A COLD SEASON by Alison Littlewood

A COLD SEASON Alison Littlewood (www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk) Jo Fletcher Books (www.jofletcherbooks.com) [Also published as a signed limited edition hardcover by PS Publishing (www.pspublishing.co.uk)] £7.99 Following the death of her husband in Afghanistan, Cass decides to start anew. Packing up her son, Ben, she heads for the small village of Darnshaw, nestled in the Yorkshire Moors, where […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE by Stephen King

THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE Stephen King (www.stephenking.com) [See here for information on The Dark Tower] Hodder (hodder.co.uk) £19.99 Released: 24th April I have mentioned before my love for the work of Stephen King, so it’s difficult to describe how excited I was to find his latest novel – a Dark Tower novel, no less […]

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 […]

PURE by Julianna Baggott

PURE Julianna Baggott (www.juliannabaggott.com) Headline Books (www.headline.co.uk) £14.99 As a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, I am always excited to see what new worlds can spring forth from the minds of writers whose contemplations all start at the same point: what if the world as we know it ended? In Pure, Julianna Baggott gives us a […]

SORRY by Zoran Drvenkar

SORRY Zoran Drvenkar (www.drvenkar.de) Translated by Shaun Whiteside Blue Door (www.harpercollins.co.uk/…/blue-door) £12.99 I will admit that when I saw the cover of Zoran Drvenkar’s Sorry – the first of the German author’s novels to be translated into English – my first thought was that it was a novel aimed at a young adult audience. What […]