Category Archives: Reviews

First published in 1984, and set several years in the future, Frederick Forsyth’s ninth novel, The Fourth Protocol, is a complex but superbly written espionage story, set during the Cold War, involving Russia’s interference in the UK’s 1987 general election. … Continue reading →

Jess Walker is in her first year at a university in East Anglia, studying an aspect of the works of Agatha Christie. There she falls under the spell of her tutor, Lorna Clay, who happens to be a successful novelist … Continue reading →

I first came across the fiction of M John Harrison in the late 80s and early 90s, in the anthologies edited by Stephen Jones – the annual Best New Horror and his original Dark Terrors series. His writing, on the … Continue reading →

Such is the size of my teetering pile of ‘to-be-read’ books that rarely nowadays do I approach the end of a book with a feeling of regret. And yet that’s exactly what I did as I neared the end of … Continue reading →

For several years the British Library have been publishing their Crime Classics series, containing titles from the ‘golden age’ of detective fiction and beyond. Some of them are quite well-known, others more obscure. This particular novel, Family Matters, originally published … Continue reading →

Patricia Highsmith wrote five novels featuring the murderous anti-hero Tom Ripley, starting with The Talented Mr Ripley in 1955. Ripley Under Ground is the sequel, published in 1970. It picks up with him living in a small town just outside … Continue reading →

Books to Die For is a non-fiction catalogue of short essays, all written by mystery and thriller authors, recommending a crime novel that they feel deserves celebrating. There are well over a hundred of these, arranged in chronological order starting … Continue reading →

John Banville is a critically acclaimed author. His literary novels have won the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Under the … Continue reading →

The Searching Dead is published by Flame Tree Press (following its original publication several years ago in a limited edition by PS Publishing) and is the first part of Ramsey Campbell’s Daoloth trilogy, to be followed by Born to the … Continue reading →

London Gothic is Nicholas Royle’s fourth collection of short stories, published by Confingo Publishing. It contains 15 stories, covering a period between 2000 – 2020, and includes seven original tales. I first came across the fiction of Nicholas Royle in … Continue reading →