I’m comfort reading this week. I’m in the mood for something easy on the imagination but I don’t want to re-read anything. So, I’ve selected a couple of thrillers by authors whose previous books I’ve enjoyed. The books were written ten years apart, with one of them due for publication on 1st September this year. One is a thriller set in Cardiff in Wales, the other in Malibu in California. One is a standalone novel about a neurodivergent character. One is the start of a new series.

I’m hoping to relax into both of them and let everything else slip away.

‘Rubbernecker’ by Belinda Bauer (2013)

I read Belinda Bauer’s thriller ‘Snap‘ five years ago, when it was on the 2018 Man Booker Prize Longlist. The book surprised me by being a good genre read and by having enough ‘literary’ content to be nominated for the Man Booker.

I’ve been meaning to read more of her stuff ever since but good intentions don’t get books read.

‘Rubbernecker‘ was her fourth novel and her first standalone book. It calls to me because it centres around a young man with asperger’s who is studying anantomy at university because, following the death of his father, he is very focused on understanding exactly how life becomes death. Then he realises that the body he is dissecting at college was a murder victim and that he needs to prove that before he finishes destroying the evidence.

OK, that may not strike you as a comfort read but I’m looking forward to settling in to it.

Belinda Bauer is a British writer of crime novels. She grew up in England and South Africa but later moved to Wales, where she worked as a court reporter in Cardiff.

Bauer’s debut novel, Blacklands (2009), won the British Crime Writers’ Association‘s Gold Dagger award for the best crime novel of 2010. 

Her fourth novel, Rubbernecker (2013) won the 2014 Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.

Bauer is a former journalist and screenwriter; she won the Carl Foreman BAFTA for her screenplay The Locker Room.

‘Malibu Burning’ – Sharpe & Walker #1 -by Lee Goldberg (2023)

I loved Lee Goldberg’s Eve Ronin series, about a police officer who leverages a viral video of her taking down a celebrity tough guy actor while she was off-duty into a promotion to Detective and the trouble that that causes her.

When I saw that he had a new series coming out and that it was available for free as an Amazon First Read, I had to get a copy.

I admire the way Lee Goldberg grounds even his most bizarre stories in things that really happen in California, populates the story with larger-than-life but believable main characters, adds a twisty plot and flavours the whole thing with a dry sense of humour that always works for me.

I’m looking forward to having a new series to read.

Lee Goldberg is an American author, screenwriter, publisher and producer.

He has published over forty books . He his best known for his two most recent series, the four Iain Ludlow thrillers that started with True Fiction, and the four Eve Ronin police procedurals that started with Lost Hills. 

He co-wrote the Kate O’Hare & Nicolas Fox novels with Janet Evanovitch.

His TV crime series, include Monk, Diagnosis Murder, Spenser, Martial Law and The Glades