Published by Harper Avenue, 2021, 304 pages. “What you see in the bush is rarely what’s really there.” Kira is engaged to the handsome and rich Aaron with whom she has a child, Evie. They live in a beautiful house with Olive, Aaron’s 13-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Aaron loves his daughters and seems …
Category: Crime / Thriller
The Widows of Malabar Hill: Sujata Massey
Published by Soho Press, Inc., 2018, 400 pages. This is more than just a crime novel: by setting it in India in the early 1900s, Sujata Massey paints a vivid portrait of the country and especially of the lives of the women at the time. The book starts in Bombay in 1921. The British are …
Snow: John Banville
Published by Faber Books, 2020, 352 pages. “‘The body is in the library,’ Colonel Osborne said. ‘Come this way.’” This book begins like a traditional English whodunit: with a body in the library in a country house. It’s a cliché—except that John Banville doesn’t do clichés. He uses a murder mystery to paint a portrait …
A Madness of Sunshine: Nalini Singh
Published by Gollancz, 2020, 352 pages. “That was the town Anahera remembered, the town that had suffocated her, the town where there were no secrets—and far too many hidden things.” Anahera is from Golden Cove, a small town in New Zealand’s South Island. She left for the UK, became a well-known classical pianist and married …
We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day: Ivana Bodrožić
Translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-BursaćPublished by Seven Stories Press UK, 2021, 223 pages. Original version published in 2016. “Everyone is running from someone, or from their own past.” Corruption and the long shadows thrown by war are at the heart of this political thriller from Croatia. Nora, a young journalist in Zagreb, is sent …
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The Woman in White: Wilkie Collins
Published by Penguin, / Bantam Doubleday Dell / Everyman's Library / Oxford University Press, 1860, 719 pages. “There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white …
The Thursday Murder Club: Richard Osman
Published by Penguin, 2020, 400 pages. If you’re looking for a light read with a bit of murder thrown in, then look no further. Richard Osman has written a delightful whodunit, set in an upscale retirement village in the UK. Septuagenarians Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron live at Coopers Chase, a retirement village. They form …
Black Water Lilies: Michel Bussi
Translated from French by Shaun WhitesidePublished by W&N, 2022, 144 pages. Original version published in 2011. Giverny: a beautiful, picturesque village in France, known for its most famous resident, the impressionist painter Claude Monet, who is famous for his paintings of water lilies. Artists and tourists flock to the village to see the beautiful gardens …
Wife of the Gods: Kwei Quartey
Published by Random House, 2009, 319 pages. Set in Ghana, this is the first in a series featuring Detective Inspector Darko Dawson. Gladys Mensah is found dead in the forest near Ketanu. Her body, seemingly untouched, is discovered by Efia, a trokosi or a “wife of the gods”. In reality, Efia is one of the …
The Bone Readers: Jacob Ross
Published by Little, Brown and Company / Peepal Tree Press / Sphere, 2016, 264 pages. This is a thoroughly enjoyable whodunit from a Grenadian writer. Michael Digson (“Digger”) is out of work, living on the island of Camaho.[1] He is the illegitimate son (“outside child”) of a maid and her employer, the Commissioner of Police. …
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