Reviews 

Bought this as listed for the Booker prize (2016) and in the crime section at Waterstones. It is very good and I can understand the...

This is very different, quite difficult and very good. A book about a boarding house in Portabello, Edinburgh, really throughout the 20th...

Book of the year, so far. Beautifully written. About a single location – Glen Conach – in the Scottish highlands over several centuries....

Local library now open again, post lockdown, so opportunity to try some books. This was very good – an almost 19th century novel written...

Very good. Quite a difficult book about her childhood in Motherwell, written by a successful and now I think sadly dead journalist in her...

I like Denise Mina, with her weird punk hair, and enjoyed her on the TV recently with Frank Skinner on Boswell & Johnson’s tour of...

I like this writer and hadn’t read one for years, but picked one of which I had no memory, perhaps because it is not that good. Three...

A book whose provenance I don’t know; must have been my father’s if the marginal jottings are in his handwriting. Not unlike a Rebus...

This was well plotted but really it ran into melodrama. My memory of May’s earlier books is of dense plotting, linguistic challenges...

An early (I think) Rebus novel, pre Siobhan Clarke and Cafferty. This is pretty good - about an up and coming (married) politician caught...

I have tried, I think, to read this before. It is quite a weird book, a slightly surreal campus novel set in Aberdeen or possibly Dundee...

Dan gave this to Paddy for Xmas. The author is a 2nd hand bookseller in Wigtown, a small Scottish town in Galloway, not far from...

Couldn’t get on with this at all, despite my enthusiasms above. Maybe I was just enjoying Madrid and Granada too much. Very much a...

Odd experience, as I expected this to be a re-read, but it must have sat, unread, on my book case for years. Siobhan’s parents have never...

Thriller with two parallel time lines; modern day Canada and the Highland land clearances in the mid 19th century. The two plot lines run...

Our local library is I am sure struggling to survive, so I went in to give it a bit of support. Few decent books though! Anyway another...

Very good – I have really enjoyed Ian Rankin over the last couple of years; odd because I never used to. Perhaps it was the alcohol. By...

How nice to find a good writer I had never heard of on what I thought was a rather wasted trip (all 200 yards from the door) to the...

Haven’t read any Ian Rankin for ages, but revisited the library on a sunny day and found that Rebus had been resurrected. I am not...

Inspired by the chase around Scotland in no.68 ( and struggling a bit with no.70) I Kindled this for nothing. Never read it or any other...