Category: Blog

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Read this book for: criminal’s perspective, cover-up, thriller, multi-plot, suspense, heist, bank robbery

Quick Review: A fantastically plotted, tight, tense and fresh take on a heist story, PARALLEL LINES will grab you and hold you to the end.

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Adam Shaw is dying, and knows he’ll leave his disabled son with nothing. His solution? Rob a bank. It’s no surprise that things go wrong. What is surprising is that when another customer is accidentally shot, no one in the bank is in a hurry to hand Adam over to the police. There’s the manager who’s desperate to avoid an audit, the security guard with a serious grudge, and the woman who knows exactly how bad the victim really was… Eight people, twelve hours, one chance to cover up a murder. But it’s not just the polices they have to fool. When so many lives intersect, the results can be explosive.

PARALLEL LINES is not Steven Savile’s first novel, and it shows in his mastery of the pace and suspense of a truly enjoyable thriller.

Continue reading “REVIEW: Parallel Lines by Steven Savile” →

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Read this book for: non-fiction, true crime, multiple storylines, US-based story, victim-focussed narrative, serial killer

Quick Review: A true-crime narrative about five victims of the ‘Gilgo Beach Killer’ – women who were killed and hidden in Long Island – their personal histories and their families’ still ongoing search for justice, written from a refreshingly different perspective.

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Award-winning investigative reporter Robert Kolker delivers a humanizing account of the true-life search for a serial killer still at large on Long Island, and presents the first detailed look at the shadow world of online escorts, where making a living is easier than ever and the dangers remain all too real. A triumph of reporting, a riveting narrative, and “a lashing critique of how society and the police let five young women down” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), LOST GIRLS is a portrait of unsolved murders in an idyllic part of America, of the underside of the Internet, and of the secrets we keep without admitting to ourselves that we keep them.

Continue reading “REVIEW: Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker” →

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Read this book for: non-fiction, true crime, gritty detective stories, multiple storylines, police procedural, US-based story

Quick Review: Dark, gritty and incredibly real, this true-crime novel resists the urge to glamourize the detective’s life and presents an intense and compelling picture of murder investigations.

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After gaining unparalleled access to the homicide unit in Prince George’s County, which borders the nation’s capital, bestselling author Del Quentin Wilber begins shadowing the talented, often quirky detectives who get the call when a body falls. After a quiet couple of months, all hell breaks loose: suddenly every detective in the squad is scrambling to solve one shooting and stabbing after another. Meanwhile, the entire unit is obsessed with a stone-cold ‘red ball’, a high-profile case involving a seventeen-year-old honour student attacked by a gunman who kicked down the door to her house and shot her in her bed. This is the inside story of how a team of detectives carry out their almost impossible job. Murder is the police investigator’s ultimate crucible: to solve a killing, a detective must speak for the dead. More than any recent book, A GOOD MONTH FOR MURDER shows what it takes to succeed when the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher.

Continue reading “REVIEW: A Good Month For Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad by Del Quentin Wilber” →

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Read this book for: travel writing, memoir, non-fiction, hauntingly beautiful prose, chilling events, terrible historical events

Quick Review: A beautifully written and poignant memoir that will make you want to pack your bags and visit, Cook uses the sites of some of the darkest chapters of human history to shed light on the good parts of humanity.

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Thomas Cook has always been drawn to dark places, for the powerful emotions they evoke and for what we can learn from them. These lessons are often unexpected and sometimes profoundly intimate, but they are never straightforward. With his wife and daughter, Cook travels across the globe in search of darkness – from Lourdes to Ghana, from San Francisco to Verdun, from the monumental, mechanised horror of Auschwitz to the intimate personal grief of a shrine to dead infants in Kamukura, Japan. Along the way he reflects on what these sites may teach us, not only about human history, but about our own personal histories. During the course of a lifetime of traveling to some of earth’s most tragic shores, from the leper colony on Molokai to ground zero at Hiroshima, he finds not darkness alone, but a light that can illuminate the darkness within each of us.

Continue reading “REVIEW: Tragic Shores: A Memoir of Dark Travel by Thomas H. Cook” →

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Read this book for: innovative format, modern mystery, surprise ending, journalist investigator, suspense, whodunnit

Quick Review: Perfectly capturing the suspense and need-to-know tension of the true crime podcasts it’s modeled after, SIX STORIES is definitely one of this year’s must-reads for all crime fiction fans.

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1997. Scarclaw Fell. The body of teenager Tom Jeffries is found a year after his disappearance at an outward bound centre. Verdict? Misadventure. But not everyone is convinced.

2017. Enter elusive investigative journalist Scott King, whose podcast examinations of complicated cases have rivaled the success of Serial, with his concealed identity making him a cult internet figure.

In a series of six interviews, King attempts to work out how the dynamics of a group of idle teenagers conspired with the sinister legends surrounding the fell to result in Jeffries’ mysterious death.

Continue reading “REVIEW: Six Stories by Matt Wesolowski” →