Crime reviews
The Spotted Dog by Kerry Greenwood
There are few in the crime world quite as capable at both solving mysteries and baking an excellent sourdough as Corinna Chapman: baker extraordinaire, sometime detective, and general lady-about-town…
Leave No Trace by Mindy Mejia
Mejia’s first book, The Last Act of Hattie Hoffman, was a wonderful study of a small town dealing with large problems. In Leave No Trace, the trouble is much more personal. The city of Duluth is rock…
Trace: Who Killed Maria James? by Rachael Brown
At number 736 High Street Thornbury on 17 June 1980, Maria James was stabbed sixty-eight times in a frenzied attack at the back of the bookshop she owned and lived in. Fast forward thirty-eight years…
Loose Units by Paul F. Verhoeven
Decades after a youthful Paul Verhoeven inadvertently sees a crime scene photo that he’s never been able to shake, he sits down with his ex-cop father John to find out why. Why he couldn’t shake it, …
Retribution by Richard Anderson
For those resolutely suburban readers, like me, the allure of rural crime is relentless: all those long, dark roads, the expansive farmland where anything can hide, and a certain type of character wh…
The Nowhere Child by Christian White
One rainy Melbourne evening, photography teacher Kim Leamy is approached in the cafeteria by a man who has news that will knock Kim right out of her orbit: he believes that she is not Kim Leamy, but …
Into the Night by Sarah Bailey
After the events of Sarah Bailey’s debut The Dark Lake left Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock unable to be the partner, mother and human that everyone in the regional town of Smithson needed her to …
Live and Let Fry by Sue Williams
Honestly, how I’m expected to go past a title with a pun like this is beyond me. In the third book starring small-town fish-and-chip-shop-owner-and-also-detective-but-not-officially Cass Tuplin (the …
All the Beautiful Lies by Peter Swanson
In the seaside town of Kennewick, Maine, the body of a bookseller is found at the bottom of the cliffs he loved to walk along. His son, Harry, makes his way from the college graduation he will now mi…
The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan
If you’re on the hunt for a crime story that’s going to consume every other thought in your head, wring you out like a wet towel, and then deposit you back in the real world with your nerves fried to…
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