I have a wonderful friend who works in the cruise industry who has occasionally invited me to join him on the ocean waves. For one reason or another I’ve not yet been able to take him up on the offer, even though I’ve always wanted to experience a cruise holiday…
The Art Of Baking Blind
21 August 2015 by Leave a Comment
It’s that time of year again – Wednesday nights are sacrosanct and anyone who dares to whisper a hint of spoiler is shunned from my social circle. The Great British Bake-Off is back and I’m in baked goods heaven. The success of Bake-Off…
A Colder War
18 August 2015 by Leave a Comment
While I’ve read a lot of crime novels over the years, I’m much less experienced with spy fiction. I’ve read Casino Royale, but no other Bond book and I’m sure I must have read a couple by John Le Carre at some point, but other than The Constant Gardener I don’t have any recollection of them…
The Great Village Show
10 August 2015 by Leave a Comment
I’ve been reading a lot of crime and literary fiction recently but decided as it’s summer that it’s time to lighten up a bit with some sunny, happy reading. I’ve got a few books that look fabulous on my to-be-read pile including A Proper Family Adventure, The Art of Baking Blind…
A Killing Moon
7 August 2015 by Leave a Comment
There are some cities in the UK which make perfect settings for gritty crime thrillers – Edinburgh with its dark closes, Belfast and its sectarian divide and troubled past, my home town of Glasgow with its (now mostly outdated) reputation for hardmen fighting deprivation…
The Pact – Episode 1
5 August 2015 by Leave a Comment
In Victorian times the serialised novel was the height of fashion, popularised in particular by the huge success of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. Across Europe stories such as Madame Bovary, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo…
The Quality of Silence
3 August 2015 by Leave a Comment
It’s the middle of the British summer, some days have been lovely, others have been fairly dreadful. While the perfect books to read during the summer are typically regarded as light, frothy novels set on the beach I spent a few days in the chill of an Alaskan winter…
Tenacity
29 July 2015 by Leave a Comment
One of my main bugbears with a lot of police procedurals is that the main character is always “damaged” in some way. Alcoholic, bad with the opposite sex, poor family life – no fictional top cop is ever well balanced and happy with their life. I understand completely that it offers an extra dimension to the narrative…
The Woman Who Fed The Dogs
1 July 2015 by Leave a Comment
There are some crimes which are so hideous that they attract world-wide attention, names of (mostly) men who have committed acts so wicked that they spread beyond the borders of their own countries. One of these men is Marc Dutroux, a Belgian paedophile and child murderer…
Little Black Lies
29 June 2015 by Leave a Comment
Can you imagine taking the life of another person? Would you have the ability to deliberately kill someone? That’s the question that Catrin Quinn, one of the three main characters of Sharon Bolton’s Little Black Lies, asks herself on the very first page…