Annie Ward mixes together a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs and alcohol with all the suspicion, gossip and lies circulating among the pushy soccer moms, its charismatic sports coach, and staff at an elite private school in the Colorado mountains to great effect in The Lying Club. At an elite private school nestled in the Colorado mountains, a tangled web…
Curated by book squirrels
Book reviews
When six friends book a weekend stay at a remote barn on the Northumberland moors, a violent overnight storm exposes the cracks in their relationships, some of which could prove fatal in Gilly Macmillan’s The Long Weekend. In an isolated retreat, deep in the Northumbria moors, three women arrive for a weekend getaway. Their husbands will be joining them in…
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…
Caroline Smailes’ novel, The Unwrapping of Theodora Quirke, could be exactly the read you need this festive season, whether you string fairy lights everywhere at the earliest opportunity or curse when you hear the opening bars of a Christmas song. And now’s the perfect time to tell you all about it. Here’s why: Yesterday (6 December) was the feast day…
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…
Mary Beth Keane’s novel The Walking People is a mesmerising family story spanning more than fifty years. It crosses the Atlantic from west coast Ireland to New York on the Eastern Seaboard, where what starts out as a reluctant immigrant’s journey ultimately becomes a real voyage of self-discovery for one young woman. 1960s Rural Ireland. Greta Cahill must abandon her…
Deputy Coroner Clay Edison returns for a case which puts his loyalties and limits of endurance to the test in The Burning, the latest collaboration from father and son writing team, Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman. When a wealthy man is found murdered in his hilltop home, Deputy Coroner Clay Edison is shocked to discover a link to his own brother…
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…
In her latest novel, The Couple at No.9, Claire Douglas explores the nightmare scenario of what happens when building work unearths human remains in the back garden of a young couple’s new home. When pregnant Saffron Cutler moves into 9 Skelton Place with boyfriend Tom and sets about renovations, the last thing she expects is builders uncovering a body. Two bodies, in…