14th April 2022

THE FIELDS by ERIN YOUNG
(HODDER £16.99, 352 pp)

This first venture into crime from award-winning, Brighton-based historical novelist Robyn Young — writing under a pseudonym — is set among the cornfields of Iowa. A young woman is found murdered on one of the few family farms that has not been swallowed up by the titans of ‘Big Agriculture’. 
Newly promoted Sergeant Riley Fisher, the first female head of investigations in the Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office, is sent to investigate. Her search becomes personal when she realises the victim is an old school friend. 
Another body is found, and rapidly it emerges that something very frightening indeed is happening in the vast flatlands of the Midwest. 
Add to the mix an election for governor and the suspicion that a woman can never be a homicide detective, and you have a story as gripping and sinuous as Jane Harper’s The Dry. There could be no higher praise. 

14th April 2022

BREAKNECK POINT by T.Orr Munro
(HQ £14.99, 400 pp)

An interesting debut from a former crime scene investig a torturned-journalist, this focuses on single mother-of-one Ally Dymond. 
She’s a CSI who’s been coldshouldered by her colleagues after blowing the whistle on a corrupt detective inspector. 
Dymond finds herself exiled to the depths of North Devon, where no serious crime ever appears to take place. But then the body of 19-year-old Janie Warren turns up in the seaside town of Bidecombe. 
The lead detective is convinced it is simply a drug overdose, but Dymond is far from sure. Still, no one wants to listen to a female investigator who put one of their own behind bars. 
Meanwhile, the killer is watching her every move and charting it in counterpoint to Ally’s story. 
Packed with authenticity and a neat line in menace, it could have moved a little faster, but is compelling nonetheless.

14th April 2022

INTO THE DARK by Fiona Cummins
(Macmillan £14.99, 336 pp)

Nothing and no one is entirely what they seem in the gifted Cummins’ fifth crime story. In a beautiful house overlooking the sea in Essex live the golden Holden family — father Gray, mother Piper and teenagers Riva and Artie. 
Then one morning all four disappear into thin air, with the only clue left behind a message written on a mirror in Riva’s bedroom which says, ‘Make Them Stop’. 
Has there been a massacre? If so, where are the bodies? Or have the family been kidnapped? No one can tell. 
Enter DS Saul Anguish, a new member of the murder squad in Midtown-on-Sea, an officer with an heroic record of protecting two children from a serial killer. 

12th May 2022

THE BLOOD TIDE by Neil Lancaster
(HQ £14.99, 448 pp)

The intrepid DS Max Craigie, who burst onto the scene last year in Lancaster’s formidable story Dead Man’s Grave, now finds himself confronting his nemesis, Scottish crime boss Tam Hardie, once again. 
The gangster may be in jail, put there by Craigie, but he is still pulling the strings when it comes to drug-smuggling in the Highlands and he has revenge on his mind. 
It becomes clear there is a corrupt officer somewhere in the highest echelons of Police Scotland, Border Force or the National Crime Agency, who is providing Hardie with inside information. 
Add to the story a callous killer who happens to work for the law, and you have a deliciously dark stew that comes to the boil in the Highlands. It is a tribute to Lancaster’s formidable talent — he is after all a former detective with the Met — that every paragraph feels utterly authentic.

12th May 2022

NO LESS THE DEVIL by Stuart MacBride
(Bantam Press £20, 480 pp)

There can be no question that MacBride is one of this country’s finest crime writers. In a string of novels he defined what darkness means in storytelling with his perfectly judged Logan McRae series. 
Here he launches a new detective, DS Lucy McVeigh, who finds herself plunged into two investigations. First a vicious serial killer — nicknamed Bloodsmith — is still on the loose, even though it is 17 months since he butchered his first victim, cutting the heart out along the way. 
Then there is Benedict Strachan, who killed a homeless man 16 years ago, at the age of just 11. Now 27, he has been released, but seems consumed by the fear someone is out to kill him, and begs McVeigh to save him. 
Could there be two monsters haunting Scotland? Brave, belligerent and resourceful, McVeigh quickly reveals she is a heroine to be treasured. 

12th May 2022

THE MURDER RULE by Dervla McTiernan
(HarperCollins £14.99, 304 pp)

This fiendishly clever story focuses on an idealistic young law student, Hannah Rokeby, who wants to join the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia which aims to overthrow miscarriages of justice. 
It currently has one particular case in its sights — Michael Dandridge. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death only for the case to be returned for a re-trial, which is now rapidly approaching. 
Yet Hannah is anything but what she seems. Her mother is not having cancer treatment at a local hospital, as she has claimed — instead she’s a barely functioning alcoholic and her daughter is not so much interested in seeing Dandridge freed but in seeing him convicted again.