Friday Reads

  What is the perfect antidote to miserable November weather? A crime novel that transports you to the sunnier climes of Italy, to a city full of beautiful piazzas and delicious tagliatelle al ragu: Bologna. A Quiet Death in Italy is the debut novel from Tom Benjamin and the start of a new crime series […]

  This week I’m recommending our reissues of the first ten books in the Bill Slider series, which were written in the nineties by prolific author Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. Slider is a Detective Inspector in Shepherd’s Bush, London, and he has a great, realistic police team round him as they solve some pretty bizarre murders. The […]

  If you’re feeling deflated by a lack of Halloween spirit yesterday, we’ve got a book that will not only quench your thirst for spookiness, but spellbind you with its eloquence, wit and form: The Bleak Midwinter by Len Tyler. This page-turner has it all: a witch who concocts mysterious herbal medicine and lives alone with a […]

If you’re sick of the miserable weather and the miserable politics, there is nothing better than Simon Brett’s hilarious crime capers to lift your mood. Simon Brett is the author of over ninety books and an OBE-awarded crime writing treasure. His Blotto and Twinks series follows a brother and sister sleuthing duo on wacky crime-solving […]

  Nelson DeMille has decades of amazing thriller novels under his belt, all filled with dry, sometimes cheeky wit, compassion and fantastic set pieces. The Deserter is no different – but it is the first novel he has co-written since 1998’s Mayday, and this time it’s significant: his co-author is his son, Alex, whose screenwriting credentials bring […]

Playing Dirty is the new Liberty Chapman novel from Helen Black – an author who is up there with Martina Cole and Roberta Kray for gritty gangland crime with a tough female lead. The series is set in Leeds and follows Liberty, a high-flying lawyer with a very murky past. Hannah Wann  

  To tie in with paperback publication of the brilliant The Devil Aspect by Craig Russell, we have reissued his wonderful Lennox series with a fabulous new cover design. The series features the eponymous Canadian PI as he conducts his murky and dangerous business in 1950s Glasgow. If you like your crime fiction to be […]

I love destination crime, and Amsterdam is the setting for Anja de Jager’s contemporary police procedural series featuring detective Lotte Meerman as our damaged and driven protagonist. Not only is this a gripping police procedural, joint star of the book together with Lotte is Amsterdam itself – from its canals, cobbles and waterways, to the […]

I never thought I’d be able to replicate the weekend when my best friends and I holed up for two whole days to binge watch the entire first series of Big Little Lies. Between episodes we would unpick all that had happened in the last and make detailed (and, as it invariably turned out, wildly […]

Once again, as our thought turn to darker days, longer nights and murderous deeds, I’m reading one of my authors who absolutely excels at the Gothic mystery. Last year, with Go to my Grave, she gave us the Christie-esque Scottish country house murder mystery while this year she offers us a whole village which harbours […]

I’ve always been fascinated by idyllic little villages – what really goes on behind the closed doors of cosy cottages? In Witchwood, deep in the Forest of Dean, where Rebecca Griffiths has set her second novel, there are dark secrets and unspoken threats that will end in a tragedy. A Place to Lie moves between […]

I am always talking up this series as an excellent fun crime read, though one that doesn’t pull any punches. The deaths are gruesome, but the camaraderie between Eve and her deputy Peabody – and their whole team – and the excellence of Eve and her husband as a couple brings a respite to her […]