THE SEA ON FIRE by Howard Cunnell

THE SEA ON FIRE Howard Cunnell Picador (www.picador.com) £12.99 Kim is a man in his mid-thirties who has spent the vast majority of the latter half of his life travelling the world and diving some of its most beautiful spots. Nowadays he is living in Brixton with his wife and three daughters, the call of […]

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THE INQUISITOR by Mark Allen Smith

THE INQUISITOR Mark Allen Smith (www.markallensmith.com) Simon & Schuster (www.simonandschuster.co.uk) £12.99 Geiger is a man without a past; his life started with his arrival, several years before, in New York. Before that, a black hole. After chance leads him to the local Mafia boss, he decides to go into Information Retrieval – torturing subjects to […]

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HHHH by Laurent Binet

HHHH Laurent Binet Translated by Sam Taylor Harvill Secker (www.vintage-books.co.uk/about-us/harvill-secker) £16.99 Released: 3rd May 2012 Laurent Binet’s debut novel, the oddly-named HHhH, appealed to me on two different levels: first of all, as an avid consumer of any and all information concerning the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and secondly, as a lover of the […]

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GRANDAD, THERE’S A HEAD ON THE BEACH by Colin Cotterill

GRANDAD, THERE’S A HEAD ON THE BEACH Colin Cotterill (www.colincotterill.com) Quercus (www.quercusbooks.co.uk) £16.99 When we first met Thai crime journalist Jimm Juree in last year’s Killed at the Whim of a Hat, she had been forcibly relocated to the somewhat backwards Maprao in southern Thailand with her mother – slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s – and […]

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STONEMOUTH by Iain Banks

STONEMOUTH Iain Banks (www.iain-banks.net) Little Brown (www.littlebrown.co.uk) £18.99 I didn’t have to read too far into Iain Banks’ latest novel, Stonemouth, to realise that I’ve been more than a little unfair to him over the course of the past few years. As a younger man, I read The Crow Road, having enjoyed the BBC television […]

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