Shotsmag

This feminist Welsh Press has come up with a Cosy that’s the antithesis of Noir except that it’s set in the fifties when homosexuality was illegal and murder a capital crime, which lends an unexpected frisson to a work hyped as fun. The scene is set in Aberystwyth, a Welsh university town where performers arrive a week before Christmas to stage a one-night concert, bringing in their train spouses, entourages,  and an element of glamour to a cultured  and somewhat cloistered community.

Hallett’s latest is a happy mix of a traditional Christie-style murder mystery and an ultra-modern riff on the pros and cons of electronic communications. Agatha’s spirit hovers over The Silent Appeal, whose major plot device is an 'amdram' production of Christie’s 1951 play The Hollow.

This curious Japanese mystery novel is of the ‘locked room’ or ‘impossible crime’ subgenre, and could also fall under the ‘cat mystery’ classification. Written in a beguiling ‘cozy’ golden-age crime fiction style, it has a darker undercurrent which at times borders on the grotesque. Originally published in Japan in the 1970s - it is the first of the casebooks of Mikeneko Holmes now finally available in an English translation.

Reading this novel is akin to voyaging on a hallucinatory dream, one that requires you take a life-jacket and notebook for it is a tempestuous journey that spans not only several continents but also traverses time. Opening in Portugal’s capital Lisbon in 1954 inside a historical archive, the mysterious Nuno Bárbaro de Castro is in the process of tracking down the last will and testament of the relative Garoto Bárbaro [de Castro].

Intense, hard-hitting, bloody and fatal! And that’s just the golf tournament backdrop that encapsulates this absorbing crime fiction novel. The two main characters are Detective Chief Inspector Jack Hunter, a dedicated, ‘follow-the-rules’ policeman and ‘hunter’ of vicious criminals, and Adam Stringer a freelance journalist, and a ‘stringer’ in newspaper parlance.

Robotham’s small town crime novel is striated with menacing claustrophobia, where the truth is purposefully camouflaged from view and eroded by the passage of time. Despite the emotional heft of the book, the pages slip by so rapidly that the reader is forced to grip the cover until the knuckles turn white. It’s 2001 and Arlo Hackett is released [on parole] after serving twelve years of a fifteen year sentence.

During the course of the novel, one of the author’s characters states “I ain’t being no drudge. All I want is a bit of adventure in my life.” To which the fictionalised Sam Pepys replies with a smile “Oh, my dear girl. You have no Idea.” This exchange sums up this glorious narrative perfectly. Seething Lane is an immersive experience for the reader in which A.D. 1670 London never felt so evocatively menacing.

Written by Mike Ripley A regularly irregular column of musings on (mostly) crime and thriller fiction both ancient and modern. Think of it partly as the ramblings of someone who has read more thrillers than he needed to and some so you don’t have to, and partly as a warning from history.

This novel is a claustrophobic thriller set against the dark halls of a prestigious [and unnamed] American University via the inner thoughts of a troubled woman. Hidden agendas are revealed when the former Medical School Provost, Jeff Harker is elected as incoming President. Narrated from the first-person view [and inner thoughts] of Elizabeth Harker, wife of the incoming president we get a tense and disorientated account of events as they unfold around her and the University.

Swanson returns to the novella format with his latest work, a narrative so judiciously edited that the 150 pages almost turn themselves. Like the author’s previous work, it is an extremely dark narrative cloaked under the writing style of a cheerfully jolly golden age mystery.