Category: Books

I’m a bit behind on keeping up to speed with the latest books I’ve read, so here’s a whistlestop tour. A Matter of Death and Life is the latest Andrey Kurkov novel. This time around our hero decides that life is meaningless and contracts a hit man to kill him. Things quickly get complicated and…

David Wolstencroft was very successful with his first book Good News, Bad News. It was pretty well reviewed, and then had the book chosen to be a Richard & Judy bookclub choice, which is never exactly bad for sales. As a co-creator of Spooks (you can’t miss this fact as it’s all over the cover,…

Purity of Blood is the second in the Captain Alatriste series of novels by Spanish author Arturo Perez-Reverte – and there are plenty more still to come. These are slight novels; not a great deal happens. The story is being told from the point of view by Alatriste’s protege, Inigo, at some indeterminate time in…

This is the breakthrough “business” book of the moment. Economist Steven Levitt and New York Times writer Stephen J. Dubner, take us through a very strange selection of essentially interesting facts and stories. At the outset of the book, they explain that there’s no real “theme” to this book. Instead they jump around the place.…

A few years ago Rob Long, sometime writer on Cheers and several [less succesful] US sitcoms, used to write a very entertaining column about the industry in The Observer. These either came from, or made up (I forget) a book called Conversations With My Agent which is now seemingly out of print. It was very…

This is the fist Annika Bengtzon book published in the UK, but might actually be the second or third in publishing order in Sweden. Whichever way around, it’s the first in chronological order. Anyway, junior reporter Annikia is introduced in this book working for a fictional Stockholm evening newspaper. She gets randomly assigned to a…

First of all, if you haven’t already heard it, dash over right now to the BBC Radio Player and listen to last Wednesday’s first episode of the second series of Ed Reardon’s Week. Ed Reardon is quite the funniest creation I’ve heard (or seen) in some time; a writer by trade, although he has trouble…

If you fancy yourself as the next Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson or Reginald Hill, there are a few things you really need to know when you start your detective crime series. First of all, you should think of it as a soap opera. You have to lay some clues well ahead of using. Not in…

Yet another Hard Case Crime novel, and, like the Stephen King novel, this one is also has a contemporary setting. Not only that, but the contemporary setting is Edinburgh (and Kirkwall in the Orkneys)! Joe is an enforcer for a dodgy Edinburgh loan shark. Are there any loan sharks who aren’t dodgy? Anyway, everything changes…

I was very impressed that the Åhleans department store stocked an entire section of books by Swedish authors. It was mainly made up of Henning Mankell novels, but having read all them, and wanting to read something Swedish I picked this up from the Stockholm based journalist Liza Marklund. This seems to be the third…

Yes – another Scandinavian novel. Does Iceland count as Scandinavia? Indriðason is the man who’s just won the CWA Gold Dagger, and inadvertently caused them to change their rules regarding the language of first publication. This wasn’t the book that won the award – that’s still only out in trade paperback. But this is his…

I believe that this is the thirtieth entry in the Discworld series, and that means that Pratchett has been publishing more than one title a year on average. I understand that he’s slowed down a bit more recently, but the guy’s a publishing phenomenon. This time around we meet Moist von Lipwig, who’s a cheat…

I guess that Hard Case Crime must have been over the moon when one of the kings of fiction deigned to write a novel for them. I’m also guessing that he’s so powerful a literary figure that he doesn’t have to worry about his publishers getting upset when he writes for another one. I’m not…