Theakston’s 2021 now available

One Night, New York is the last of the Theakston's books that I was to get in my Library, as it only appeared last Thursday as an audio book. The 1932 New York setting made the book different to most things I have read recently. The book was really helped out by the dramatic opening …

2022’s first Debut

Surfing through Audible’s new releases, looking for a likely first interview to go with my later interview of Simon Mason on the 24th of this month, I found that Leonora Nattrass had recently published her debut, Black Drop. I unwittingly noticed this cover all over Twitter during the preceding two months, so when I spotted …

Netflix’s New Crime

As we all finish the random cheese and biscuits over the Christmas period, I was looking through Netflix and found Harlan Coben's Stay Close. After watching his previous Netflix adaptation, Safe, I was intrigued to see what his next adaptation would look like. Although I've read a couple of his books, with the ones that …

A Change of approach

This year as I am coming closer to my ambition of becoming a full time writer, now that I have completed the Curtis Brown short writing course, I am going to be focussing a lot more on different writing styles and unusual protagonists in order to try and spark my imagination for the Curtis Brown …

My final read of 2021

The Shadows of Men is a very intriguing novel where Mukherjee even uses his own name for a character, but when he kills him off, is this a metaphor for the series or not? Both Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee are voiced by different narrators for the first time, this really adds a new flavour …

My first Christmas read

No Quarter Given is the first book that I've been able to read since the interview schedule finished, that I've planned to read over Christmas. Because of the way that my care package works, I'd initially planned to do a group review of more than one book, but having started Neil's latest Connor Fraser book, …

Hachette’s six figure deal

As Christmas arrives, as a reviewer, I sometimes get early Christmas presents in my inbox from publishing companies offering me an ARC copy of a book that I find intriguing. In this case, Edel Coffey was one of these and Hachette were definitely right to highlight Breaking Point to me. It has taken me two …

UK Crime Book Club Countdown

Yesterday afternoon, for a hour and an half, me, Caroline Maston and Sam Brownley, the three interviewers on UK Crime Book Club, gave the members our top ten books of the year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsoy6M39QYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOsRbF5okO4

The BBC’s Christmas App

Yesterday I finished JP Delaney's The Girl Before, in time for the adaptation, not knowing that they would have all of the episodes available straight after the first episode aired. This is why I've delayed the review of the book to compare and contrast both audio and tv adaptation of his original written work. Thanks …

The Netflix Nut

As Christmas comes and it is dark outside more and more TV reviews will probably be on my website, with both Netflix and the BBC bringing out crime dramas for the season. Netflix's offering is The Chestnut Man, the book being originally written in 2019 by Soren Sveistrup. This was recommended to me by a …