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with its dark closes, Belfast and its sectarian divide and troubled past, my home town of Glasgow with its (now mostly outdated) reputation for hardmen fighting deprivation…
Blackfish
6 August 2015 by
As you’ll know if you follow me on Twitter, I’m passionate about animal welfare. It’s one of the issues that I regularly have a good old rant about – hunting with hounds, the use of animals in shops, cruelty to pets and of course keeping wild animals in captivity…
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…
Boyhood
2 July 2015 by 2 Comments
When I first heard about Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, the story of a family told over a span of 12 years and filmed over that same timeframe, I was thoroughly excited. It was such a bold idea and had the potential to be a generation defining 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…
The Rosie Project
26 June 2015 by Leave a Comment
Since starting this website, I’ve been lucky enough to receive a number of proofs and review copies of books from publishers and there’s something a little bit exciting about seeing lists of the best recent releases and knowing that I’ve either read them or (more normally) have a copy just waiting to be read…