The Perfect Lie by Jo Spain
I’ll admit it. Jo Spain had me from the first chapter in her latest thriller, The Perfect Lie, set in Newport, Long Island. Maybe it was the protagonist, Erin Kennedy being an Irish ex-pat. I live with one of those. Which sort of makes me Irish by injection. Or maybe it was Erin’s Bellport Bay…
The Day She Died by S.M. Freedman
I like novels that tell a story in both the present and the past. After all, so much of what we become is tied up in where we have been. When an author uses this shifting perspective it’s like getting two mysteries for the price of one. In any old book you can read to…
Still Life by Val McDermid
Still Life begins with a corpse being pulled out of the Firth of Forth by a group of lobster fishermen. Definitely not your typical catch of the day. The body belongs to a man who was a suspect in his brother’s disappearance and probable murder over a decade ago, but he did a runner when…
The Less Dead by Denise Mina
My mother used to work as a social worker, reuniting adult adoptive children with their natural parents. She’d be the first to tell you that those reunions can be wonderfully rewarding. They can also be a complete flippin’ disaster. That’s the thing with birth families, just like Forest Gump’s iconic box of chocolates, “you never…
Darling Rose Gold By Stephanie Wrobel
Rose Gold and her mother, Patty, have a complicated relationship in the dark domestic thriller, Darling Rose Gold. This is in part due to Patty being in prison for the last five years. Incarceration tends to put a damper on most family get-togethers, particularly birthdays when everybody expects cakes with a file in them. But…
River of Lies By R.M. Greenaway
The dead bodies are dropping fast and furious in this latest novel in the B.C. Blues Crime series by the talented R.M. Greenaway. If you are looking for dull moments, pick up another book. In the first few pages of River of Lies, a young woman is murdered in a parking lot on her way…
I Choose You by Gayle Curtis
“Mental illness is sickness of the mind caused by the constant overwhelming battle one has with one’s essence, beliefs and purpose.” (I Choose You, p. 235) If this is the definition of mental illness, then the only sane person in the novel, I Choose You, is the serial killer (ironically the one responsible for this…
Last Request by Liz Mistry
Liz Mistry has a new fan. I was already a hard-core devotee of Tartan Noir via Denise Mina (interviewed here at She Kills Lit), but after reading Liz Mistry’s Last Request set in West Yorkshire, I have a whole new geographic subgenre to savour. I’m going to call it Tweed Noir, crime fiction guaranteed to…
Darlington by Tripsy South
“Sometimes it was just best to shut the f*** up and let the wisdom flow over you.” – (p. 217) Such was the approach I attempted to take while reading Darlington. This novel is a sort of Kerouac-like stream of consciousness that follows a few months in the life of Tommy Darlington – a part-time…
Bunny by Mona Awad
It is tough to nail down the genre of Bunny, A Novel by Mona Awad. Is it noir? Horror? Crime fiction? Is it an acid flashback from that tab you dropped stupidly in college? Or maybe we will just call it Literary, the great catch-all for all exceptionally well-written works that often defy description. Whatever…
