Any consumer of media content of any kind will slot right into the opening of this novel. In a gritty urban setting, a grizzled and world-weary cop looks down on a dead body, possibly a prostitute. There’s a street-smart young beat cop standing nearby who knows the local working girls. There’s an incompetent subordinate who might have contaminated the crime scene. Techs are taking samples; witnesses wait nearby to be questioned. Then comes something unexpected: our detective notices a woman walking nearby, then “realises” she isn’t actually there, and unsees her.
Continue reading The City & The City
In a small village near Cambridge, in the 1950s, a parish vicar named Sidney Chambers finds himself embroiled in a series of mysteries. He teams up with his drinking buddy on the local constabulary to get to the bottom of them, quizzing witnesses under the guise of pastoral care and generally sticking his nose into the business of his parishioners.
Continue reading Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death
At a high school in Southern California, five students are gathering for detention. They appear to fit into familiar categories: the loner geek; the honours student; the sports star; the pampered princess; the budding criminal. A noise draws them to the window: a car accident in the parking lot. When they turn back around, something has changed in the room which means that only four of them will leave it alive.
Continue reading One of us is Lying
Georges Simenon was inter-war France’s most famous writer of detective fiction, and Inspector Maigret is his most famous creation: built like a rugby player, sucking on his pipe, with the collar of his coat turned up against the Paris drizzle. A few years back, Penguin announced it would be reissuing one Simenon per month – a larger undertaking than it sounds, given the sheer volume of his output, not to mention the need for translation. This week, after years of good intentions, I finally read one of them.
Continue reading Pietr the Latvian
Brace yourself: this is a novel set partially in Whitechapel in the 1880s that does not so much as glance at Jack the Ripper. I know, right? What even are the 1880s in Whitechapel for? Well, in this case, a young man working as a clerk for the Home Office is saved from a bomb set by Irish Republicans by a watch made by a clairvoyant Japanese watchmaker, so…sorry you asked?
Continue reading The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
Before reading this book, I spent about a month reading nothing but novels written by women in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of them were mystery novels. Ninety per cent of the action took place in drawing rooms. The ritual of tea was interrupted for no possible emergency. There were some dead bodies scattered about, but the more serious problem was the difficulty of getting decent servants. It was heaven.
My poor, fragile brain was not prepared for The North Water. Continue reading The North Water
As a person who has had a love of Agatha Christie inculcated in me from the years of my earliest literacy by older female relatives on both sides of my family, I am the first to admit that I am less than conversant in other great mystery novelists of the same period. It took me until my 30s to discover John Dickson Carr, for example – arguably the greatest of the so-called “locked room mystery” writers. My family bookshelves just didn’t deign to notice the existence of any detectives that weren’t Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, or (grudgingly) Tommy and Tuppence Beresford*. No surprises, then, that Patricia Wentworth has only just appeared on the horizon of my literary radar**.
Continue reading Grey Mask ff
In the not-too-distant future, a flu-like epidemic has swept the globe. Of those who aren’t killed outright, a small but significant proportion develop a neurological complication that renders them conscious but paralysed – the Lock Ins of the title. Referred to as “Hadens” after a former (fictional) FLOTUS, an early contractor of the syndrome, they are implanted with complex nano-technology and able to interact with the outside world through the use of cybernetic prostheses. So yeah. Mind-controlled robots. A minuscule number of individuals are also left with their neurological structures affected in such a way that they can interface with Hadens, acting for short periods as their proxies (known as “integrators”).
Continue reading Lock In
It’s no secret that I’m a massive fan of Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and its sequels, but for some reason I had never ventured into any of his other novels. Fforde did a live chat with the Guardian recently, which reminded me of this fact, and prompted me to give this series, “Nursery Crimes”, a go.
Continue reading The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear
Billy Graves, NYPD, is a cop with a history, a member of a group of mostly-now-ex-detectives each of whom has a personal White Whale, a One That Got Away. When their Whites start turning up dead, Billy is forced to confront the possibility that one or more of his friends might be involved. Meanwhile, his family is the target of a series of unsettling and increasingly violent incidents at the hands (unbeknownst to him) of one of his colleagues.
Continue reading The Whites
