The Neon Lawyer by Victor Methos
So good it could be British crime fiction
I read an enormous amount of crime fiction – English, Scottish, (I’m not going to say British because Scottish, English and Welsh crime fiction are very different from each other), Irish, American, …
The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill By C S Robertson
Crime Fiction Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This
Craig Robertson was a new writer to me, and this was one of those serendipitous discoveries for which you thank the fates. I can’t remember what led me to this book, but …
A Wake of Crows by Kate Evans
Way back at the beginning of 2015, I reviewed a crime book, The Art of the Imperfect. The author, Kate Evans, was unknown to me, but she made a huge impression. In my review, I recalled the first …
A Long Shadow by H L Marsay

Every serious reader from time to time picks up (or, in this case, downloads) books they haven’t heard of by writers they also haven’t heard of. That’s how I came to read this book. Quite often – I might almost …
Police Procedurals. A Killer Makes Himself Known
I’m writing a series of police procedurals under the new pen-name, JJ Sullivan. Book 1, Drawn to Murder, is already complete and when I went to bed last night I was 17,000 words into Book 2, Death to Order…
The Crimson Shore by Gillian Hamer
I read a lot of fiction other than crime fiction, but I do read a lot of crime fiction. For the most part, I don’t review the crime fiction I read, because more than 50% of it does not merit …
The Doom Murders by Brian O’Hare and Murder at the Roadside Cafe by Brian O’Hare
I bought the second of these books because I bought the first. I guess that tells you how much I liked the first. Brian O’Hare writes about Northern Ireland, which is a closed-in society, in the United Kingdom but not …
Beatrice Stubbs ends her career in style
The Beatrice Stubbs series by JJ Marsh began in 2013 with Behind Closed Doors. I gave it five stars, which I really don’t like to do, but I had no choice. Four more books have followed, all worth …
Brian O’Hare and Gillian Hamer. New to me
Talking to young people (and anyone under 50 is young to me now), I’m often struck by the rails on which their entertainment and cultural lives run. It seems to me that people are told what is good and what …