Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s The Newcomer is a crime novel with a difference: for here, as the title suggests, the victim doesn’t cede the story to the perpetrators or those investigating, but instead remains the main focus of our attention throughout. When her 29-year-old daughter Paulina goes missing on a sleepy pacific island, Judy Novak suspects the worst. Her fears are…
Curated by book squirrels
Blog tour
In A Ghost in the Throat Doireann Ní Ghríofa chronicles her personal response to a famous eighteenth-century poem in captivating prose and lays bare her own life while discovering that of the poet who wrote it. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem that…
Government clerk and reluctant spy Laurence Jago has good reason to conceal his French language prowess on gaining promotion and leaving the Foreign Office attics for the corridors of power in Leonora Nattrass’s debut novel Black Drop. July 1794, and the streets of London are filled with rumours of revolution. Political radical Thomas Hardy is to go on trial for…
I’m rounding off this week’s McIlvanney Prize blog tour in the run up to Bloody Scotland, which begins today and runs over the weekend in a hybrid format. (You can buy a digital pass or tickets to individual events by clicking on the links.) The Scottish International Crime Writing Festival runs the McIlvanney Prize, awarded to the best Scottish Crime…
A desperate phone-call in the middle of the night shatters so much more than the peace and tranquility of a family holiday in Gillian McAllister’s sixth novel That Night. During a family holiday in Italy, you get an urgent call from your sister. There’s been an accident: she hit a man with her car and he’s dead. She’s overcome with…
Someone might be getting away with murder in Romy Hausmann’s novel, Sleepless, an ambitious cat-and-mouse thriller, about guilt, coercive control, social inequality, retribution and justice. It’s over, my angel. Today I’m going to die. Just like her. He’s won.It’s been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she’s wanted nothing more than…
In Nicola Moriarty’s You Need to Know we meet the Lewis family, as they approach the first anniversary of a tragic accident in the run-up to Christmas, in itself a stressful enough time for most families. Jill’s three grown-up sons mean everything to her. She would do anything for her boys – protect them, lie for them, even die for…
Author Egan Hughes mixes a potent cocktail of past trauma and mental health issues with a young couple’s switch to rural living and our growing dependency on tech to create a fraught and unnerving suspense in Leave the Lights On. Their new ‘smart home’ is Joe’s dream. A remote cottage where everything – from the lighting to the locks –…
The locked-room murder mystery that she’s neatly stitched it into is entirely her own creation but the inspiration behind Hope Adams’ novel Dangerous Women is the Rajah quilt, an actual quilt made by convicts on their 1841 voyage of transportation from London to Van Diemen’s Land. (What we now know as Tasmania, Australia’s island state, following a name change in…
Emma Stonex takes as her inspiration for The Lamplighters a real event from 1900, where three lighthouse keepers vanished from the Flannan Isles Lighthouse on Eilean Mòr in the Outer Hebrides. Moving the action to Cornwall in 1972 and making hers a rock lighthouse, fifteen miles off the coast from Lands End, she creates a compelling locked room mystery together…