Creator: Christopher Lee
Publication date: 2008-01-07
RRP: £13.99
Price: £7.68
Review Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire and Other Stories / HarperCollins Audio:
Publication date: 2004-06-14
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £16.99
Price: £7.35
Review Monday Mourning / Random House Audiobooks:In Monday Mourning Tempe Brennan finds the bones of three dead adolescents in a basement and she has to convince her police colleagues that they are recent enough that the case should be investigated. The book has all the technical know-how, crisply explained, that we expect from Kathy Reichs; readers find themselves peering over Tempe's shoulder as she works out, not only the solution to a puzzle, but how to begin to solve it. Reichs is a practising forensic archaeologist in real life-but she never forgets that her readers cannot be expected to know everything she does. For a genuine expert though, she is remarkably unpatronising to our ignorance-one of the reasons why Tempe has so many colleagues who know comparatively little is so that her explanations can instruct us while we watch prickly Tempe tread on colleagues' toes. Like all of Reichs' books, Monday Mourning has a pronounced sense of place-Montreal in the snow has rarely seemed so real. If there is a downside to this clever police procedural, it is that we get rather too much of Tempe's fairly conventional emotional life-apparent problems with her lover Ryan end up in quite the corniest of explanations for apparent individuality, while her concern for an apparently suicidal friend adds artificial suspense to a plot that was doing the whole thing quite well in the first place. -Roz Kaveney.
Creator: Hugh Fraser
Publication date: 2004-07-19
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £16.99
Price: £8.20
Review Curtain: Poirot's Last Case: Complete and Unabridged / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:
Creator: Stephen Tompkinson
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2004-02-06
RRP: £15.99
Price: £3.94
Review Millions / Macmillan Audio Books:
Edition: Exclusive to Gardners
Publication date: 2007-10-01
RRP: £9.99
Price: £5.63
Review The Thirty Nine Steps (Classic Drama) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Steven Pacey
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2003-06-20
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £16.99
Price: £8.99
Review Ice Station / Macmillan Audio Books:
Creator: Emily Woof
Publication date: 2004-05-06
RRP: £14.99
Price: £4.75
Review Tokyo / Random House Audiobooks:Tokyo is another of Mo Hayder's deliciously chilling criminal outings, but probably won't produce the frisson of disapproval that such novels as Birdman and The Treatment did. The days are gone when Hayder was identified as one of a cadre of women writers who did something totally unacceptable: produce grisly crime novels quite as unsettling as the products of male imagination. People seem to have finally accepted that the tough crime novel needn't be an exclusively male preserve. Her troubled female protagonist in Tokyo is Grey, haunting the thronging streets of Tokyo in search of an elusive piece of film recording the infamous Nanking massacre of 1937. But did the film ever exist? The past is a touchy subject for Grey, with incidents in her own life that she has not yet come to terms with. She ill-advisedly becomes a hostess in a nightclub where the clientele is a tad unsavoury (another example of Hayder utilising real-life crime for her plots, with the echoes of a recent murder case). And Grey finds a lead to her quest: a taciturn survivor of the massacre who is now an academic, with no time for the woman pestering him. But Grey makes progress with him-until she encounters a powerful Godfather figure and his violent associates, with a clandestine source for his well-being a much sought-after elixir. Soon, Grey's life becomes two things: very complicated and a place of considerable danger. The change of locale for Mo Hayder here has ensured that the imaginative energy of her earlier books is consolidated, as is the rejection of the now hackneyed serial killer plot. [+]Atmosphere is brilliantly sustained, set pieces are pulse-racing, and (most satisfying of all) Grey is a truly complex and damaged heroine, the perfect conduit for the reader through this dark world. -Barry Forshaw.
Publication date: 2006-10-09
RRP: £18.99
Price: £11.19
Review Cross / Headline:James Patterson has a position that is unassailable - as one of America's most reliable crime and thriller writers, his best-selling status is assured. But it has to be said that he has tested the patience of his long-time readers by the series of books written in collaboration with other, lesser-known writers, in which it seemed that his own participation was the least important element. True Patterson fans will always welcome books such as Cross as the real deal: unadulterated James Patterson, sans collaborators. Here we have Patterson's favourite protagonist, Alex Cross, in the days when he was making his mark in the Washington, DC Police Department. To his horror, he witnesses his wife being murdered in front of him by an unknown killer. Years pass, and Cross has left the FBI for his former profession as a psychologist. He feels he has come to terms with the events of the past, but then receives a call from his ex-partner John Sampson, requesting a favour in tracking down a serial rapist in Georgetown. Soon, the case presents connections to the death of Alex's wife - is he finally being given the chance to catch her murderer? This is James Patterson, doing what he does best: delivering a narrative in which there is not an ounce of wasted fat. Alex Cross is always, of course, a strong protagonist, and the personal element here energises an already kinetic storyline. James Patterson, we are reminded, needs no collaborators. [+]-Barry Forshaw.
Creator: Terrence Hardiman
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2000-05
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £53.99
Price: £52.01
Review Death Is Now My Neighbour / Chivers Audio Books:
Publication date: 2004-08-02
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £16.99
Price: £7.70
Review The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next) / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affairputs you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard. Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable-someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example-a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text-against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel-an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre-and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames. Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. -Roz Kaveney.
Creator: Jan Maxwell
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2008-05-06
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £16.99
Price: £9.06
Review Where Are You Now? / Simon & Schuster Audio:
Creator: Christopher Ravenscoft
Publication date: 2002-11-07
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.99
Price: £5.15
Review The Babes in the Wood (Inspector Wexford) / Random House Audiobooks:
Creator: Jan Maxwell
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 2007-05-21
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £16.99
Price: £7.66
Review I Heard That Song Before / Simon & Schuster Audio:
Publication date: 2005-09-12
RRP: £17.99
Price: £3.98
Review Mary, Mary / Headline:
Creator: Isla Blair
Publication date: 2006-11-17
RRP: £14.99
Price: £3.06
Review Harsh Cry of the Heron / Macmillan Audio Books:
Creator: Mary Stuart Masterson
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2005-10-31
RRP: £15.99
Price: £3.40
Review Predator / Time Warner AudioBooks:
Publication date: 2005-11-07
RRP: £17.99
Price: £3.27
Review The Take / Headline:
Creator: Ric Jerrom
Publication date: 2004-05
RRP: £45.95
Price: £47.94
Review Off with His Head: Complete & Unabridged / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 2003-05-05
RRP: £12.99
Price: £8.54
Review A Study in Scarlet: BBC Radio 4 Full-cast Dramatisation (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: James Macpherson
Publication date: 2004-05-03
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £12.99
Price: £6.47
Review Tooth And Nail (CD) / Orion:Because the first body was found in Wolf Street, because the murderer takes a bite from each body, the press have found a new terror, the Wolfman. Drafted down to the Big Smoke thanks to his expertise in the modus operandi of serial killers, Inspector John Rebus is on a train south from Edinburgh. His Scotland Yard opposite number, George Flight, isn't too happy at yet more interference. It's bad enough having several Chief Inspectors on your back without being hounded at every turn by an upstart Jock. Rebus is going to have to deal with racial prejudice as well as the predations of a violent maniac. When he's offered a serial killer profile of the Wolfman by an attractive lady psychologist, it's too good an opportunity to turn down. But in finding an ally, he may have given his enemies an easy means of attack.
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Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire and Other Stories, Monday Mourning, Curtain: Poirot's Last Case: Complete and Unabridged, Millions, The Thirty Nine Steps (Classic Drama), Ice Station, Tokyo, Cross, Death Is Now My Neighbour, The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next), Where Are You Now?, The Babes in the Wood (Inspector Wexford), I Heard That Song Before, Mary, Mary, Harsh Cry of the Heron, Predator, The Take, Off with His Head: Complete & Unabridged, A Study in Scarlet: BBC Radio 4 Full-cast Dramatisation (BBC Radio Collection), Tooth And Nail (CD) |
