RUSH OF BLOOD by Mark Billingham

RUSH OF BLOOD Mark Billingham (www.markbillingham.com) Little, Brown Book Group (www.littlebrown.co.uk) £16.99 Released: 2nd August 2012 Six Brits – three couples – meet at the pool of a Florida Keys resort while on holiday, and become friendly over the course of the two-week holiday. On their last day, a child goes missing – a fourteen-year-old […]

COLD HANDS by John J. Niven

COLD HANDS John J. Niven William Heinemann (http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/…/william-heinemann) £12.99 Released: 2nd August 2012 Donnie Miller has it all: beautiful wife and son, perfect home in the wilds of Saskatchewan and the sort of comfort that comes from having a rich father-in-law who is generous to a fault with his daughter and grandson. It’s a far […]

LOW TOWN: THE STRAIGHT RAZOR CURE by Daniel Polansky

THE STRAIGHT RAZOR CURE (LOW TOWN 1) Daniel Polansky (www.danielpolansky.com) Hodder (hodder.co.uk) £7.99 Warden is a drug dealer and hard man on the streets of Low Town. Ex-soldier, ex-lawman, it is only his past that keeps him above suspicion when he stumbles upon the body of a young girl. When a second body is found, […]

BED OF NAILS by Antonin Varenne

BED OF NAILS Antonin Varenne Translated by Siân Reynolds MacLehose Press (maclehosepress.com) £18.99 When his friend kills himself on stage in a seedy nightclub in Paris, John Nichols leaves the isolation of his camp in southern France’s Lot and heads to the country’s capital to identify the body. But something doesn’t quite feel right, and […]

COLD GRAVE by Craig Robertson

COLD GRAVE Craig Robertson Simon & Schuster (www.simonandschuster.co.uk) £12.99 There is, it would seem, an unwritten rule for writers of cop-centric series that states that at some point the cop must become involved in an off-the-books investigation. Craig Robertson’s third novel, Cold Grave, sees the return of series characters Rachel Narey and Tony Winter, and […]

THE BLACK PATH by Åsa Larsson

THE BLACK PATH Åsa Larsson Translated by Marlaine Delargy MacLehose Press (maclehosepress.com) £18.99 Late last summer, MacLehose Press published Åsa Larsson’s Until Thy Wrath Be Past. Despite multiple attempts in my review to convince people that it was the third book in the series, it turns out that it was, actually, the fourth. MacLehose’s latest […]

IN HER BLOOD by Annie Hauxwell

IN HER BLOOD Annie Hauxwell (www.anniehauxwell.com) William Heinemann (www.randomhouse.co.uk/…/william-heinemann) £12.99 Catherine Berlin is an investigator for the Financial Services Authority, working as part of a task force whose remit is to clamp down on London’s illegal loan shark businesses. Working with an informant she knows only as ‘Juliet Bravo’, Berlin continues an investigation into East […]

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 […]

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 […]

THE KEY by Simon Toyne

THE KEY Simon Toyne (simontoyne.net) HarperCollins (www.harpercollins.co.uk) £12.99 Released: 12th April 2012 Regular visitors may remember that around this time last year, I reviewed Simon Toyne’s debut novel, the wonderful thriller, Sanctus. I liked it so much that it ended up on my best of the year list. So it was with that all-too-familiar mix […]