The Crime Warp

Mari Hannah is chair of this years Theakston's Old Peculier crime festival in Harrogate as well as being their reader in residence. This year she'll be leading the festival' Big Read. She is also a multi award winning author, and once you've read The Scandal , you'll now why. Number three in Mari Hannah's Oliver and Stone series set in Northumbria, The Scandal is a gritty, well researched, edgy police procedural with a main protagonist with flaws as well as merits. DS Frankie Oliver, is nicely balanced by her boss and work partner DCI David Stone. Don't you just love it when the dynamics between the two lead detectives drive the plot forward? Mari Hannah is a practiced hand at the police procedural and the story trots along at a fair old pace. The Blurb When an young man is found stabbed to death in a side street in Newcastle city centre in the run up to Christmas, it looks like a botched robbery to DCI David Stone. But when DS Frankie...

Available here McIlvanny Crime book of the year 2017 long-listed author, Owen Mullen may be better known for his gritty PI Charlie Cameron series or his psychological thriller In Harm's Way, but I suspect that  Out of the Silence  will become his best known and most highly acclaimed novel to date.  Set in Pakistan moving between rural villages and Lahore, it is one of those books that really does transport you to another country, another culture, a different way of life ... and it does so with sensitivity and aplomb.  It is one book that I won't forget in a hurry, that's for sure. The Blurb  Star investigative reporter Ralph Buchanan’s glory days are behind him. His newspaper has banished him abroad, not knowing the greatest moment of his long career is waiting for him there. When Simone Jasnin asks him to help expose a grave injustice, he finds himself embroiled in a harrowing tale that began in a dusty rural settlement, settin...

Kenny ‘Happy’ Drummond, given weeks to live embarks on a journey to rectify any past mistakes in his life for the people who matter to him.   When he initially fails to locate his childhood protector Callie he delves deeper only to discover that she’s disappeared and her husband is suspected of being responsible.  With seizures debilitating him he embarks on a radical course of action with dark repercussions. 

kindle £6.99 HB £9 In this, the 19th Harry Bosch book Connelly writes a tight plot with a huge sentimental nod to Bosch cases past catching the essence of Harry Bosch as he’s evolved –  In many ways (for me anyway) The Burning Room is reminiscent of John Harvey’s final Charlie Resnick book Darkness Darkness – Relax though I don’t think this is the final Harry Bosch book!

Book Review: The Skeleton Road .   Ms McDermid takes us from Buildering up a derelict school to experiencing   war torn Croatia through the eyes of a woman in love, to the cloistered elite of Oxford Academia. – not bad considering she’s recently been busy having mortuaries named after her, writing her take on Northanger Abbey and having her Forensics Book published.

I was hooked by Chris Ewan’s Safe House , I loved Dead Line and now, in my eyes, he's scored a hat trick because I was totally enthralled by Dark Tides from start to finish.  There are few male authors who would dare to write with a woman's voice and fewer who could do it as well as Chris Ewan has done in Dark Tides.