Iâve been reading crime fiction all my life. I love following the detective sifting through the evidenceâthe clues, the false trails, and the eventual denouement. It was a crime fiction book that made me realise that history is not fixed but is, in fact, detective work. It changes as more evidence is discovered or a new interpretation is accepted. That book made me decide to take history as my subject at university and I spent six deliriously happy years examining evidence, evaluating it, and, reaching conclusions. Amongst my case studies were the princes in the tower, the gunpowder plot, and witchcraft. Happy days!
All Kate Atkinsonâs books are beautifully written, with wicked observation, but what I love about them most is the reality of her characters.
None is more addictive than her detective, Jackson Brodie. I chose this book, not just because itâs the first in the series, but because it moved me so much. I have read it over and over again and each time it makes me cry. I want to take Theo, who still yearns for his murdered daughter, into my arms and comfort him.
Like me, you will want to know what happened to the little girl who disappeared from her own garden one night and what possessed one woman to kill her husband with an axe.
Through it all runs a subtle humour, which will make you laugh out loud.
Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night. Case two: A beautiful young office worker falls victim to a maniac's apparently random attack. Case three: A new mother finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making - with a very needy baby and a very demanding husband - until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.Thirty years after the first incident, as private investigator Jackson Brodie begins investigating all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge ...
I discovered Belinda Bauer through my local book club and have been addicted ever since. Her plots are thrilling, dark, and original.
The opening scene in this one will draw you in immediately and you will have trouble putting the book down until you have reached the end. It is the story of three children whose mother just disappeared one day. She told them to wait in the car and she walked away andnever came back!
Jack has to look after his sisters in any way he can. He goes to some very dark places, always wondering what happened to his mother.
The tension throughout is unbelievably high.
This story terrifies me and attracts me. I read it again and again, and it still gets me every time.
Crime & Thriller Book of the Year (Specsavers National Book Awards) Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018.
'The best crime novel I've read in a very long time.' VAL MCDERMID
SNAP DECISIONS CAN BE DANGEROUS . . .
On a stifling summer's day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack's in charge, she'd said. I won't be long.
But she doesn't come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed for ever.
Venice, 1612. A notorious courtesan and the scholarly daughter of the chief rabbi meet and form an unlikely friendship when their portraits are to be painted for a âGallery of Beautiesâ.
Dangerous passions are stirred by the portraits, and one by one, the beautiful subjects of the paintings are poisoned.âŚ
Frieda Klein is a psychotherapist dedicated to helping her patients overcome their private horrors. She tells them that they are in a safe place with herânothing will go beyond these walls. Until one day, a patientâs dreams and desires accord so closely to the case of a missing child that she decides to break that promise.
She finds herself involved in a complex police investigation that can only be solved with her specialist insight. The tension mounts to breaking point as she tracks down the killer, ending in a shocking climax that comes straight out of the left field.
"Complex psychological suspense at its best." -Booklist (starred review)
Immensely intelligent and poignantly human, Frieda Klein has captivated book critics and crime readers everywhere with her debut outing as Blue Monday's iconoclastic heroine. A psychotherapist and insomniac who spends her nights walking along the ancient rivers that lie beneath modern London, Frieda stars in a dazzling new crime series in which the terrors of the mind spill over into real life.
When five-year-old Matthew Farraday is abducted, Frieda cannot ignore the fact that his photograph perfectly matches the boy one ofâŚ
Rendellâs Inspector Wexford is so real that one reader wrote to the author, begging her to kill Wexfordâs wife soshecould marry him.
Iâve read all the Wexford books but this was the one that stood out for me.
Itâs a complex plot that involves kidnapping, a paedophile, a riot in which a policeman is burned to death, domestic abuse, and a cold-blooded murder.
The search for the body commenced. Then the victim walked into town.
Behind the picture-postcard façade of Kingsmarkham lies a community rife with violence, betrayal, and a taste for vengeance. When sixteen-year-old Lizzie Cromwell reappears no one knows where she has been, including Lizzie herself. Inspector Wexford thinks she was with a boyfriend. But the disappearance of a three-year-old girl casts a more ominous light on events. And when the public's outrage turns toward a recently released pederast and another suspect turns up stabbed to death, Wexford must try to unravel the mystery before any more bodies appear, and beforeâŚ
In this spine-tingling, atmospheric ânail-biter of a novelâ (Shelf Awareness), a woman returns to her hometown after her childhood friend attempts suicide at an alleged haunted houseâthe same place where a traumatic incident shattered their lives twenty years ago.
Few in sleepy Sumnerâs Mills have stumbled across the Octagon HouseâŚ
Teyâs Inspector Grant is laid up in the hospital and his girlfriend, desperate to keep him entertained and running out of ideas, has the brilliant idea of supplying him with photographs and portraits of famous people from the past. His task is to identify them solely from their faces, a skill he prides himself upon. One of the faces really intrigues him. He thinks the man is great and goodâa saint, perhaps. When he turns the picture over to read the name on the back, to his amazement it is Richard III. He demands his long-suffering girlfriend to bring him all the evidence she can find, so that he can solve the case of the princes in the tower.
This book changed my life. For the first time, I realised that history is a detective story. I eventually went on to do two history degrees and have never regretted it.
_________________________ Josephine Tey's classic novel about Richard III, the hunchback king whose skeleton was famously discovered in a council car park, investigates his role in the death of his nephews, the princes in the Tower, and his own death at the Battle of Bosworth.
Richard III reigned for only two years, and for centuries he was villified as the hunch-backed wicked uncle, murderer of the princes in the Tower. Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time is an investigation into the real facts behind the last Plantagenet king's reign, and an attempt to right what many believe to be theâŚ
In the 1990s Oxfordâs dreaming spires become a killerâs secret playground. It begins when Joshua finds the girl shivering in the stream, clutching a severed hand. Then he is plagued by the same nightmareâsomeone is coming through the corn, getting closer, eager to kill.
This is Tommy Rossâs first murder case and he has no idea how to solve it. How do you find a killer when you canât even find the body?
ALBA - Hidden Secrets is a tale of blood, broken dreams, and buried secrets.
When I was in high school, several young teenage boys died in car accidents, with tragic outcomes for all involved, and I wanted to honour their memory without specifically identifying them.
Imogeneâs client has a special request. The only hitch is, the client is dead. Itâs an ordinary day at Harryâs Hair Stop until Imogene hears her favorite clientâs dying wish. Two days later, she finds herself in the embalming room at Greener Pastures Mortuary, bottle of hair dye and scissorsâŚ