The Crime Warp

The Middle East – dangerous now, dangerous then. The author Nick Brown takes us on an action packed road trip through lawless parts of Asia Minor in the 3rd Century C.E. We follow his protagonist Cassius Corbulo, imperial agent, as he tries to solve two mysteries in challenging circumstances: to locate his kidnapped bodyguard and friend Indavara and to help a nomadic chieftain to find his missing daughter and her friends. An added challenge is that Cassius Corbulo has abandoned his duties, gone rogue so to say, to go on this hunt. Will the army track him down and bring him to heel?   Acting outside the law, he and his Christian servant Simo come up against some very troublesome and ruthless characters in their quest and more than once they have to use subterfuge or violence to get out of a tight spot. I enjoy reading murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome because they offer up a rich variety of people from all walks of Roman life in a completely different and cosmopolitan world and yet…

Hot on the heels of the Agatha Raisin season on Sky starring Ashley Jenson, we have the newest in the Agatha Raisin series, Pushing Up the Daisies where Agatha is employed by a belligerent lord’s son to discover who murdered his obnoxious father.

For this I've selected a couple of big screen recent releases and two New to TV releases.  As you'd expect the phenomenally successful  Girl On The Train and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back have to be my cinema choices.  My TV choices were very much harder to select with the wealth of crime fiction offerings available in the comfort of our own homes.  In the end, I narrowed it down to the UK's The Fall and the USA's Secrets and Lies.

Jack Reacher :Never Go Back
This was a totally enjoyable action film.  Tom Cruise's  portrayal of Jack Reacher was believable, aided in part by Cruise's more mature appearance.  I think Cruise lent a welcome emotional aspect to Reacher's character, which, I find, the books omit.  Apart from the fantastic action scenes the highlight for me was author, Lee Child's, cameo role as a custom's official in the airport. 
The storyline was enjoyable- corruption in the upper echelons of the army with the risk of a miscarriage of justic…

All Is Not Forgotten by Wendy Waller (July 14th 2016) A young girl, Jenny Kramer, is brutally raped in a small Connecticut town.The town desperately want the perpetrator to be a stranger, the girl’s mother wants her to forget what happens and allows a controversial memory drug to be used on the daughter.When this causes complications the girl is referred to a psychiatrist to help her retrieve her memories in order to deal with the PTSD connected to her rape.

As an old True Blood fan, I was quite excited when I discovered that Charlaine Harris had written a second supernatural/crime series with another interesting protagonist, Harper Connolly. Unlike Sookie, the mind reading small town waitress, Harper can find dead bodies. And once she touches them, she can figure out how they died. You would think this is a useful skill to have in a crime book and that she’d be pretty popular with the crime fighting brigade. But as some of us know, people on the whole don’t like those who are different and feel threatened by those with special talents. We’re a pretty closed-minded lot and people in the Ozarks, Arkansas, where ‘Grave Sight’ takes place, are no different.   Harper travels all over the States as a sort of corpse finding consultant, accompanied by her step brother and manager Tolliver. Having grown up together in the same dysfunctional family, they understand each other like no outsider ever could. They look out for each other and protect e…

Seeing as the American Presidential Election has been dominating the news pretty much everywhere, I thought that a review of a Crime Thriller involving the US president would be timely. From the outset, the early days of George Washington, the Americans have succeeded in creating a myth of power and influence surrounding the presidency. They knew, whether consciously or instinctively, that if they were to build a nation with a leader who would be followed, someone with enough gravitas to compensate for the loss of a king, then they would have to create a powerful aura around the position. Brad Meltzer cleverly brings out the tension between the idealised office of the president and the failings of the individual who holds the position
.  In ‘The President’s Shadow’ there are sinister forces at work who want to destroy Warren, the president in question. Are these forces out to destroy the position or the man? And who better to protect the president than a secret society, The Culper Ri…