Category Archives: REVIEWS

A themed anthology can sometimes be a tricky thing, often the curate’s egg of the literary world. On one hand you might get stories that act almost as a pastiche of the source theme, either tonally or in prose style … Continue reading →

John Banville is an award winning author of literary fiction, one with an impeccable writing career spanning more than half a century. Since 2006, under the pen-name Benjamin Black, he has published a series of crime novels featuring the forensic … Continue reading →

Cat lives in Los Angeles, far away from 36 Westeryk Road, the imposing gothic house in Edinburgh where she and her estranged twin sister, El, grew up. As girls, they invented Mirrorland, a dark, imaginary place under the pantry stairs full … Continue reading →

Published in 1983, Black Water, edited by Argentine-born Canadian writer Alberto Manguel, is a mammoth short-story anthology, collecting together 72 fantastic tales from around the world (many of them translated from their original language). Contained within are disquieting stories, fragments … Continue reading →

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 →