McTiernan, Dervla (2020) The Good Turn. Police corruption in Ireland's gardai is the central theme of this new Detective Cormac Reilly story. Reilly faces enemies at work and his colleague, Garda Peter Fisher, is banished back to his father's patch in the small seaside village of Roundstone, with the threat of prosecution hanging over his… Continue reading April Picks
Category: Top new books
March Picks
Lodge, Gytha (2020) Watching from the Dark. M. Joseph. As Zoe is murdered her boyfriend Aidan is listening on Skype. Although he is desperate to report what he heard he is fearful of engaging with the police. DCI Jonah Sheens (in his second outing) and his team take on the case. What is the motive?… Continue reading March Picks
February Picks
Donoghue, Emma (2019) Akin. Picador. Noah is only days away from a long planned 80th birthday trip to his birth city of Nice, when a social worker calls. Noah is obliged to take temporary care of Michael, his eleven year old great-nephew, whom he has never met. The mismatched pair travel to Nice. As Noah tells… Continue reading February Picks
January Picks
Sveistrup, Soren (2019) The Chestnut Man. M. Joseph. An atmospheric Danish police procedural and thriller, by the writer of the TV series The Killing. The brutal murders of young mothers, with missing appendages (hands and feet), and a chestnut doll, bring young detective Naia Thulin and her world-weary partner Mark Hess onto the case. It… Continue reading January Picks
December Picks
Kwok, Jean (2019) Searching for Sylvie Lee. Morrow. Golden girl Sylvie, flies to the Netherlands to visit her dying Grandmother, and then goes missing. Her distraught younger sister Amy sets off in search of her sister, retracing her movements and revealing long-hidden family secrets. At the heart of the mystery is Sylvie's upbringing, raised until… Continue reading December Picks
November Picks
Dukess, Karen (2019) The Last Book Party. H. Holt. A coming-of-age tale of Eve, a young woman with floundering literary ambitions, struggling to find her voice. During a Cape Cod summer Eve jumps at the chance to work as an assistant for famed New Yorker writer Henry Grey, only to discover that the literary world she… Continue reading November Picks
September – October Picks
Walker, Martin (2019) The Body in the Castle Well. Quercus. Bruno, my favourite policeman, in his 12th outing, again takes on a murder mystery in the Périgord (Dordogne). Claudia, an American art student, who has been studying the archives of an elderly art historian and war hero, is found dead at the bottom of a… Continue reading September – October Picks
August Picks
Walker, Wendy (2019) The Night Before. St Martin's Press. Rosie has spent most of her life worrying about her younger sister Laura. Laura is emotionally fragile, her life haunted by tragedy, but with an abiding desire for love and happiness. Rosie's peaceful family life is turned upside down when broken-hearted Laura returns to live with her.… Continue reading August Picks
July Picks
McLean, Felicity (2019) The Van Apfel Girls are Gone. Fourth Estate. The Van Apfel sisters, Hannah, Cordelia and Ruth, disappeared into the surrounding bushland during the school's Showstopper concert. Tikka was eleven in that summer of 1992 and now she has returned home to make sense of what happened to her friends. Does what she… Continue reading July Picks
June Picks
Sky, Emma (2019) In a Time of Monsters: Travels Through a Middle East in Revolt. Atlantic Books. After serving time in Iraq as a political advisor Emma Sky found no homecoming in the UK and soon returns to the Middle East. In her travels (2011-2016) she bears witness to the Arab Spring, and to the failures… Continue reading June Picks
7:30 Bookclub 