Creator: Jeremy Davidson
Publication date: 2008-05-01
RRP: £16.99
Price: £5.50
Review Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Betrayal (CD) / Orion:
Creator: Martin Jarvis
Publication date: 2007-05-04
RRP: £13.00
Price: £5.75
Review Wolf Winter / Macmillan Digital Audio:
Creator: Robert Glenister
Edition: Abridged edition
Publication date: 2006-05-08
RRP: £15.99
Price: £7.49
Review Scaredy Cat / Time Warner AudioBooks:Mark Billingham's Scaredy Cat is as inventive his previous serial killer novel a Sleepyhead. Detective Inspector Tom Thorne has the job of watching out for patterns and thinks he spots one-two similar killings on the same day; women followed from a mainline station and then strangled. Rapidly, though, it becomes clear that the methods differed in all sorts of ways-one killing was controlled, the other frenzied-and the timings do not work out. On a hunch, Thorne checks for other such pairings and finds them-this time two killers are working as a team, one setting the other challenges. We know what Thorne does not, that all of this has to do with things that happened at school years ago; we also know a lot more than Thorne about the demons that drive some of his own investigating team. Billingham sets himself some complicated technical challenges here-flashes back and forwards, and closeups of killers' minds that keep crucial information from us-and some of the complications don't quite work. Overall, though, this is a terrifying exploration of brutal madness, made all the more so by touches of compassion for the killer's victims-the killer may think this a game, but we and Thorne know it is not. -Roz Kaveney.
Creator: Christopher Lane
Edition: MP3 Una
Publication date: 2008-02-12
Dewey code: 823.914
RRP: £16.38
Price: £11.83
Review The Killing Ground / Brilliance Corporation:
Publication date: 2004-01-05
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £19.99
Price: £4.24
Review Absolute Friends / Hodder & Stoughton:John le Carré's Absolute Friends is his best in years, capturing the verve and mastery of the magnificent early work. In fact, as a prelude to the book, you could do worse than reread The Spy Who Came in from the Cold again, and be forcibly reminded how le Carré transformed the spy thriller 40 or so years ago. And the consolidation of his achievement came with the George Smiley sequence (inaugurated with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). As the Cold War came to an end, le Carré seemed to be in need of a new focus for his literary universe, but this was soon to come as the author explored newer social threats, with The Constant Gardener utilising the power of the pharmaceutical companies as nemesis, and producing yet another critical and popular success. Absolute Friends, even before publication, had some of the best word of mouth any le Carré novel had enjoyed, and every word of it was justified. As a penetrating character study, it's nonpareil, with the (very different) friends of the title brilliantly realised. Ted Mundy is the son of a British Infantry officer who left India under a cloud after partition, while Sasha is the crippled son of a religious German family who became a star of Far Left politics in the 1960s, at which point he encounters the ungainly Ted, taught by his father-and a committed girlfriend-to loathe British imperialism and all its current offshoots. In the present, Ted finds himself acting as an eccentric tour guide at Ludwig's palaces in Bavaria. When the two men meet again, they once more become involved in clandestine activities-with lethal results. If the author's own anti-Blair/Bush feelings are sometimes foregrounded, this is still le Carré at his considerable best, and a reminder of what a great talent the UK has in this writer. [+]-Barry Forshaw.
Publication date: 2005-05
RRP: £39.50
Price: £41.49
Review Of Woman Born / ISIS Audio Books:
Creator: David Aaron Baker
Edition: Audio CD Version
Publication date: 2008-05-20
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £25.76
Price: £12.88
Review Odd Hours (Odd Thomas) / Brilliance Audio:
Creator: Bill Paterson
Publication date: 2004-09-02
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £12.99
Price: £8.28
Review Knots And Crosses (CD) / Orion:
Creator: Kati Nicholl
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2006-07-03
RRP: £15.99
Price: £6.99
Review The Righteous Men / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:
Creator: Tim Machin
Publication date: 2005-04-11
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £16.99
Price: £8.40
Review The Innocent / Orion:
Publication date: 2005-07-18
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £17.99
Price: £10.00
Review The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: v. 3 (BBC Audio) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: David Timson
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2004-09-03
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.00
Price: £3.98
Review Death in the Clouds / Macmillan Audio Books:
Creator: David Timson
Publication date: 2004-08-31
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.99
Price: £9.08
Review The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: v. 5: Vol. 5: v. 5 / Naxos AudioBooks:
Creator: James Macpherson
Publication date: 2007-10-18
RRP: £14.99
Price: £7.49
Review A Question of Blood (CD: LATEST EDITION) / Orion:Sometimes crime affects you directly: in A Question of Blood Inspector John Rebus is caught up in two cases that are closer to home than he would like. He is under investigation for the burning alive of a minor psychopath who threatened his attractive young sergeant Siobhan Clarke; and the son of an estranged cousin has been murdered in a high-school shooting. As always in Rankin's novels, Rebus's bad attitude to his superiors comes back to bite him: even though doctors testify that damage to his hands is a scalding from trying drunkenly to get into an over-hot bath, it is regarded as circumstantial evidence of his possible guilt. The high-school shooting looks at first sight like another ex-SAS crazy going wild-and here Rebus's own past as an SAS washout comes to haunt him-and the constant meddling of army investigators screams cover-up. In fact, though, this is one of those occasions on which Rebus's slightly paranoid preparedness to see connections everywhere pays off and he manages to solve both crimes and a lot of other unsuspected pieces of mayhem besides. Along the way, the book offers Rankin's usual intense commentary on embattled masculinity and what it means to be a Scot, and this excellent sequence's usual portrayal of an Edinburgh where modernity rubs up against time-worn slums and ancient privilege. -Roz Kaveney.
Publication date: 2004-10-07
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £12.99
Price: £3.00
Review Adam and Eve and Pinch Me / Random House Audiobooks:In Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, Ruth Rendell once again tackles the dark and dangerous side of human psychology. It is this quality that defines her as a writer and distinguishes her from the other British Queens of Crime: PD James and Minette Walters (although some would argue that Val McDermid is now in that category). She take the reader into a more sinister and threatening world than any of her contemporaries, and there is a reason why she remains non-pareil in this territory: a reason demonstrated with disturbing impact in Adam and Eve and Pinch Me. Rendell's speciality is her ability to enter the psychopathology of her characters and make us not only understand their often murderous behaviour, but also vicariously participate. It's a skill that Hitchcock made his own in the cinema, but he rarely moved into such black waters as Rendell. This new book continues a trend initiated in earlier work by Rendell: the grafting of supernatural elements into a typical Rendellian tale of menace. And what makes the ghost in the new book so disturbing is the total avoidance of cliché: no grey, wispy phantom, this-it is disturbingly corporeal. Jock Lewis died in the Paddington train crash. Or did he? His fiancée Minty is coming to terms with both his loss and the loss of all her savings, which Jock vanished with. And there is Zilla, who had been married to a man called Jerry Leach. [+]She also received a letter from the railway company telling her that her husband is dead. Other women, too, who do not know each other, have all had relationships with a dark-haired man who disappears from their lives. And when Jock's ghost reappears to Minty at her home and at her work, she begins to carry a knife. but if she stabs him, will he bleed? Rendell has always been a writer who likes to take risks, and the danger here was that Adam and Eve and Pinch Me would end up as a smorgasbord of supernatural and crime elements, each cancelling the other out. But Rendell is far too assured a writer for this, and the balance between the different aspects of the book is always kept rigorously in place. So many writers fall into dull repetition; here, again, Rendell demonstrates that she's going from strength to strength. -Barry Forshaw.
Creator: Jeff Harding
Publication date: 2005-02-03
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £16.99
Price: £5.44
Review Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Legacy (CD) / Orion:
Creator: David Timson
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-03-31
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.99
Price: £7.05
Review The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: "The Engineer's Thumb", "The Silver Band", "The Scandal in Bohemia", "The Five Orange Pips" v. 2 (Classic Fiction) / Naxos AudioBooks:
Creator: Christian Rodska
Publication date: 2003-02-28
RRP: £41.07
Price: £43.06
Review The Keys of Hell / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Andrew Sachs
Publication date: 2008-05-01
RRP: £13.99
Price: £3.00
Review Doctored Evidence / Random House Audiobooks:
Creator: David Timson
Publication date: 2004-08-31
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.99
Price: £9.08
Review The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: v. 5: Vol. 5: v. 5 / Naxos AudioBooks:
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Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Betrayal (CD), Wolf Winter, Scaredy Cat, The Killing Ground, Absolute Friends, Of Woman Born, Odd Hours (Odd Thomas), Knots And Crosses (CD), The Righteous Men, The Innocent, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: v. 3 (BBC Audio), Death in the Clouds, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: v. 5: Vol. 5: v. 5, A Question of Blood (CD: LATEST EDITION), Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Legacy (CD), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: "The Engineer's Thumb", "The Silver Band", "The Scandal in Bohemia", "The Five Orange Pips" v. 2 (Classic Fiction), The Keys of Hell, Doctored Evidence, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: v. 5: Vol. 5: v. 5 |
