It should have been the perfect art heist carried out by art lovers turned amateur criminals. But the real underworld of Edinburgh came in on the act and things turned unpleasant. No Rebus in this novel, but Rankin hasn’t lost … Continue reading →
Like Iain Pears’ ‘Stone’s Fall‘, ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’ has greed, espionage, love, lust, betrayal, duplicity and murder. And like Stone’s Fall it is told in different voices, four this time. Its setting is Oxford in the early 1660s, … Continue reading →
This book, the third in Dave Hutchinson’s ‘Fractured Europe’ series (of four, I gather) keeps up the standard set by the first two, ‘Autumn‘ and ‘Midnight‘. The action shifts from place to place, gradually digging through layers of confusion and … Continue reading →
In this story none of the characters comes out well, and there isn’t a happy ending.
Continue reading →A short novel lampooning Richard Dawkins. Some good jokes, and a surprise ending. Good fun, unless you’re Richard Dawkins.
Continue reading →This is the follow-up to “Europe in Autumn“. Unimaginatively, I’d expected it to pick up where ‘Autumn’ left off, but in ‘Midnight’ we have a whole new cast of characters.* Hutchinson develops the theme at the heart of ‘Autumn’, taking … Continue reading →
This is the second of Harris’s books set in present-day London and featuring DC Nick Belsey, described on the cover by Val McDermid as “a beguiling bastard of a hero”. As in the first book “The Hollow Man“ it doesn’t … Continue reading →
“The Hollow Man” is Oliver Harris’s first novel. His central character is a disillusioned, disreputable detective constable whose patch is Hampstead, but who knows the seedier parts of London too. The story concerns a suicide in a house in the … Continue reading →
This is the first book in a planned trilogy. The second volume, “Europe at Midnight“, is due out in November 2015. “Europe in Autumn” is set in a dysfunctional Europe not too far in the future. The open borders ideal … Continue reading →
The Woodcutter of the title is the central figure in this story of a boy, the son of an estate forester in the Lake District, who grows up in the hills and is a natural and self-taught rock climber. After … Continue reading →