Late Summer Recommendations

Today I’d like to introduce part 1 of a selection of interesting crime and mystery books. I hope you will find something that will pique your interest and keep you company as the nights draw in and the weather turns. 

Exile by James Swallow: The second spy thriller featuring disgraced MI6 spy Marc Dane. A rollercoaster of action involving Somali pirates, vicious Eastern European gangs, a nuclear terrorist threat… A worthy follow-on to the popular ‘Nomad’. Published in 2017 by Zaffre.

I’ll follow that with something unusual: The Parentations by Kate Mayfield. It’s not a crime novel but a sort of time-travel magical fiction novel with an element of mystery. Spanning three centuries in a London and Iceland setting, several related individuals find themselves having to guard a child from a gang who to seek to kidnap the boy to discover the secret that binds these mysterious people.

Would you want to be immortal? How many lifetimes would you last before wanting to die? On the other hand, how would you feel if the spring that provided the potion to keep you immortal had finally run dry? I have always been morbidly fascinated by what people will do to stay alive, as if life were the ultimate prize and had to be held onto at all cost. 

A well-written, ambitious and imaginative novel with a dark gothic feel – this is not the sort of book you finish on a flight. At 479 pages, The Parentations will keep you going and engage you intellectually as well as emotionally. It was first published in March 2018 by Point Blank, in Hardback for £14.99.

From one dark book to another, perhaps even darker. The Feed by Nick Clark Windo. With this post-apocalyptic suspenseful thriller we have arrived firmly in the digital age. If in The Parentations you had to deal with the dependence on a potion that grants immortality, in this book, it’s the addiction to The Feed – a kind of dystopian digital reservoir of all your memories, knowledge, your whole identity in fact. 

Do you know anyone addicted to their phone? Well, our smart phones and computers are peanuts compared to the Feed, because when it collapses, the world ends – how can someone exist without The Feed? Tom and Kate can, because they avoided this addiction, but then their little girl goes missing. How can they find her in a collapsing world without technology?

Published by Headline in January 2018, Hardback £16.99.