The Crime Warp

I reviewed another of Lee Goldberg’s books, Watch Me Die, a while ago.   I didn’t realise that as well as writing novels, Goldberg had also been involved in TV scriptwriting, with shows such as Monk, Diagnosis Murder and Hunter under his belt.   His Amazon profile is so tongue in check, I’m not sure whether he actually has two Edgar Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America or not. Anyway, I so enjoyed Watch Me Die , that I thought I’d try another of his books.   I didn’t want to read TV spinoffs of Monk and Diagnosis Murder , so I looked at his other novels and found My Gun Has Bullets.   Intrigued by the title, I got the book….This is what I found. It’s a book best described as a rude and raucous romp through Hollywood.   The protagonist is former Beverly Hills Police Officer Charlie Willis.   When he was still a proper police officer, Willis pulled over a speeding Rolls Royce driven by Esther Radcliffe, geriatric st...

R D Wingfield’s three original Frost books were some of the first crime novels that I read back in 1992, just as the TV series came out.   I loved the books as the Frost character brought this almost anarchic quality to them.   As you read the book, you lost all sense of time as Frost rushed round, juggling multiple cases, dragging the latest hapless DC with him, in an increasingly sleep deprived state, finally solving all the cases much to Mullett’s disgust.   I read all of Wingfield’s later Frost books and when he died in 2007 I thought that would be the end of Frost. I was a little apprehensive when I saw that James Henry was writing a series of prequels to the Frost series, but decided to try the first book.   I wondered whether someone else would be able to capture both the style of writing and Frost’s character, which in the books is so different to that portrayed by David Jason in the TV series A Touch of Frost.   I wasn’t disappointed and...

I’ve chosen just three books for November as I’m going to try and concentrate on posting more individual book reviews in the run up to Christmas.   Of this month's picks, only The Late Scholar hasn’t yet been published, although with a 5 December publication date it’s not so far away.   I think you’ll like the mix – new author, established author and a bit of cosy – what else could you ask for?   Romancrimeblogger   Down Among the Dead Men by Ed Chatterton: This is Chatterton’s second book, featuring newly promoted DCI Frank Keane and the Major Incident Team in Liverpool.   The crime scene is a dead husband and wife, which looks initially like a murder-suicide.   However, the couple’s teenage son Nicky is missing.   Uncertain whether he is looking for the killer or another victim, Keane discovers a link between the missing boy and his holiday job on a film being shot in the city.   Keane knows time is running out to find Ni...

When I started writing this post I wasn’t quite sure how I would bring the three parts together seamlessly.   I think I’ve got it and hope you think so too. I’ll start with our birthday (it was actually 29 th October, but it’s taken me a little longer than planned to get this post written) – The Crime Warp is one year old, and we’re all really chuffed with how well it’s taken off.   The Crime Warp now gets over a thousand hits a month and we believe that’s because we’ve kept to our aim of featuring the newest and best in contemporary crime fiction.   We’ve focused mainly on book reviews, but also had author interviews and occasional giveaway competition such as the signed David Baldacci novel The Hit  ( and there’s another giveaway at the end of this post! ).  What we’ve been surprised about is that over a third of our hits are from outside the UK.   Many are from the US and there are others from as far afield as Europe, the Far East and even Austr...