The Crime Warp

ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS! Due to such an avalanche of replies to the competition, I have decided to announce three winners today.  It gives me great pleasure to announce that  the winners are....

Available on Amazon Click  here In my opinion Mark Billingham's Love Like Blood is this years must read novel.  It is superb! Love Like Blood is a tense read about honour killings inspired by the horrific murder of 19 year old Banaz Mahmood in 2006.   Banaz was murdered by hit men paid for by her uncle and father because she fell in love with the wrong man.  A man who ten years later, grief stricken killed himself.   The sad thing is this tragedy is not an isolated event and the CPS suspects many more incidences of 'honour' related crimes occur, than are reported.

It's so lovely that you've come to The Crime Warp on your birthday, Peter.  I've cracked open the champagne and we have a wee birthday cake for you too.  Yes, you must wear the party hat  and no,  you can't leave before we play 'pin the tail on the donkey'! A very tipsy Crime Warp welcome and a very Happy Birthday to Peter Best.

Available on Amazon Click  here It's always a pleasure to feature Northern Irish Noir writers onto the blog and Brian McGilloway is no exception.  His DS Lucy Black series of books just go from strength to strength... with the added bonus that each of them can be read as standalones.  So,  Bad Blood is the fourth in the series and , as we've come to expect from McGilloway, it focuses on contemporary Northern Irish issues. Here's my review...

On this lovely Spring morning we welcome debut author Amanda Fleet to The Crime Warp.  Her novel The Wrong Kind of Clouds is a thriller that reaches from Edinburgh to Malawi.  It's great to have you here Amanda...

Hi Crime Warper's, it's summer, it's good to be alive and I'm happy so.... today on The Crime Warp I am giving away a signed copy of each of my two books Unquiet Souls and Uncoiled Lies to one lucky person.  Read on to find out what you need to do!

As a ‘crimebibliophile’   (I just made that word up, catchy isn’t it?), I thought I was familiar with  just about every premise possible for a crime or mystery novel. That is until ‘Strange Magic’ landed on my bedside table. 'Strange Magic' is set in Essex (and don’t you dare allude to ‘Essex Girls’ or the main protagonist Rosie Strange will assault you, at least verbally. That is, if she can find time between her manis and pedis and her hunt for the bones of a witch, executed in the 16 th century during the height of the persecution of witches.) Rosie, a matter-of-fact sort of woman and benefit fraud investigator, inherits a witch museum from her estranged Granddaddy Septimus. Wanting to sell the place, Rosie visits the ramshackle museum where she encounters the dishy curator Sam Stone. Soon the two of them become embroiled in a sort of English road trip to chase after said bones, needed to save the life of a little boy.   And the plan to sell the museum slips int...

Having just completed a marathon reading session which took me back to 1980s Soviet Russia I can categorically say: It was a helluva good read. A bit too violent in parts perhaps for this gentle soul, but what do you expect when your plot has flash-backs to the Battle of Stalingrad and the capture of Berlin in 1945, as well as the involvement of the KGB and sinister Cold War law enforcement types. Navigating the stormy waters of Communist Russia (no lame clichés like this in this very well-written thriller) is Major Tom Fox, banished to the British Embassy in Moscow due to shady under-cover activities in Northern Ireland. His exile was to involve a modest research project, but when the step daughter of the ambassador is kidnapped, Tom Fox is charged with finding the troubled teenager. More action man than desk jockey, he soon is not only on the trail of the kidnapper, but also discovers that a serial killer is on the loose. Are the dead bodies he finds connected to the girl ...

Leigh Russell has recently published Deadly Alibi, the ninth book, in her Geraldine Steel series and has sold over a million books.  She is an active member of the CWA and a great supporter of new talent in the genre.  The Crime Warp is proud to welcome her ...

A school like no other. Graduate from this one though, you don’t get a shiny certificate, you get violence and terrorism. Just the place for Jack Reacher. In so many ways this latest book by Lee Child is as entertaining as the others, as fast-moving, as engaging. However, there has been a development. Jack Reacher is not the man we have come to know. He is different now. The Jack Reacher we are familiar with stood up for the victim, he cared about justice, there was a layer of humanity under his capacity for fixing things the violent way. I wonder where that humanity went. In ‘Night School’, Reacher isn’t going after one baddie or a group of baddies, he is trying to stop a terrorist attack that could kill millions. A sign of the times. If we are trying to save millions of lives, perhaps we use a different standard of response, a more amoral one. More CIA than boy scout. The threat of terrorism makes us hard, ruthless. This new side of Reacher also affects his relationships, the ...

The Crime Warp has great pleasure in welcoming B.A Steadman to our den of iniquity.  Bernie is the author of the DI Hellier series of books which are acclaimed as being gripping and pacy - Just my cup of tea.  Talking of which Bernie, here's your coffee and I've splashed out on some shortbread fingers....

Need You Dead is number 13 in Peter James’ highly successful Roy Grace series.   I’ve followed Peter James for some time now.   He’s an author that’s genuinely at the top of his game and Need You Dead doesn’t disappoint.     I loved the idea behind the story in Need You Dead – a body in a bath – there’s something almost quaintly old fashioned about this idea, especially as at first it looks an open and shut case with a clear prime suspect. However, as Grace looks carefully at the case, a number of plausible scenarios present themselves, until an unexpected turn of events makes the case more sinister than Grace could ever have imagined. Roy Grace is the central character of Peter James' successful 13 book series and, for those blog tourists that don’t know him, here’s a peek at his file! I thoroughly recommend Need You Dead and you can read some of my previous reviews of Peter James’ novels, as well as an interview with Peter James hims...

On 22nd April , after being scared rigid, I reviewed You Can Run by Steve Mosby  (click here ).  I loved it and am now delighted to welcome this very talented, fellow Northern writer to The Crime Warp.  It's great to have you here, Steve Liz: Tell us a bit about your current book release. Steve: My latest book, You Can Run , is about the search for Available on Amazon Click  here a serial murderer called the Red River Killer. He’s been abducting women for nearly twenty years and sending letters to the police taunting them about the crimes, and the book begins when the police have finally identified him. The trouble is, even though they know who he is, they don’t know where he is. The main character, Will, is the detective in charge of the hunt, and he has a personal connection to the case that he has to keep secret from his colleagues. But as the investigation progresses, he comes to believe that not everything is as it seems. Liz: Where did t...

Paula Hawkins' new novel IntoThe Water has received a plethora of mixed reviews, with Val McDermid suggesting that the readers would be less than enamoured with it (click  here ) and The Sydney Evening Herald (click  here ) giving it the thumbs up. So, I headed over to Harrogate last night to hear about the book from Paula herself.

Available on Amazon Click  here In Dead Souls, Angela Marsons has definitely mixed it up by taking, her protagonist, Kim Stone, out of her comfort zone and giving her team a bit of independence... wonder how that works out?

Available on Amazon Click  here I've been waiting for ages for this one.  The tantalising Winters novella, Open Your Eyes,  released last year only served to whet my appetite for The Quiet Man. I love the fact that author James Carol explores Winters as a young man in his novellas  and also shows how his character has developed in his 'adult' novels.   Winter's back story is intriguing and Carol, a UK writer, slips  into the Americanisms in a seemingly effortless and totally convincing way.