I reviewed Attica Locke’s debut novel Black Water Rising back in 2014 and wasn’t particularly impressed at the time. The Cutting Season, her second novel is a more accomplished and enjoyable crime novel. Almost all the action of The Cutting Season takes place in a historic Louisiana mansion called Belle Vie, once a working sugar…
I have a few Laura Lippman books in the 746 but hadn’t read any before trying her most recent book, Sunburn, last year. I loved Sunburn and thought it was stylish and well-written, so decided to have a look and see if her back catalogue contained any other gems. What the Dead Know is a…
Read more No 484 What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman – Book 1 of #20booksofsummer20
The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina is the second in the Alex Morrow series and it opens in a shocking fashion with a young woman returning to her dead mother’s house, only to find that she is not alone. A nightmare ensues that will engulf several families before anyone can wake up.…
I have never read Megan Abbott before, but the critical acclaim for her new novel drove me back into the 746 to pick up one of her earlier works, her third novel The Song is You. This is a brilliant slice of neo-noir crime fiction, taking a real life story as inspiration to turn the…
I’m a big fan of Jo Nesbo and his dark, troubled creation Harry Hole. Nesbo has just published The Thirst, his eleventh in the Harry Hole series. I’ve read almost all the books, but thought I would go back to the beginning and read The Bat, the first Harry Hole novel written in 1997 but…
Things weren’t great for Maeve Kerrigan at the end of The Burning, the first in the series of crime novels by Jane Casey. Attacked by a serial killer; dealing with the machismo and misogyny of her fellow police officers and starting a perilous relationship with her colleague Rob Langton had left Kerrigan in a fragile…
In Claire McGowan’s incredibly assured debut novel The Lost, forensic psychologist Paula Maguire looks at the photographs of a group of missing girls and notes All of them lost, in their own ways The same could be said for all the characters in this tightly plotted and intricately woven thriller as McGowan explores…
It turns out that Fever of the Bone is the sixth novel in a series featuring profiler Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan, but it is my first experience of Val McDermid. As often happens when you dip into a series in the wrong order, much time is spent just working out who is who…
By Crooked Cat author, Val Penny
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