murder

WITCH HUNT . . . Between the covers

Detective Superintendent Grace O’Malley, of London’s Met Police, is not going to feature in a Sunday evening TV prime time cosy crime series any time soon. She rides a Harley, is rude and abrasive and, for good measure, her husband has a penchant for BDSM sex with students looking to supplement their income. In another part of the city (it is Halloween) we have Juliette Boucher, a TV journalist. She receives a bizarre phone call from a man who calls himself the Witchfinder General. He tells her to be on Westminster bridge just before midnight, where she will witness something beyond newsworthy.

And spectacular it is. And gory. A motor launch comes into view, and it is on fire. On it is standing a woman. She burns, too. Then, there is a series of explosions, and the boat sinks. Here’s the thing. It was the so-called Witchfinder General who phoned Grace to tip her off about her husband’s sexual proclivities. When the police try to trace the owner of the boat, they find that it was sold by a retired civil servant to a man called – wait for it – Matthew Hopkins.

For younger readers, the real Matthew Hopkins was a Protestant zealot who, around the time of the English Civil War, toured the eastern counties of the country – Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire – in search of those he called witches. It is estimated that he had over two hundred women – mostly guilty of nothing more than being herbalists or natural healers – violently put to death.
The man who has named himself after this monster is clearly very clever, has sources inside the police force, and is hell-bent on recreating a reign of terror. His first victim, the woman in the boat? Veronica Crosse, a TV medium and celebrity speaker.

The authors have added another (potentially corrosive) spice to their recipe, and one that is not directly connected to the man who has modeled himself on a 17th century serial killer. Grace’s husband Dominic is himself a copper, but not just any old plod. He is Assistant Commissioner Dominic Boswell, of New Scotland Yard.

We are introduced to a bizarre clergyman named Moses Blackmore, who is the incumbent of a tiny parish near Yeovil. He wears a long black coat, a string tie and has a long silver beard. His human flock (he is also a farmer) are less of a congregation than a cult, and are in thrall to Blackmore’s fire and brimstone brand of protestant fundamentalism. While the police procedural aspect of the book had, this far, been impeccably convincing, I realised that there would be a horror-fantasy element to the narrative, too. That is not a problem. I am a huge fan of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker novels, in which he effortlessly blends the PI genre with the supernatural. It’s just that these days, the Church of England simply does not allow an old fashioned vicar to run a single parish. In real life, Moses Blackmore would be in charge of at least four or five other nearby parishes. And, most likely, he would be a woman.

A little over a third of the way through, there is a dramatic raid and arrest in an upmarket London hotel but, of course, it’s the wrong man, and yet another example of the WFG playing the police like a Stradivarius. There is a second murder, this time of another elderly woman spiritualist, hanged from a church tower and then burned. The WFG (and his associates) cause the filmed scene to be played out on a big screen at a huge public gathering in London on Bonfire Night.

Grace eventually cracks the case (or so she thinks) and finds that the perpetrators are connected to some of the most powerful and influential people in government and public service. There is the mother of all twists in the final pages, but I don’t do spoilers, so you will have to find out for yourself. Witch Hunt is an imaginative and energetic canter through the fields of corruption, revenge, and madness, and it will be published by Severn House on 5th May.

May 3, 2026 0

DEADLY FORCE . . . Between the covers

Being ‘late to the party’ in terms of long running crime fiction series is an occupational hazard for amateur reviewers. Yes, we try to cover the ‘big ones’ by such authors as Val McDermid (Tony Hill/Karen Pirie) Peter James (Roy Grace), Mark Billingham (Tom Thorne), John Connolly (Charlie Parker) or David Mark (Aector McAvoy) but there are only so many hours in the day, and sometimes we miss things. The Bill Slider books by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles are, judging by this book, one such, and a series that I regret not discovering years ago.
If I may, I will write briefly about the economics of publishing, as it is relevant here. Some crime writers are, relatively speaking, household names, and their books are found on the shelves of TESCO and ASDA. This will be a little while after launch date, and the price will be less than the Amazon tab. In another universe altogether, let us look at libraries. Usually run by County Councils outside of the big cities, these amazing institutions loan books, free of charge to members. Although we are talking pennies, authors receive royalties when their books are borrowed. Severn House is a publisher that specialises in crime books to be sold to libraries. Their Amazon prices reflect this. After all, who would pay £21.98 for Deadly Force, as good as it is? The answer is – buyers for libraries. I am not sure if that is what they actually pay, but that is what Amazon tells us. Of course your ‘free’ library book has already been paid for – by you – through your council tax. Nowadays, local libraries have had to become more ‘inclusive’ by providing computer and internet access to increase footfall, which is all the bean counters at County Hall understand. Incidentally, Severn House has now been taken over by Joffe Books, a very different kind of publisher.
Digression over, so back to the book. DI Bill Slider is an astute and amenable Met Police copper working out of Shepherd’s Bush. For out of towners , this is an area of west London, seedy but expensive in terms of housing, well served by London Transport. A body is found in a silted up canal. The corpse is quickly identified as that of Peter Bentley, an unremarkable policeman, working out of Notting Hill. He has been battered to death by someone who was probably, wielding a tire iron.
Slider’s enquiries are painstaking, but some facts emerge. Bentley is estranged from his wife, has a zero social media presence and, in his private life, wore an expensive diamond ear stud – which is missing from his corpse.Just about half way through the book, the story takes a delicious twist. The diamond earring is found and, long story short, it was a gift to Bentley from his lover, a wealthy 50-something former actress. Unfortunately for Slider and his team, this new information solves nothing, and only sends a middle-aged Polish couple into the court system for petty theft.
Then, from what seems like a complete dead-end, Slider’s persistence finds a thread of evidence and, when he tugs it, the fabric protecting the killer of Peter Bentley rapidly unravels and the killer – uncomfortably close to home – is brought to justice. This is a beautifully written and literate thriller that occasionally sparkles with sharp comedy. Deadly Force will be published by Severn House on 5th May.

May 1, 2026 0

FIVE SILVER SPOONS . . . Between the covers

This a classic revenge thriller. Not quite in The Count of Monte Cristo class, but pretty good. We start in June, and a young serviceman, on leave from his barracks, is cycling to his mother’s house when he is hit by a car. The five young undergraduates in the car leave him for dead, but he survives. Time is supposed to be a great healer, but some wounds remain open and fester.

We skip two decades, and now that man is out for vengeance. The five titular silver spoons have all prospered. In the order they are presented to us they have become a deeply respected surgeon, a supposedly Green media hustler, a university lecturer, a junior cabinet minister and a failed rock star (but very successful junkie). The latter receives a postcard of the Cambridge college he and his four friends attended. On the back is scrawled, “you’re first”. He is soon found dead. The other four occupants of the car on that fateful night have been sent a similar card, each inscribed, “who’s next?”

Author Sam Steele introduces us to DI Hope Fenton. If you were hoping to find a fictional senior copper who is happily married with a smoothly purring domestic background, you will have to look elsewhere. Hope is still married, by the skin of her teeth, to forensic scientist Adam, but he does most of the heavy lifting with their twins, while she prefers the solitude of her father’s barge on the Regent’s Canal.

Sam Steele, with an almost sadistic relish, ramps up the tension as each of the four potential victims slowly realises that the twenty five year-old chickens are coming home to roost. Meanwhile, Hope focuses on a Bulgarian criminal, Jack Garrett’s dealer, who she believes had a hand (and a baseball bat) in his death. She tries to do her job free of emotion and impulse, but sometimes her head is in a different place. The knowledge that her young son Noah was abducted several years ago while they were supermarket shopping, and had never been found, is like a malevolent tinnitus, constantly present and debilitating.

There’s a fatalistic 1830’s poem, known as Sounding Rafters. It has been set to music, and one quatrain reads,

“Stand! stand! to your glasses, steady!
Tis all we have left to prize;
One cup to the dead already–
Hurrah! for the next that dies!”

In this case, ‘the next that dies’ is university lecturer Alistair Monroe. Our as-yet-unnamed cyclist from the prologue has also been indulging in some serious blackmail. Ajay Desai, the surgeon, for example, has been siphoning off £500 a month from the savings account set up to pay for a £20K camper van trip around California for himself and family. Former ferocious criminal barrister and now Justice Secretary Lois Blackstock MP was the alpha member of the quintet back in the day, and she remains thus. She meets with the other two survivors – Desai and Gideon Makepeace, the renewables guru, and hatches a plan to fight back.

Just over a third of the way in, we realise that Sam Steele has been playing us, and rather cleverly. We learn that the blackmailer and the killer are not one and the same person. One is identified. He is Ross Livingstone, the odd man out on that corridor in St Giles College all those years ago. The misfit who was ridiculed. The English scholar whose ability dwarfed that of his five potentially high flying room-mates. Now, he lives in a dingy flat and sweeps up rubbish for the council in Gloucester. But is he the killer or the blackmailer?

Gideon Makepeace is murdered, and then Ajay Desai dies. Lois Blackstock is arrested, as DNA traces have been found at the murder sites implicating her. By this time, however, we know who the killer is, and it is a very clever twist inserted by the author into what is already a complex plot. Five Silver Spoons will be published by Allison & Busby on 23rd April.

April 19, 2026 0

A DEADLY EPISODE . . . Between the covers

For those unfamiliar with the series, the concept is simple, if unusual. Central to the story, and narrator, is Horowitz himself in his real life persona of author and TV screenwriter. The fiction begins with the presence of a former police officer called Hawthorne who now works as a private investigator. The pair originally teamed up when Horowitz hired Hawthorne to provide him with real life mysteries that could be turned into CriFi plots.

Here, things become even more self-referential, as the first book in the series, The Word is Murder, is being turned into a major feature film, but the production, filmed in Hastings, the setting for Horowitz’s finest creation, Foyle’s War, is beset by problems.The screenwriter, producer and director are at each other’s throats, the project is way over budget already and the killer comes – literally – when the actor playing Hawthorne, David Caine, is found dead in his Winnebago, an expensive Japanese kitchen knife embedded in his throat.

Both Horowitz and Hawthorne are quickly called in by the Sussex police to help with the investigation. There are some tasty suspects. James Aubrey is Caine’s agent, but was about to be sacked, despite having played a huge part in the actor’s rise to fame. Teresa de Leon, the producer, having just been filleted for cash by a family dispute, knows that her only salvation is an insurance claim on the abandoned film. Next in the queue is director Cy (Cyril) Truman. He is, as they say, as camp as a row of tents, and admits that he fancied David Craig with a vengeance, and had done all in his power to boost the actor’s career. But was his largely unrequited passion enough to provoke him into a savage knife attack? Then we have the screenwriter. Horowitz is rather naughty in giving us a complete disconnect between her Christian name and her surname. Shanika Harris speaks in a studied Estuary English, and is as woke as a dawn chorus blackbird. She met Caine when she was a student, and was seduced by both his dynamic good looks and his Thunbergian zeal for the the environment and his hatred for those who enjoy a decent steak. Could the revelation that Caine occasionally ‘batted for the other side’ have provoked a frenzied attack?

Just over half way through the book, there is a dramatic shift in the narrative. Horowitz, knowing the stars’ Winnebagos bear the characters’ names, not than those of the actors, wonders if Hawthorne himself may have been the target, rather than the actor. Hawthorne reveals that there is, indeed, someone in Hastings who hates him with a vengeance. We then learn the story of the Murder at Foss Hall, which was Hawthorne’s first case as private detective. In a (rather large) nutshell, Rupert, the son of the Foss Hall owners, was involved in a fatal road accident. Duncan McClintock, the estate factotum, covered up Rupert’s culpability, but blackmailed the young man. When McClintock went missing, presumed dead, his blood was found in Rupert’s car. Hawthorne, a local man, was hired by the family to extricate Rupert from the mess. The result was that Harry Morgan, another estate employee, was convicted of the crime, and it is his widow – a barmaid in a Hastings pub – who has nursed a visceral hatred of Hawthorne since her husband’s death.

The detecting partnership between Horowitz and Hawthorne is Holmesian in one sense. Hawthorne is much the sharper of the two and frequently has to point out clues to his more affable and conciliatory partner. They aren’t even friends, let alone companions, Hawthorne never having had to bother with the drinks party social choreography that writers have to learn in order to pitch stories to agents and sell TV projects to programme commissioners.

Despite one or two interesting discoveries by the fictional Horowitz, it is Hawthorne’s attention to detail that closes the case, and the real Horowitz presents us with two elaborate but elegant solutions to two different murders. You can read my reviews of previous books in the series – The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death and Close to Death – by clicking the titles. A Deadly Episode will be published by Century on 23rd April.

April 16, 2026 0

THE FACES OF THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

Can crime novels teach you anything about a location? Fans of the late Phil Rickman would argue that they knew the Hereford/Wales borderlands through his Merrily Watkins novels. Readers of Jim Kelly’s Phillip Dryden books might , as a consequence, claim a nodding acquaintance with the Fens. London? Perhaps too vast and unknowable despite the best efforts of Mark Billingham and Tony Parsons. Leeds? I knew it through countless visits to an undergraduate son, but always found the place rather intimidating. Chris Nickson lives there, and has used it as the background for three series of novels. In those featuring Simon Westow we are in Georgian times. The baton is then handed on to Tom Harper, who bestrides the city like a colossus from Victoria’s reign to the period after The Great War.

Now we are in WW2, with a redoubtable young woman, Cathy Marsden, who has been seconded from the local police force to the Special Investigation Branch, an embryonic group whose work sits in the gap between regular policing and military intelligence. We are in the spring of 1944. Cathy is newly engaged to Tom, a mechanic with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He has served in North Africa, where he has managed to keep himself out of the firing line. Now, after a spell of leave, he has been recalled.

There are rumours that the Allies are building up to ‘something big’. At work, Cathy and her colleagues are investigating a fatal car crash in which a local spiv and his girlfriend were killed. More intriguing is the fact that the boot of the car was filled with handguns stolen from American and British barrack armouries.When another small time local crook, Ricky Hopper, ends up being mangled in the metal waterwheel of a local factory, Cathy realises that these are deep waters, as dark and dangerous as the River Aire itself.

Nickson effortlessly captures the privations of ordinary Britains during the war.
“Cathy settled with her fish paste sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and thermos flask of tomato soup. Her mother made the same thing each week. One more routine of war, she’d be happy to leave behind.”

The author makes other very apposite cultural references. Safe in her own bed, in her own home, Cathy reads herself to sleep with Daphne du Maurier’s Hungry Hill, a romantic saga about an Irish family, published just a year earlier.

Vernon Scannell wrote:
“Whenever war is spoken of
I find
The war that was called Great invades the mind:”
That terrible conflict hangs heavy over the Marsden household. Gassed while ‘doing his bit’, Cathy’s father’s lungs were ruined, and every breath is a struggle. There is a terrible irony that just three decades later, the same mortal enemies are intent on ripping out each others’ hearts.The SIB search narrows in focus. They are looking for two men. Dandy Wilson is the new Mr Big in the Leeds underworld of touts and black marketeers, while Corporal Lyle Brevitt is the source of the pilfered American stores. Anxious to find the latter is US military policeman Frank Graves.The SIB receive reliable information about where to find Wilson, but when they raid the property, their quarry is gone. Given the timescale, the inescapable conclusion is that someone is passing on inside information to the fugitive. Does the leak come from the regular police or – unthinkably – from someone in SIB?

Eventually, both Wilson and Brevitt are tracked down and the traitor within is unmasked. What Nickson – like all good novelists – does well is to make us care deeply about the central characters. Here, we leave Leeds on the eve of ‘D’ Day, and we can only hope that Cathy’s Tom survives what is to come, and returns to claim his bride. The Faces of The Dead was published by Severn House on 7th April.

April 6, 2026 0

THE KEEPER

Former Chicago cop Cal Hooper has fetched up in the Irish village of Ardnakelty, where he supplements his pension with woodworking and carpentry. This is the third novel in the series, but for newcomers, the cast list comprises:

Lena, his kind-of fiancée. She is a widow.
Noreen, her sister. She runs the village shop and is a one woman Greek chorus and general busybody.
Tommy Moynihan, a would-be big shot, manager of a local factory, rich but widely disliked.
His son Eugene, something in Dublin finance circles.
Rachel Holohan, his long time girlfriend.
Trey, a teenage girl, something of a wild child, informally adopted by Cal, whose natural daughter Alyssa still lives in America.
The drinkers at the Seán Óg pub. They are a diverse mix of farmers and strugglers, but unequivocally wedded to Ardnakelty and its heritage, for good or bad.

We learn that all is not well between Rachel and Eugene. She is reported missing one night, and then Cal and other searchers find her body in the local river. Weeks pass before the authorities declare her death a suicide, through drinking antifreeze. Meanwhile, the village has become polarised with gossip and speculation, the fault line being suspicion of – or support for – the Moynihans.In the long dead days between Rachel Holohan’s death and her body being released for burial, Ardnakelty begins to twitch.

A better snapshot of a rural Irish wake you will not find:
“I’m starving, “Bobby says dolefully.
At a long table at the end of the room, a scrawny kid with an unconvincing mustache is ladling soup from a tureen into bowls for a line of the kind of old women who can’t be killed by anything short of a lightning strike.
Bobby eyes him wistfully.
‘I’d eat the hind leg off the lamb of God.”

At a hefty 400 plus pages this is no crime caper throwaway. Tana French uses the time and space to plant a seed of suspicion beneath the turf of Ardnakelty. The seed germinates, puts out roots, and then produces the flowers which Baudelaire called Fleurs de Mal. As Rachel is laid to rest, the parish priest cannot resist a biblical reference to the evil of suicide, while the Moynihans and Rachel’s family sit, pointedly, on opposite sides of the church.

The enigmatic Trey thinks that the antifreeze suicide makes no sense; Lena has told no-one about the night Rachel visited her, ostensibly to ask for Lena’s veterinary advice about her cat, but actually – and tearfully – wanting someone to talk to. In an effort to find out what is going on, as tensions increase, Lena goes to see Noreen”s mother in law, who seems to know all and see all, despite never leaving the house:

“At the heart of it all is Mrs. Duggan, vast and formless, in a magenta dress, coated with swirls of tiny magenta beads, like one of those underwater creatures that lie wide-mouthed on the seabed, waiting to receive anyone and anything that comes their way.”

As opinions in Ardnakelty polarise between the pro and anti Moynihan camps, Tana French gives us a magnificent pub brawl which (old movie buffs, pay attention) might have been orchestrated by John Ford, with John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in full flight.

Despite his being an outsider and a former Chicago cop, Cal feels connected:

“Cal doesn’t know how to find words for what he means.The things he’s come to prize in this place are not, mostly, the ones he moved here in search of.The beauty is all there and more, but he was also picturing simplicity and peace, maybe even innocence, none of which showed up in any noticeable quantity.Instead, he’s found the intricate webs constructed over centuries that bind people to one another, to their land and to their past.He’s under no illusion that these bindings are simple or innocent either.They’ve sliced people to the bone, scourged them out of town, choked them to death. But alongside all that, they’ve held the place together, steadfast in the face of time, dark happenings, rifts, attacks, and sieges.”

This is a brilliant and addictive crime novel and a rather superior whodunnit, but it is so much more. Tana French’s portrait of small town rural Ireland, with its gossip, linguistic quirks, petty jealousies, long-held grudges and its ambiguous relationship with the land and its climate reveals in words what Rembrandt brought to life with brush strokes. I have never set foot in Ireland, so I cannot say if her version is accurate. What I do know is that no contemporary English writer does the same thing for our villages and small towns. We are, of course, a very crowded and compact country and much more in thrall to globalist media influence, so perhaps the comparison is unfair. In the end, good triumphs – after a fashion. Tommy Moynihan is stopped in his tracks, but not before a good man dies. The Keeper will be published by Viking on 2nd April.

March 26, 2026 0

REAPER . . . Between the covers

New Zealand’s long standing Queen of Crime is, of course, Ngaio Marsh, but her trademark Inspector Alleyn novels were mostly set in England, apart from four where Alleyn is seconded to New Zealand. Vanda Symon, in contrast, sets her novels resolutely ‘at home’. I thoroughly enjoyed Prey (2024) which was set in Dunedin.

Here, Symon takes us the the capital city. We quickly learn that Max Grimes is a former Auckland police officer, now living rough, but with a day job as a cleaner. The circumstances surrounding his apparent downfall unfold as the story progresses. The titular Reaper has decided that his life mission is to rid the city streets of those he views as bottom feeders – the vagrants, the alcoholics, and vulnerable people who live in shop doorways and empty properties. People like Max, then? Well, perhaps not. Vanda Symon’s first task is to convince us that Max is tough and resilient enough – despite his reduced circumstances – to tackle a serial killer.

Homeless sleuths need some form of contact with and co-operation with the regular police, and for Max Grimes, this comes in the shape of DS Meredith Peters, an astute and resourceful officer, but one acutely aware of the residual misogyny not just in the police force, but in city politics.There is a parallel plot. Experienced readers know that these lines often converge, but for now, here it is: we learn that Max’s daughter was murdered by her drug-addled boyfriend, who subsequently took his own life. When Shane McFarlane, the boy’s father, approaches Max and asks him to trace the dealer whose product effectively killed both of their children, Max’s initial reaction is repulsion and a rude refusal. Later, he reconsiders, and agrees to help.

The Reaper is given sporadic third person narratives to himself, so we know exactly what he is up to, well before Max and the police do. He shoots dead a former chemistry teacher and successful crystal meth cook named Gary Cochrane, and it is Cochrane who pulls the two parallel plot lines together, much to the detriment of Max Grimes, who has had a bruising recent encounter with Cochrane in his search for the dealer who has caused him so much pain.

Vanda Symon cleverly emphasises Grimes’s physical vulnerability here, as she realises that a Reacher-like superhero is an unlikely fit for her man. I did wonder, however, about Max having a constantly charged and fully paid-up smartphone, despite his abject poverty, but hey ho, it’s crime fiction. When Max is framed for the shooting of Cochrane and arrested, at least he has a roof over his head but, mentally, he is in a very dark place.

The idea of a homeless solver of crimes is certainly not new. Trevor Wood introduced to his sleuth Jimmy Mullen in The Man on the Street, and followed up with One Way Street and Dead End Street. Is the concept plausible? Probably not, but then this particular reviewer must constantly remind himself that he is dealing with crime fiction. Readers want to be absorbed, intrigued and entertained; Vanda Symon emphatically ticks all three boxes. She has given us an ingenious plot which leads to a (literally) searing finale. Reaper is published by Orenda books and is available now.

March 11, 2026 1

THE DANGEROUS STRANGER . . . Between the covers

This is the latest outing for British CriFi’s most unlikely partnership – Wilkins and Wilkins. Detective Inspector Ryan, of that kin is scruffy and, to be blunt, dresses and talks like a chav (remember them?) His partner Ray is Nigerian – London, handsome, public school educated, urbane and, before he was paired with Ryan, a rising star of Thames Valley police. They are based on Oxford. The book begins, however, in London, where an ageing criminal, known, as Dogs, is hunted down by a violent former associate called Head Hunter, and forced to take on another job.

An emergency call sends the Ws out to a budget hotel, now housing asylum seekers. An angry mob of locals, incensed by the recent murder of a local girl by an apparent immigrant, is laying siege to the property and, amid the chaos, a young African man is murdered while trying to escape the hotel. What this has to do with the events in London remains to be seen. To add to the already fraught relationship between Ryan and Ray, the Superintendent attaches a young Detective Constable, William Huber to the Ws team. He is unlikely to gel with Ryan, as William is a ‘posh boy’, enthusiastic, earnest and plummy of voice. The Ws have home lives that seem different, but neither resembles any kind of utopia. Ray is, as they say, ‘happily’ married, but life with wife Diane and their twin sons is frequently fractious. She is a professional woman, and is determined that Ray do more than his hair share of parenting, in spite of his unpredictable working hours. Ryan lives alone in a seedy rented flat, while his four year old son is brought up by his sister. He tries to be a good dad but, again, his job and what it sucks out of him, make him an imperfect father.

As the case progresses, it transpires that the man killed in the hotel protest may have been a wealthy and well connected French citizen but, clearly some things simply do not add up. The case takes a grim turn when a twelve year-old boy who attended the riot with his father is found to have concealed a knife and an empty canister under his bed. Hidden with them is his mobile ‘phone, on which is a video of the burning man. The two big questions are: what was the Frenchman doing in the asylum hotel, and what became of the migrant for whom he was mistaken? Further grit is thrown into than less than well-oiled mechanism of the investigative team by the arrival of a prominent French police officer to “help” with enquiries. As the story progresses, Simon Mason leaks clues into the narrative, a drop or two at a team, as to the connection between Oxford and the world of Dogs and Head Hunter.

Mason endows Dogs with a noirish quality as if he had just walked in from the streets of one of Derek Raymond’s ‘Factory’ novels.

“Really, he was only happy in London. Old Rotherhithe, those shabby, mean places of his youth.He was shabby and mean himself and always would be, thank God. All his life he’d lived in the weeds; he resented it and loved it, they were his weeds. It was the way he was made.”

Ray has his demons, but on Ryan’s back is the terrifying specter of his abusive father, now a broken man in an ex-offender’s institution.

“He thought of the person his father had become, a pathetic figure, shrunk and feeble, sick-looking, an animal that needs putting down.But buried very deep in Ryan, like a disgusting secret, was something he didn’t understand and couldn’t bear to think about: he was still frightened of this person.”

The joy of crime fiction is that its best writers make us believe in the improbable. Mason presents us with Ryan Wilkins, in his scuffed trainers and awful trackies, forever twitching with facial tics caused by God knows what family history. He is off the social scale in terms of lifestyle. His clapped-out Peugeot is always on the cusp of breakdown, and how he maintains the trust of his little son is little short of miraculous. And yet, and yet. He has instincts and insights that his more ‘civilised’ partner Ray can only dream of. I don’t want this series to end but, going forward, could Ryan ever mature into a seasoned institutional copper. What would he be like aged 50? Thankfully, that is a conundrum to which I will not have to provide a solution. The Dangerous Stranger is an absolute peach of a crime novel, and will be be published by Quercus on 12th February.

For my thoughts on previous Ryan Wilkins mysteries, click this link.

March 10, 2026 0

DEAD HEAT . . . Between the covers

For Matt Grimshaw, everything has suddenly become rather ‘former’. Thanks to being sacked by his long-term employer, he is now a former journalist, and Takara is now his former lover, he having discovered her cavorting with a colleague in his London flat. Adam and Celia, a well-off media couple, are still his friends, however, and they have given him the key to the cottage next to their villa on the Mani Peninsula, part of the ancient kingdom of Sparta.

Matt spends a few days on his own there before Adam, Celia, their teenage daughter Lydia and her friend Jasmine arrive. Adam is disconcerted that across the bay a former abandoned folly, Arcadia, has been converted into a luxury compound by a tech billionaire called Reynash de Souza. The problem is that Adam and de Souza have, as they say, history. When de Souza throws a party for all the neighbourhood, what Dylan called ‘a simple twist of fate’ intervenes and turns the azure Aegean into something far, far darker.

In the background is a missing person, a man called Marc Ashley, a guest at de Souza’s Arcadia. One morning, he set out for a run and never came back. His sister Sarah is desperately trying to find him by a leafleting campaign and organising volunteer search parties.At the heart of the story is the relationship between Matt and Adam. Matt is a talented writer, but insecure and, perhaps, too sensitive to the needs of others. His emotional antennae are fine-wired, but to his own detrimental. Adam is, to use the old word, a cad. Charming, persuasive, charismatic even, he uses people. One such is a young woman called Amira, a former intern at Adam’s production company. He seduced her and is subsequently horrified when she turns up at de Souza’s mansion. She blackmails him, and Matt, ever loyal, agrees to be part of the deception involving a pay-off that will deceive Celia.

The book begins with one of those enigmatic prologues, date stamped well after the events of the main story. A man sits in a Greek court, watching a prisoner being sentenced. Sabine Durrant drops a fairly hefty hint that the observer is Matt Grimshaw, but who is the convicted man? Sabine Durrant not only deftly recreates the enervating physical climate, but makes us sweat in the oppressive emotional climate created by infidelity, old sins returning to haunt the perpetrator, and dangerous atmosphere caused by money mixed with power. Dead Heat is an immersive mystery beautifully woven with the threads of cruelty, revenge and deceit. It will be published by Century on 12th March.