Reviews 

I have read this before but was possibly binge-reading Robinson at the time and enjoyed it a lot more this time. This one begins in north...

Have read this before, but struggling to find things in the library. A bolt on, I think, to the earlier four Jackson Brodie books. Brodie...

This is very good. A young trendy woman has had an affair and child with a political activist, who has subsequently disappeared. She...

I have read this guy before, a bit of a reading binge in Malaga in 2017, see no.490. But I hadn’t read this one; I think a fairly recent...

A variant on Scandi noir, this is set in Helsinki, so Finnish noir, which lacks resonance. A quite good police procedural, with a very...

The first Laidlaw novel, completed by Rankin following McIvanney’s death in 2015. I found it very hard work and with few characters of...

I like Reginald Hill, but his later books do veer into a level of obscurity that I don’t enjoy. If so, this must be a mid-period book, a...

Never heard of the author, but this was very good, and beautifully written. A crime novel, set possibly in Edwardian or late Victorian...

A Skandi–noir novel, I guess. Well plotted especially toward the end, but I found the central characters totalling un-interesting. Hanna,...

I think this is the title. It is the one that begins with a massacre, cunningly written so that I assumed set in Africa until the last...

I have read I think all Tana French’s books but this is the best. I find her prose style can get a bit Jamesian and convoluted but not in...

Xmas present from Dan, signed by the author. Parallel plot lines; Clarke in Edinburgh doing conventional police work; Rebus now...

Insomniac night after finishing 697, grabbed another short book from the (crime) bookshelf. Despite, I think, what people would say,...

The return of Jackson Brodie. This was good, but not as rich as some of the previous books; read a bit as if her agent or backers had...

McBain is a very good writer and I have lots of his books on the bookcase, which I haven’t read for years. I have wasted a lot of money...

Mc Bain is undoubtedly a clever writer and the general ‘police procedurals’ summary masks this. Here we have a play within a play within...

A midnight flit downstairs to find a book having finished 663 at 83% on the kindle; an annoying habit of the modern publishing industry...

First book on my very challenging to use new kindle. I re-read 650 with a view to re-reading this, but my kindle then died, hence a...

Enjoyed no’s 597 and 615, so thought I would give Hill another go. This is the one where Ellie Pascoe comes close to having a Lady...

Airport, aeroplane reading en route to Malaga. Same book as no.1, 6 years ago. Very clever plotting, probably Hill and the Daziel novels...