I’m very pleased to have stumbled upon Charlotte Armstrong’s books. Her writing feels fresh and is full of energy. Mischief was a great example of a 1950s American thriller. It was like having a Hitchcock movie playing in my head.

My full review is HERE

 The Secret Hours is Mick Herron’s latest book and I think it’s his best.

It has a depressingly accurate contemporary timeline, set in London, that displays just how broken our government is and a 1990s timeline, set in Berlin after the fall of the wall, that gives the backstory on two key characters from the Slough House series.

Those Who Wish Me Dead is a thriller set in the forests in the mountains of Montana and Wyoming.

To me, it was a perfect example of how an action-packed thriller should be constructed: real people, a strong sense of place, unique technical knowledge, sustained tension, rising body count and the theme of the meaning of survival running through it all.

Feed Them Silence is set in the near future and is about a scientist who has developed implant technology that enables a direct mind-to-mind link with an animal that has had a is so focused on making her work a success that she fails to understand how ethically compromised her work is.

This is a very powerful novella that felt immediate and personal while tackling some big themes. I enjoyed how sharing the consciousness of a wolf was imagined and the climate change background, but what sold me on the book was the acute observation of the relationship between the scientist and her wife.

We Spread is a beautifully written book told entirely from the point of view of a woman in her eighties who may be being gaslighted, or may be losing her mind, or may simply be getting old. It’s hard for her to tell. Whatever the cause, her growing anxiety as she feels herself losing control of her life is palpable.

She’s found herself in a small, luxurious elder care facility, a grand house in a remote location surrounded by a forest she is not permitted to enter and run by a scientist with an interest in delaying or preventing ageing. 

There was a lot of truth about ageing in this book and a fairly sober consideration of whether living forever has any meaning and whether or not we are more than our memories.

I saw the first series of Cardinal, the TV adaptation of Forty Words For Sorrow, a few years ago and enjoyed the way it created an atmosphere of distrust and threat that was partly embodied by the fierce cold weather in which most of the action took place.

It turns out that the TV version was fairly faithful to the book but there were, inevitably, simplifications so there was enough about the book that was different to keep it feeling fresh.

Both of the main detectives are well-drawn and believably human. I liked how their relationship developed from a starting point of (well-deserved) mutual suspicion to something that might become a partnership, albeit a partnership between two naturally solitary people.

The atmosphere of the novel is dolorous but not hopeless. The weather and the landscape are almost characters in their own right. The plot was twisty and there are a couple of side plots to make things interesting. I’ll be back for the rest of the series.

In Sparkling Cyanide, Agatha Christie experimented very successfully with a new way of structuring a murder mystery. She takes the reader directly inside the memories of the six people who were present on the night that Rosemary Barton died after drinking a glass of champagne dosed with cyanide.

I loved that, with each person’s remembrance, my picture of Rosemary Barton and of the people she had been sharing a table with, shifted. It was refreshing not to have my impressions filtered through the questions asked by a detective. I felt as if I got to meet each person. Best of all, having met them all and assembled all the facts, I realised that while I knew a lot about them and I knew whether I liked them and whether I trusted them and whether they trusted each other, I still had no idea who the murderer was of how the murder was done. 

My full review is HERE

InThe Blood follows on the heels of the events in Sunglasses After Dark, but it has a distinctive character of its own.

The first book strutted onto the stage of my imagination with all the bravado of the young tough and talented and demanded my attention, looking me in the eyes and saying with confidence that felt like a threat, ‘My name is Sonja Blue and you’ve never met anyone like me’. It was chaotic and bloody and I really hadn’t met anyone quite like Sonja before.

In The Blood is a more considered story although still full of energy. There’s a well-structured plot, a little less random violence and a lot more development of Sonja’s character.

I liked the introduction of Palmer, a human PI who Sonja recruits as a partner. His involvement broadened the scope of the action and allowed the reader to see Sonja through a new pair of eyes.

Money Shot is a Hard-boiled crime novel that is very different from the typical macho gumshoe novel. It’s not about solving a mystery. It’s about revenge.

It opens with our heroine, Angel Dare, naked and bound hand and foot in the trunk of a car in a remote lot. She’s been left for dead but she’s still breathing. A fact that the man who tried to kill her will come to regret. 

This is not a comfortable or cosy book. It’s an unflinching look at some terrible people doing some nasty things. It’s a story of a woman coming to understand that her old life is gone, that her friends are either dead or have betrayed her or both and deciding that none of that is going to stop her from killing the men who did this to her. 

What kept me wading through the soulless sex, the vicious violence, the grimly plausible exploitation and the constant bloodshed was Angel Dare herself. She felt very real to me and what happened to her was truly awful. What she did about it wasn’t any better. The price she paid for it may even have been worse but I could see it happening.

My full review is HERE

Set in Australia, Hades is a police thriller about a serial killer in Australia. What appealed to me about it was that it declined to follow the genre norms and cut its own bloody and surprising path to resolution.

It’s the first book I’ve read where the police seem to be the dangerous ones. The investigation is carried out by a pair of psychopathic brother and sister twins, one of whom is partnered with a violent angry man who takes drugs and beats his wife. If they’re the good guys, you can imagine how bad the bad guy is.

I enjoyed the dual timeline and dual point-of-view storytelling and admired how well the narrative structure maintained the tension while developing the characters.

In ‘Final Girls‘ Mira Grant has interwoven tropes from Mad Scientist Science Fiction thrillers and Halloween / Evil Dead horror movies to deliver a story that is original, exciting and often surprising.

The whole story is told with that same mix of immediacy and distance that I associate with fairy tales and horror stories told to a group around a campfire. You see what the protagonists are doing and their reactions, emotions and some of their thoughts are shared with you but you never really get inside the protagonists’ heads. I liked this approach. It kept me firmly in the realm of storytelling and reminded me of the power stories have over how we see the world and each other.

My full review is HERE

Dark Tales is a collection of seventeen disturbing stories. They’re not horror stories. They’re not built to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, at least, not at first.  They’re stories that you recognise immediately as being a little ‘off’ in a way that disturbs you even though you can’t name the source of your unease and the longer that inability to name what is wrong continues, the more disturbing the stories become.

These are stories that wear ordinariness like a mask. It’s an ordinariness that you immediately distrust, a normality that triggers a sort of uncanny valley response that is quietly unnerving.

These stories have barbs that bury themselves in your imagination, making them hard to forget. This a partly because each story has something dark and surprising curled around its heart, partly because I spent so much energy trying to work out what was ‘off’ about each story (think about how tiring it is to be constantly looking over your shoulder for something you know is following you but which you never catch a glimpse of) and partly because some stories never fully explain themselves, leaving my imagination wrestling with the unease that they’ve left behind.

My full review, including comments on each story, is HERE

Life Sentence is set a few weeks after the first Cassie Raven book, Body Language. I was pleased to see the series continue but I couldn’t imagine how the set-up of a Mortuary Technician who may sometimes hear messages from the bodies in her care could be extended without becoming repetitive.

A. K. Turner solved the problem by having Cassie deal with the revelation that her father is still alive, that he and her mother did not die in carcrash, and that her father has been paroled after serving seventeen years for murdering her mother.

The way Cassie dealt with this felt authentic on an emotional level. I enjoyed that the investigation of her mother’s death required the resurrection of Camden Lock as it was in the 90s. I also enjoyed finding out more about DI Phyllida Flyte and watching the relationship between her and Cassie start to strengthen while still remaining inchoate and unconventional.

Devil In A Blue Dress redraws the classic noir landscape of Los Angeles in the late 1940s by showing it to me through the eyes of Easy Rawlins, a black veteran, originally from New Orleans. We meet him just as the life he’s built for himself in LA has blown apart and he desperately needs money. So, when a white man looking for a girl who likes to hang around the jazz clubs Easy frequents asks for his help, he takes the job.

The plot has the typical Noir mix of sleaze and violence except, this isn’t a tough white PI navigating the demimonde like a predator on the hunt. This violence and sleaze is happening in the world Easy Rawlins lives in and it’s being done to him and to the people around him for reasons he doesn’t understand and by people he is meeting for the first time.

For the first half of the book, all Easy can do is stumble through as best he can. The point when Easy stops bouncing around in the dark like a ball bearing in a pinball machine and starts independently to gather the information he needs to protect himself is beautifully captured. I could feel him becoming both more himself and someone much tougher and harder-edged than he’d wanted to think of himself as being.

My full review is HERE