Missing on the Tube
~ No One Saw a Thing, by Andrea Mara ~ Bantam, 2023. There have been many novels written about children who are abducted, who have gone missing, who are held captive say in a school building, and all of these...
Mystery
Crimes on the Reservation
~ Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee Books ~ 1970 – 1996. The southwest wind picked up turbulence around the San Francisco Peaks, howled across the emptiness of the Moenkopi plateau, and made a thousand strange sounds in windows of the...
Jackson Brodie, at 60.
~ Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson ~ Penguin Random House, 2024. A new Kate Atkinson novel! And that too, featuring the inimitable Jackson Brodie, who I feared had retired forever at the end of Big...
Murder noir, by the Tiger Mother
Amy Chua burst into popular public consciousness with her third book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. An memoir about her strict Chinese-parenting approach, the book was both wildly entertaining and wildly controversial. Her next book also created controversy:...
A Library of One’s Own
Imagine a weatherproofed box of books outside a house where anyone is free to stop by and pick up a book, drop off a book, or just browse. It is such a charming idea, and seems so community-minded and friendly....
Foul Play in a Pristine Hotel
Novels about neurodivergent people are no longer unusual. After the well-deserved success of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog In the NightTime, there have been several novels with very memorably ‘different’ characters who have to adjust to an...
The Roaring ’20s
Kate Atkinson has great talent. Her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum was a lovely, if sometimes grim, multigenerational tale of a family in York, with a twist that is hinted at occasionally, and slowly becomes clear over...
Cubbon Park Crime
The success of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series has inspired a host of similar series: set in various locales with lots of local colour and female detectives solving mysteries by using their local knowledge as...
Traditional crime-fiction with a massive historical background
Although I began to read this book with eagerness, it is with reluctance that I am reviewing it. I had enjoyed several of Khan’s other novels featuring Inspector Chopra and the baby elephant, mostly set in Mumbai, a lighthearted set...
Flat and predictable
The Silent Patient screams ‘unreliable narrator’ from just about the first chapter. Alicia Berensen, a beautiful and talented artist, was found one night with a dead husband, a gun with her fingerprints, and slashed wrists. She survived, but has not...
A Wimsey century, but not in cricket
At times of tension one returns to the old, familiar, and comforting, and so it was that I spent the early part of 2022 re-reading Terry Pratchett and Dorothy Sayers. Sayers was born in 1897, and her first detective novel...
Playful bloodshed
Several people are enclosed in a manor house, or on an island, or in a train. The weather worsens, and they are trapped for a few days. And then a body is discovered. Over the course of the next few...
Irish Investigations
April in Spain refers to the month as well as a person. It’s not a particularly clever pun, and to me, this was reflective of the novel as well. Is it a mystery? Not a very successful one, as the...
East LA Investigations
A black unofficial private investigator on the mean streets of LA. Many readers will think immediately of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, but Joe Ide’s IQ deserves to stand on its own pedestal. IQ stands for Isaiah Quintana, a young man...
Murder at an elderly pace
This is a book which sets out to amuse and entertain. And to some extent, it does this well enough, offering a frothy, light read that carefully avoids straying into the frivolous or the trite. It is a whodunnit, but...
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