Murder
LA runs riot
Ryan Gattis’s novel All Involved is set in South Central Los Angeles in 1992, during the riots that began after…
The murderous gangs who run the world
Rosalio Reta was 13 years old when recruited by a Mexican drug cartel. He was given a loyalty test —…
Bringing Camus to book
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…
Fighting fear with fear
‘Do it with scissors’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us…
A brave man takes a stand
Los Angeles ghetto life — thrashed, twisted and black — is not a world that most Americans care to visit.…
Addicted to trouble
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual…
The first and last puzzle
One could have endless fun setting quiz questions about Georges Perec. Which French novelist had a scientific paper, ‘Experimental demonstration…
Cold cases warm up
‘And anything by Michael Connelly’ were the final words of advice from one of my best friends in discussing books…
Sex, death and good TV
South Africa’s spectacular murder trials – first Oscar Pistorius, now Shrien Dewani – help take minds off other difficulties
Gossip with a kind heart
J.K. Rowling’s second novel under the Robert Galbraith moniker is a whodunit set in the publishing industry. This isn’t a…
Execute
During the sudden advances of ISIS in Iraq, one visual image stood for their brutality. As the Daily Mail reported…
Sex and squalor in San Francisco
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…
Must every quality TV show begin with a young woman’s corpse?
It was Shetland that tipped me over the edge. Not the place, but the TV series. Although that’s set in…
Loss, grief and guilt
About 30 pages in and unable to find my bearings, I flipped to the end of this novel — well,…
Guns and neuroses
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…
Divinely decadent
With an eye to the blasphemy underlying some of the loveliest Renaissance painting, Honor Clerk will be choosing her Christmas cards more carefully this year
Saints and sinners
There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is…
