Tag Archives: Crime/Thriller

The Dying Squad – Adam Simcox

Part detective drama and part urban fantasy – or maybe rural fantasy, as much of it is set in the quiet Lincolnshire landscape – Adam Simcox’s The Dying Squad is fun, easy to read and full to the brim with big ideas. He doesn’t want to admit it, despite having seen his own bullet-ridden body, but DI Joe Lazarus is dead. When he finally accepts the truth, Joe finds himself in the Pen – essentially purgatory – where he’s given the task of heading back to the mortal plane to investigate his own murder. With the cheeky, also-dead Daisy-May as his partner he sets out on the trail of the drug gang he was tracking before his death, but it’s hard being an undead detective when, beyond a core awareness of who he was, he can barely remember anything about his life or the people in it. At least he can walk through walls though, and Daisy-May seems to know what she’s doing in this strange afterlife.

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Shadow – James Swallow

The fourth instalment in James Swallow’s Marc Dane series of contemporary thrillers, Shadow offers up another powerfully topical slice of high-stakes drama packed full of action, excitement, great characters and credible threats. When a bio-scientist and her family are kidnapped in Singapore, Dane and partner Lucy Keyes are sent to investigate, and it quickly becomes clear that there’s more to her work – for the Rubicon Group, no less – than it first appears. Meanwhile the escape of a right-wing extremist from Belgian police custody, and growing unease within the power structure of Rubicon itself, means their mission becomes more dangerous by the minute.

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Ghost – James Swallow

The third book in James Swallow’s high-tech thriller series featuring ex-MI6 agent Marc Dane and the Rubicon Group, Ghost provides another relevant, contemporary story as Dane tackles a mysterious hacker collective tapping into the world’s digital weaknesses. Marc is mid-mission gathering information on a link to the sinister Combine when sudden new orders arrive, sending him to Malta to investigate an unusually public assassination. Who the victim is, why he was killed and what it means for Rubicon all come to light as Marc, Lucy and co. chase digital ghosts and fight back from a devastating betrayal.

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Exile – James Swallow

The second book in the Marc Dane series, James Swallow’s Exile returns to the story of Marc Dane after the success of his bestselling Nomad. Set six months or so after the events of Nomad, it sees Dane working for the UN’s Division of Nuclear Security in Croatia as an analyst and chafing at the restrictions of his desk-bound role. After his superiors refuse to act on intelligence he’s gathered and he unsuccessfully takes things into his own hands, he turns to his contacts in the Rubicon Group to follow the trail of a piratical African warlord with a portable nuclear device.

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Killing Floor – Lee Child

Lee Child’s iconic ex-cop Jack Reacher first appeared way back in 1997 in the novel Killing Floor, since then returning in nineteen further novels and a 2012 movie, with a second movie and a new novel due for release in 2016. Rewind to 1997 and Killing Floor was the debut novel from the British author, introducing Jack Reacher as a drifter, ex-military police, rambling through America only to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Passing through an anonymous backwater town he’s arrested for murder – at first interested only in proving his innocence, he soon ends up entangled in a surprisingly personal mystery.
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The Vinyl Detective: Written in Dead Wax – Andrew Cartmel

The first in a new series from author, journalist and script editor Andrew Cartmel, The Vinyl Detective: Written in Dead Wax is a fast-paced crime novel with an unusual protagonist. Instead of the normal professional detective, here we have a record collecting failed DJ whose jokingly-produced business cards proclaim him to be the Vinyl Detective, by virtue of his claim to be able to find any record for anyone. After agreeing to help the beautiful, if slightly suspicious, Miss N. Warren find a rare record for her shadowy employer, he finds the world of record collecting soon becomes much more dangerous than he’s used to.
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QUICK REVIEW : Cross Kill – James Patterson

Cross Kill, by James Patterson, is the first in a series of quick reads called Book Shots, designed to be rapid-fire stories that can be read in one go. While most of these titles are co-authored, this one comes entirely under Patterson’s name, and features much-loved character Dr. Alex Cross. Set ten years after the events of Along Came a Spider, it sees that book’s antagonist Gary Soneji apparently returning from the grave to take revenge on Cross, first shooting his partner in the head and then returning to plague Cross as his investigation continues.
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Career of Evil – Robert Galbraith

For Career of Evil, the third crime book written by JK Rowling under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, Cormoran Strike returns and this time it’s personal. When someone sends a severed human leg to his partner, Robin Ellacott, along with a note that links the crime to Strike’s semi-famous mother, several names from his past jump out. With the police focusing on the only one he doesn’t think is guilty, Strike and Robin undertake their own investigations into the remaining suspects. Meanwhile Robin’s wedding looms, and questions arise over exactly what Strike and Robin’s partnership entails.
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Nomad – James Swallow

Perhaps best known for his work in sci-fi universes such as Star Trek and Warhammer 40k, James Swallow’s latest novel Nomad is book one in the Marc Dane series, a global spy thriller featuring a betrayed MI6 agent fighting to survive and clear his name. Marc Dane, a MI6 support agent used to a role away from the line of fire, finds himself the sole survivor of his team as they investigate a lead on a terrorist attack only to walk into a deadly trap. With the blame for the disaster laid at his feet he soon finds himself on the run, on a desperate mission to expose the real traitor in MI6’s ranks and prevent an even worse act of global terrorism.
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The Calling – Neil Cross

The ninth novel from author and screenwriter Neil Cross, The Calling is an unusual book in that it’s the prequel to the TV show Luther, which was itself written by Cross. Sensibly avoiding anything in the way of an origin story, here we see the earlier but still fully-formed character of John Luther taking on the case of an appalling double murder and the theft of a baby, a crime which drives the troubled detective to spread himself dangerously thin. Driven to applying sometimes questionable methods, he not only attracts the attention of an internal investigation, but sees his marriage slipping further away from him with every day, while the man responsible spreads terror throughout the city.
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