The Killing of Bobbi Lomax – Cal Moriarty
Hypnotism, antique books and coins, and nameless dealers. Forgery and a bankrupt property company that left thousands of angry investors in the lurch. Vicious local politics and a religious sect, the Faith, that’s one hundred and fifty years old, with a mafia-like hierarchy and a bigamist founder. Add three gruesome bombings with two dead and ...
Arab Jazz – Karim Miské
‘Arab Jazz’ by Karim Miské (translated by Sam Gordon) marks the crime fiction debut of this French documentary film-maker of mixed Mauritanian and French blood. It is an unusual, original and seductive story, formally a police procedural novel but with a style, structure and pace that single it out from many of its current counterparts. ...
Past Crimes – Glen Erik Hamilton
‘Past Crimes’ by Glen Erik Hamilton is another fine crime novel in which the police forces don’t take centre stage investigating and solving a crime. You could call it a new trend, were it not for the fact that ‘amateur’ sleuths were very much the protagonists in the earliest days of modern crime fiction, from Conan ...
A Good Place to Die – James Buchan
‘A Good Place to Die’ by James Buchan is by no means a conventional crime novel, and even as a thriller it doesn’t quite fit the established canon. Yet it’s a brilliant story that contains in equal parts suspense, action and contemplation, spiced up by the exotic flavour of life (and love, and death) in ...
White Crocodile – K. T. Medina
‘White Crocodile’, the outstanding debut novel by K. T. Medina, will make you travel to a far-away and disturbing world. The contemporary Cambodia she portrays is a place of extremes: the heat and humidity, the abject poverty of its underclass, brutalised by the Khmer Rouge oppression until 1991 and not much better off under the new ...
Kolymsky Heights – Lionel Davidson
‘Kolymsky Heights’ by Lionel Davidson was first published in 1994 and, having re-read this epic, atmospheric thriller in Faber & Faber’s fine 2015 edition I was left to reflect on what has changed in world politics and thriller fiction since the novel’s first publication, and on what has remained the same. Far-away, mysterious, brooding Russia ...
A Killing Winter – Tom Callaghan
Cruel as a winter in Kyrgyzstan. Brutal like the fiercely-fought revolutions that have savaged this Central Asia republic, wedged between Uzbekistan and China. ‘A Killing Winter’, debut novel by Tom Callaghan, hurls the reader in a world that’s very far from the comfortable one we know. A world of corruption, poverty, tribal culture and crushed ...
The Girl in the Red Coat – Kate Hamer
‘The Girl in the Red Coat’, debut novel by Kate Hamer, is a stunning story which straddles genres with seductive ease and makes you turn the pages addictively. It’s a XXIst century fairy tale with characters so real you’ll feel you just know someone like them. At the same time it’s very close to being ...
