With ‘Sorry for the Dead’, the eighth instalment in the Josephine Tey mystery series, Nicola Upson has, once again, penned a superior historical crime novel. ‘Sorry for the Dead’ is a nuanced, sophisticated psychological thriller which soars above genre conventions as it explores thorny social themes with acute insight and polished prose, while ensnaring readers with a gripping plot that keeps them guessing until the last page. As a bonus, the novel’s architecture is both ambitious and intriguing, the narrative shuttling backwards and forwards in time without losing momentum, cleverly conceali ..read more

Pushkin Press’s Vertigo imprint has unearthed and published yet another gem by US 1960s noir author Margaret Millar. ‘The Listening Walls’ is a sharp tale of mystery, deception and murder, transporting its protagonists and readers from San Francisco and the Californian coast to as far away as Mexico City. Like the other Millar novels recently published by Pushkin Press, ‘A Stranger in My Grave’ and ‘Vanish in an Instant’, ‘The Listening Walls’, first out in 1960, is deviously constructed, with impeccably timed plot twists and razor-sharp characterisation, and it has a sting at the very tip of ..read more

Wilfried Wills, the protagonist of ‘Will’, a historical thriller by contemporary Belgian author Jeroen Olyslaegers, translated by David Colmer, is in his nineties, and is writing his memoir. He does ramble on, occasionally skipping backwards and forwards in time, mentioning dead friends and past events as though the former were still alive, and the latter had only just happened. Understandable, given his age, and also given the harrowing nature of some of the events he recounts to his great-grandson, the intended recipient of his tale. Wilfried was 21 in February 1941, when he started out as a ..read more

‘Riverflow’, the second novel written by literary translator Alison Layland (after ‘Someone Else’s Conflict’) is a clever story that subtly blends tension, psychological observation and insights into contemporary attitudes towards environmental protection and green activism. Though it begins with a mysterious, unexplained death, it’s far removed from canonical crime fiction, but it definitely reads as a gripping thriller, once you’ve allowed the author to spin her mesmeric web of relationships and intrigue, both petty and grand, centred around the small, fictional rural community of Foxover in ..read more

After a remarkable debut (‘The Last Place You Look’) and an accomplished second novel (‘What You Want to See’), young US author Kristen Lepionka has produced a brilliant third instalment of the adventures of private investigator Roxane Weary with her latest novel, ‘The Stories You Tell’. Set in Columbus, Ohio, like the first two novels in the series, ‘The Stories You Tell’ is entertaining, energetic, thoughtful and thoroughly gripping. Its narrative scope exceeds the boundaries of cleverly done genre fiction, and resonates with insights into contemporary life, dealing frankly with themes rangi ..read more

‘A Stranger in My Grave’, the second novel by US author Margaret Millar published by Pushkin Press as part of its eclectic collection of 1950s and 1960s crime stories (after ‘Vanish in an Instant’), is a brilliant work of fiction that, while firmly rooted in the crime/thriller genre, is also a thoughtful, engaging, and devilishly smart piece of writing. Millar has an eagle eye for the nuances of personality that make characters intensely alive, her dialogue is razor-sharp, and she isn’t afraid of tackling issues that are acutely topical in contemporary American society, to wit racism and genre ..read more

‘Joe Country’ is the sixth instalment in Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb spy thriller series, a genre-redefining saga chronicling the seamy, low-fi and delightfully quirky espionage capers involving a ragtag bunch of contemporary MI5 agents. Among the many reputable writers who have taken up the gauntlet of writing spook thrillers in the post-Cold War era, Herron stands head and shoulders above the competition in my opinion for originality, acerbic wit and sheer writing talent. At the core of his stories is the infamous Slough House, an operational base as far removed from a Q-style secret intellig ..read more

Mexico City, the late 1960s: the capital of a formally democratic state still relying on the military for ‘legitimacy’, a sprawling metropolis and a melting-pot community that isn’t far from one of the political hotspots of the time, as reverberations of the Cuban crisis, which threatened the international power balance between the USA, Russia and China, ripple out into Mexico too. This is the scene of Rafael Bernal‘s original spy thriller, ‘The Mongolian Conspiracy’, translated by Katherine Silver, which kicks off as the Mexican intelligence service tries to nip in the bud a rumoured plot to ..read more

Bev Thomas’s debut novel, ‘A Good Enough Mother’, is a brilliant, genre-defying exploration of the complexities of motherhood, and of the constant conflict between reason and emotion. It tells the story of a respected psychologist who struggles, and fails, to keep her grief as the mother of a missing son at bay, until it collides tragically with her work and, crucially, with the lives of some of the people she is treating. There are novels that interact with you at such a deep level that they leave you with more than the satisfaction of a good read. With questions, a heightened understanding o ..read more

‘Run You Down’ is the second novel by Julia Dahl featuring feisty young New York journalist Rebekah Roberts. In the first, ‘Invisible City’, which was published in 2014 and won the Macavity, Barry and Shamus Awards, Dahl plunged the reader into the cloistered world of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic community in Brooklyn, and introduced Rebekah, a stringer for the fictional New York Tribune, a young woman with a troubled past not of her own making – her mother ran away from her and her father when Rebekah was an infant, and she grew up motherless – who’s determined to carve out a path for herself d ..read more