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…
Kate Marshall dives into a new case in Shallow Sands, the second book in this exciting new series from Robert Bryndza, when an initial discovery of hers brings something altogether more disturbing to the surface. When Kate Marshall finds the bloated body of a young man floating in the Shadow Sands reservoir, the authorities label it a tragic accident. But…
In Jennie Fields’ Cold War novel Atomic Love, a once brilliant scientist, who was fired from the Manhattan Project, finds herself wrestling with intense and conflicting emotions when an ex-colleague and former lover suddenly comes back into her life and the FBI pressures her to get close to him again. Chicago, 1950. Rosalind Porter has always defied expectations – in…
Beth Cartwright’s debut novel Feathertide is an enchanting tale of one young girl’s quest to find the father she’s never known. Born covered in the feathers of a bird, and kept hidden in a crumbling house full of secrets, Marea has always known she was different, but never known why. And so to find answers, she goes in search of…
Witnessing a fatal accident involving an acquaintance of hers, on the same day that her granddaughter arrives for a prolonged stay, proves to be a watershed moment not only for Astrid Strick but also her family in All Adults Here, the latest novel from Emma Straub. Astrid Strick has always tried to do her best for her three children. Now,…
