Reviews 

I had seen this in the bookshops years ago, but avoided it as the marketing made it look luridly unpleasant. But it is repeatedly praised...

Good, but not one of his best. Murders in N Yorkshire meet sex trafficking and people smuggling from central Europe. Banks apart, the...

I have read a lot of the Inspector Van Veeteren books, but these were five stand alone novellas in which he doesn’t feature. Three have...

This must have been a present from one of the kids, as it has sat in my bookcase for years and I have no memory of having read it before....

I have read this before, I think many years ago and it is very good. Full of quite graphic sex, but a lot better than Shades of Grey. The...

Don’t know where this came from, possibly one of my Dad’s? Don’t think I have read it, or any of her (many) books before. About a female...

Good, and very different, despite feeling slightly negative about the author as a clever dick TV quiz show presenter. Set in a retirement...

Xmas present from Dan, signed by the author. Parallel plot lines; Clarke in Edinburgh doing conventional police work; Rebus now...

I am reading these in chronological order as I find the complete works pretty un-navigable on my kindle. I have read this before, but...

I think he is quite patchy and this is not one of his best (which are very good). A fictionalisation of the Kennedy assassination in (I...

I like Denise Mina, with her weird punk hair, and enjoyed her on the TV recently with Frank Skinner on Boswell & Johnson’s tour of...

A wonderful book, read it before (177 & 8) and still difficult. So, just to help out any other baffled reader, the even numbered chapters...

This is a case of ‘make a really poor TV adaptation of a book (Dublin Murders BBC 1)’ and drive a reader back to the original book. This...

I have enjoyed a couple of McBain’s recently, but not this one. The main plot (about the murder of both a baby and her child minder) was...

Haven’t read any for many years but 707 sparked my interest. This is a good and really brilliantly plotted whodunit – if you haven’t read...

I think this is the first Peter Robinson I ever read years ago and had little memory of the plot. I had forgotten about the lesbian...

I wanted a modern crime thriller after all this 19th century stuff and picked this (or rather her next book – I will always go back to...

As Banks says at some point, the title ruins a [reasonably] good Grateful Dead song. The one (which I have read several times before)...

Mc Bain is undoubtedly a clever writer and the general ‘police procedurals’ summary masks this. Here we have a play within a play within...

Never read any of these before, but very very good. Quasi detective novels set in Tudor England whose heroine/ detective Shardlake is a...