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Ava moves to Hong Kong from her native Ireland to take up a badly paid job teaching English grammar. With cynicism and cutting humour throughout, her connections with Julian and Edith allow Ava the opportunity to experience a more comfortable life away from a cramped flatshare and even a chance at happiness. View Full Review
When his son is brutally murdered, gangland boss Zander Finn leaves the Scottish underworld, goes underground and tries to transform his life with a move to London. When he’s pulled back into his old world to fight the Albanian mobsters threatening his family, it’s an action-packed adventure with thrills aplenty and promises that you’ll be on the edge of your seat every step of the way.
Meyrick’s inimitable dark humour threads throughout and peppers Finn’s intense fight for survival. View Full Review
Well, a debut doesn't come more well-honed than Inga Vesper’s absolutely cracking slice of dark Americana, The Long, Long Afternoon, which is set in the summer of 1959 and encompasses a gripping mystery with an excoriating vision of the ways in which women everywhere are under-estimated, silenced and diminished.
Beautifully written with scenes and characters that take you right back to a time of mail-order catalogues, mother’s ‘little helper’ and the appalling casualness of race and gender inequality, Inga has created a breath-taking, chromium-shiny, tale of how dark the sunniest places can be and ... View Full Review
Billingham is a master of pulling the proverbial rabbit out of the hat in many of this thrillers. While this book, his latest, is something of a departure for Billingham – it’s not part of a series and the entire novel takes place within a psychiatric facility, a kind of Jane Tennison meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – it still has an ending that will leave you reeling. You know how the first time you saw The Sixth Sense, you wanted to watch it again almost immediately to see how it could have all ... View Full Review
The less said the better about this latest nail-biter from Mackintosh. A kind of locked-room mystery aboard an intercontinental flight in which a flight attendant is given an impossible choice by terrorists: bring down the plane if you want your daughter at home to live. But there is a dark underbelly to this tale, and the stunning, unsettling conclusion will stick with you long after you’ve put that jaw of yours back in place.
Selected by Linwood Barclay, Our Autumn 2021 Guest Editor. Click here to read the full Guest Editor Piece. View Full Review
I only discovered Patchett recently, with her most recent novel, The Dutch House, and felt swept away by her lyrical prose and sharply drawn characters. She writes compelling dramas about fairly ordinary folks, and makes it look easy when it’s anything but. She’s not a thriller writer, but her stories reveal secrets in that peeling-the-layers-of-an-onion way that the best crime writers have mastered. In this novel, the title character, Sabine, learns after his death that the magician she worked with for years, and eventually married, had a previous life he’d never told her about. ... View Full Review
This is not the best Harris novel featuring his delightful Hannibal Lecter, the notorious killer who has a taste for ... well, you know. You wouldn’t think Lecter could do anything that would shock us after peeling off the face of one of his victims in The Silence of the Lambs to use as a disguise and make his escape. There’s not much he’s not capable of, and I guess that’s why we love him so much. But near the end of Hannibal, our anti-hero prepares a meal the way you might whose ... View Full Review
The first book in the series, The Five Clues, is a real-time murder-mystery thriller and family drama, combining an exciting race against time with a heart-rending story about a teenager learning to live with the loss of a beloved parent. View Full Review
This artworld satire takes the 2021 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. View Full Review
Best Friends Lyla, Maku and Theresa have a rock-solid friendship – it’s the other relationships in their lives that cause them heartache. When ambitious Theresa moves back to Accra with her husband, she doesn’t realise it’s going to show up the cracks in her relationship, and also make her friends look more closely at their lives. This drama is full of twists and turns some of them heartstopping, others heart-rending, all of them brilliantly played out and realistic. If you’re a fan of female-centered dramas, this is one for you.
Selected ... View Full Review
What do you do when you’ve reached 37 and your biological clock is ticking so loud you can’t hear anything else? Decide to change your fortunes by going out there and actively looking for Mr Right, of course. Symona’s journey through the dating world is as funny as it is frustrating and I had more than one laugh-out-moment. Smart and astute, I really enjoyed reading about her adventures in dating and often felt as though I’d met some of those men at certain points in my life.
Selected by Dorothy Koomson, Our ... View Full Review
Ekuah is in an up-and-down, back-and-forth relationship with Dee. It’s not perfect, but it feels enough for her . . . that’s until Dee ghosts her. Bruised and heartbroken, Ekuah does her best to get on with her life and eventually meets Jay, a man who might just be the one to win her heart. That is, of course, when Dee reappears in her life… The protagonist in this tale is very young but her emotions are real and the tricky relationship she has with her parents is every bit as important as the romantic ones. I was ... View Full Review
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