Monday, 31 December 2018
Careless Love (The Inspector Banks Series) by Peter Robinson
Hardback: Careless Love (2018) is the thrilling twenty-fifth instalment in Peter Robinson's Number One bestselling Banks series, in which Banks and his team find themselves with two suspicious deaths.
A young local student has apparently committed suicide. Her body is found in an abandoned car on a lonely country road.
She did not own a car.
Did not even drive.
How did she get there?
Where did she die?
Who moved her, and why?
Meanwhile a man in his sixties is found dead in a gully up on the wild moorland. He is wearing an expensive suit and carrying no identification. Post-mortem findings indicate he died from injuries sustained during the fall. But what was he doing up there? And why are there no signs of a car in the vicinity?
As the inconsistencies multiply and the mysteries proliferate, Annie's father's new partner, Zelda, comes up with a shocking piece of information that alerts Banks and Annie to the return of an old enemy in a new guise. This is someone who will stop at nothing, not even murder, to get what he wants - and suddenly the stakes are raised and the hunt is on.
About the author: Peter Robinson's DCI Banks is now a major ITV1 drama starring Stephen Tompkinson (Wild at Heart, Ballykissangel) as Inspector Banks, and Andrea Lowe (The Bill, Murphy's Law) as DI Annie Cabbot.
Peter's standalone novel Before The Poison won the IMBA's 2013 Dilys Award as well as the 2012 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel by the Crime Writers of Canada. This was Peter's sixth Arthur Ellis award. His critically acclaimed Inspector Banks novels have won numerous awards in Britain, the United States, Canada and Europe, and are published in translation all over the world.
Peter grew up in Yorkshire, and now divides his time between Richmond and Canada.
Peter keeps a website at www.inspectorbanks.com.
Rating: 5/5
Sunday, 30 December 2018
Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds
Hardback: Posy Simmonds is back with a new anti-heroine Cassandra Darke (2018).
Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million.
Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million.
She has become a social pariah, but does not much care. Between one Christmas and the next, she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence - her own crime involving ‘no violence, no weapon, no dead body’.
But in Cassandra’s basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body.
Something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.
About the author: Posy Simmonds is the author of many books and graphic novels for adults and children, including Gemma Bovery, Lulu and the Flying Babies and Fred, the film of which was nominated for an Oscar. Her style gently satirises the English middle classes and in particular those of a literary bent. She has won international awards for her work, including the Grand Prix 2009 de la Critique Bande Dessiné for Tamara Drewe. Both Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe have been made into successful feature films. Simmonds lives in London.
Rating: 5/5
Saturday, 29 December 2018
Friday, 28 December 2018
Thursday, 27 December 2018
Victim Without A Face (Fabian Risk Series) by Stefan Ahnhem
Paperback: The first book in the Fabian Risk series, Victim Without a Face (2016) is a chilling novel about the ultimate revenge.
Criminal investigator Fabian Risk has left Stockholm with his wife, Sonja, and their two children to start fresh in his hometown of Helsingborg.
He has planned a six-week vacation before he starts a new job at the Homicide Department.
But after only a few hours in their new home, he is asked to investigate a brutal murder.
The body of Jörgen Pålsson, one of Risk’s former classmates, has been found with both hands missing.
Soon the bodies of more old classmates are found, and Risk finds himself in a race against time: Can they find the murderer before the entire class is killed?
Victim Without A Face is translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles.
About the author: ”As a kid, I never dreamt of being a writer. Putting letters in the right order to form words did not come easily to me. school, while the rest of my class had Swedish lessons, a strange-smelling lady would pull me out of the classroom to play with wooden blocks painted with colourful letters.
For as long as I can remember, however, I have been a passionate storyteller. Growing up as an only child undoubtedly sparked my creativity, and all the hours spent playing by myself fed my vivid imagination. My grandfather’s rocking chair was a marvellous spacecraft able to transport me to all the planets in the universe. And the world map that my teacher stubbornly refused to pull down revealed precisely where the secret treasure was buried.
From that time on, the stories kept coming to me, as if from an inexhaustible source. But it wasn’t until I reached adulthood that I finally abandoned a future in physics and mathematics and realised that I had to pursue my true calling."
Stefan Ahnhem grew up in Helsingborg, Sweden, and now lives in Stockholm. He is an established screenwriter, whose credits include adapting Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series for TV. He has worked in both TV and film, with everything from comedy to thriller and with original ideas as well as adaptations. He also serves on the board of the Swedish Writers Guild. Victim Without a Face is his first novel. It won Crimetime's Novel of the Year in Sweden in 2014, and it has been published in more than ten countries. To date, four novels have been published in the internationally bestselling and award-winning Fabian Risk series.
About the translator: Rachel Willson-Broyles is an experienced translator of Swedish fiction. Her recent credits include the translation of The Girl Who Saved The King Of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson.
Rating: 5/5
Wednesday, 26 December 2018
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