Translated from French by Howard CurtisPublished by Penguin, 2022, 196 pages. First translated into English in 1960. Original version published in 1949. “It was the third of December and still raining. ... In fact, for the last twenty days, it had been raining almost without interruption.” It started raining in the small French town of …
Category: Crime / Thriller
The Last Murder at the End of the World: Stuart Turton
Published by Raven Books / Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, 332 pages. It is the end of the world as we know it. A black fog has swept through the world, destroying every living thing in its wake: “the fog kills anything it touches...Unfortunately, it covers the entire earth, except for our island and half a mile …
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Black River: Nilanjana Roy
Published by Pushkin Vertigo, 2022, 350 pages. The best crime fiction is more than just a whodunnit—it shines a light on the darker side of society. This is true of Nilanjana Roy’s Black River: it is dark, heart-breaking and ultimately redemptive. Munia is a little girl who lives with her father Chand, a farmer, in …
Tokyo Express: Seichō Matsumoto
Translated from Japanese by Jesse KirkwoodPublished by Penguin, 1971, 149 pages. Original version published in 1958. The bodies of a man and a woman are found on the beach on Kyushu. The way the bodies are lying, and the empty bottle of orange juice near them—which was found to contain cyanide—seems to point to a …
The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka: Josef Skvorecky
Translated from Czech by Rosemary Kavan, Kaca Polackova and George TheinerPublished by Faber & Faber / W. W. Norton & Company, 1973, 288 pages. Original version published in 1966. Meet Lieutenant Boruvka of the Czechoslovak police: a rotund man with baby blue eyes, a tuft of hair on top of his head, and a mournful …
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Murder in Old Bombay: Nev March
Published by Harper Collins / Minotaur Books, 2021, 383 pages. Bombay, 1892. Bacha and Pilloo, two young women, fall to their deaths from the city’s clocktower. The police conclude that it was suicide. Captain James Agnihotri of the British army is recovering in hospital in Bombay after a skirmish in Karachi with the Pathans, a …
Murder at the Grand Raj Palace: Vaseem Khan
Published by Mulholland Books / Hodder, 2018, 360 pages. An American billionaire is found dead in his room at the Grand Raj Palace in Mumbai with a knife sticking out of his chest. The room is locked, and there is no sign of anyone else having been there. On the mirror in the bathroom are …
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L’Inconnue de la Seine: Guillaume Musso
Published by Calmann-Levy, 2022, 512 pages. A young woman is fished out of the Seine, very nearly dead. She has no identification on her person, so the police do a DNA test to see if they can find out who she is. The results are startling: according to the test, the mysterious woman is the …
The Dry: Jane Harper
Published by Flatiron Books and Abacus, 2017, 416 pages. Kiewarra, a town in the Australian Outback. The land is bone dry: the rains have failed again, and farmers are struggling to survive, as is everyone else. Many of the shops are boarded up. Karen Hadler and her six-year-old son Billy are found shot in their …
The Eighth Detective: Alex Pavesi
Published by Picador and Michael Joseph (also published as The Eight Detectives), 2020, 291 pages. An editor goes to a remote Mediterranean island to meet a reclusive writer, whose book her publisher wants to reprint. In 1937, Grant McAllister drew up a set of mathematical rules for a murder mystery, and wrote seven stories to …
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