bestselling author: If you were stranded on a desert island and had to choose 8 books to take with you, what would you pick and why? This week, we asked Robert Bryndza, whose latest thriller Nine Elms is out now, to reveal his top […]

  1977   Friday 16 September. Kent   Lolly Bruce reached out from the passenger seat and angled the rear-view mirror so she could study her face, peering at her reflection with a combination of intensity and disappointment. Grey eyes, small pink mouth, brown hair swept into a topknot. She sighed. Even with all the […]

  Welcome to Desert Island Crime, where each week we ask a bestselling author: If you were stranded on a desert island and had to choose 8 books to take with you. What would you pick and why?   This week, we ask Craig Russell, author of the thrilling The Devil Aspect, to reveal his top […]

PROLOGUE The appearance of that voice, of that dark personality, was like some terrible black sun dawning, filling the castle’s tower room with a shining darkness and sinking with malice deep into the dense, thick stone of its ancient walls. Despite the patient being securely fastened to the examination couch, Viktor felt strangely isolated, vulnerable. […]

Prologue   We are all creatures of habit. Even murderers. When things work out for us, we fix on some talisman to credit for the success. Lucky pants; not shaving; performing the same actions in the correct sequence; having the identical breakfast; walking on the right side of the street. When murderers reveal their talismans […]

PROLOGUE Kill me now. Police Constable Nita Bevan has realised that her partner, Martin Coles, is a windbag. Three weeks together in the car and he’s barely drawn breath. He’s pretty good when they’re han- dling a shout, but the rest of the time it’s babble, babble, babble. And once he’s on a topic, there’s […]

Now   There’s that noise again. It’s a shrill, beeping sort of sound. Sometimes it’s so quiet I forget about it. Sometimes I can’t hear it at all. And then all of a sudden it’s back, and I know it was there all the time, hiding just beneath the other sounds: the voices and the […]

Chapter 1 Angela  Fight, fight, fight. Angela looked down at her knuckles and saw they were red. It wasn’t her blood. The crowd had formed so fast, pupils from her year – twelve- and thirteen-year-olds – being elbowed out of the way by lads of fifteen. The ring of people around her pulsated as one. […]

2018 Ivy Rain is lashing down as she emerges from the Tube station, gusts of wind angling the deluge almost to the horizontal. A tenaciously brutal winter had relinquished its grip only with grudging reluctance, giving way to some unseasonably hot and sunny late spring days, but this meant that it caught everyone off-guard when […]

ONE The green first-aid kit is open, with rolls of bandages, eye drops, butterfly stitches spilling out over the vanity like entrails. In my hand are the tiny pointed scissors. Before my eyes, they open and close and open and close. I can hear him coming up the hall. The door creaks. ‘Jesus,’ he says. […]

Hands Not so many years ago it was customary to cut off a felon’s right hand and nail it above his head as he swung from the gallows. Why? Because though it is the mind that decides upon murder, it is the hand that commits the act. The hand of man is the most sophisticated […]

Prologue Darkness, be my friend, he whispered, though he doubted any noise escaped his lips, the words mere thoughts, lost in the gathering gloom. She had left the window open again, a clear invitation to let him climb up on top of the water butt and pull himself inside the room where only a flickering candle […]