Category: Detective and crime fiction

  • 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…

    Lucy Foley – Midnight Feast (2025)
  • 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…

    Agatha Christie – Dumb Witness (1937)
  • 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,…

    Eve Armstrong – Murder By Theory (2022)
  • 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…

    Amy Gentry – Good as Gone (2016)
  • 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…

    Craig Robertson – Murderabilia (2016)
  • 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.…

    Alice Slater – Death of a Bookseller (2023)
  • 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…

    Eds. Katherine Stansfield and Caroline Oakley – Cast a Long Shadow (2022)
  • Stuart Turton – The Devil and the Dark Water (2020)

    Review I was somewhat slow to this, reading it a few years after it came out. Setting up a master detective requires a deftness of touch; go too far, and…

    Stuart Turton – The Devil and the Dark Water (2020)
  • Claire Evans – The Graves of Whitechapel (2020)

    Review Having written a collection of short stories about detective work in the Victorian East End, this is of course going to catch my eye, which it did eventually on…

    Claire Evans – The Graves of Whitechapel (2020)
  • Victoria Dowd – The Supper Club Murders (2022)

    Review This is the third in the Smart Women series, featuring mother and daughter Ursula and Pandora Smart (in-world, supposedly not their real names) and aunt Charlotte, plus some of…

    Victoria Dowd – The Supper Club Murders (2022)