Dominique Gracia

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  • Vaseem Khan – Quantum of Menace (2025)

    This is a new endeavour for Vaseem Khan, after his two award-winning series set in India, the Malabar House and Baby Ganesh series, and his recent standalone US-based thriller, The Girl in Cell A. I’m always intrigued by extended-universe work that builds on well-known characters and creates new offshoots, as part of my general interest…

  • Gaynor Torrance – Death of a Ghostwriter (2025)

    I’m really enjoying the trend towards detective fiction with a strong sense of place, and as someone who lives in Dyffryn Gwy at least part of the time, I was obviously going to pick up this Wye Valley Widows series! (I had actually been trying to get hold of The Cardiff Killings, the start of…

  • Lucy Foley – Midnight Feast (2025)

    This book was everywhere on Waterstones tables for months, and it follows in the well worn tracks of her previous crime thrillers, starting with the excellent The Hunting Party. I had been a little disappointed in The Paris Apartment, feeling that things were getting quite samey, and the settings a little less compelling, so I…

  • History of Science and Science Fiction (Victorian Reading Project)

    This was the third theme on my Great Nineteenth-Century Reading Project list, which I started in 2023. As with the other themes, there was a mix of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in this list. Reading plan (chronological) Between starting the Great Victorian Reading Project of 2023 and now, I discovered that I had ADHD, and…

  • Agatha Christie – Dumb Witness (1937)

    This Poirot novel doesn’t have the best reviews, either from its initial publication or subsequently, but I found it really rather charming. There is some silliness about the circumstances of the first murder attempt against old spinster aunt Emily Arundell, whose own characterisation seems to waver a little throughout the book. For the small period…

  • Eve Armstrong – Murder By Theory (2022)

    Review I bought this a few years ago when talking about Dark Academia and detective fiction with a colleague at UCL. I’d particularly been hunting for something that involved economists, but this was adjacent and seemed like fun: two novella-length stories inviting us behind the scenes to see how working in academia can be murder!…

  • Amy Gentry – Good as Gone (2016)

    Review I enjoyed this as an audiobook a few years ago, when my child was very small and it was useful to have things to listen to so that I could walk around the park repetitively, or the flat, etc., etc. While this novel eventually gets to the whodunnit and whatdun of the apparent crime…

  • Craig Robertson – Murderabilia (2016)

    Review The reason I still love physical libraries is because they make it so easy to wander slowly through a selection of books and pick up something spontaneously that comes with none of the bumph of online selection: no aggregated number of stars by reviewers, no detail about what comes before or after it in…

  • Alice Slater – Death of a Bookseller (2023)

    Review I was really excited about the premise of this book, and the initial introductions to its apparently diametrically opposed characters—Roach (aka Brogan) and Laura—fizzed with the promise of tension. There was a lack of real menace about Roach, despite her developing stalker behaviour. A grungy quasi-loner, actually longing for connection and struggling to find…

  • Eds. Katherine Stansfield and Caroline Oakley – Cast a Long Shadow (2022)

    Preamble If you like mythologically informed (crime-adjacent) fiction, you can also check out my Dear Damsels story, ‘In Darkness’ as well as some of the stories in this collection, available on Bookshop.Org! Review This collection was published a few years again now, but I read it earlier this year, while the weather was still gloomy…