It’s time to finish what he started… A young girl is snatched in broad daylight from outside her school and later found brutally murdered and hanging from a tree. When recently retired San Francisco Police Inspector, Bob Farrell, sees this on the news, he realises his worst nightmare has just come true. The same brutal killer a government agency stopped him from putting away twenty years before is once more on the loose. As the killer wreaks a trail of blood and destruction across North America, Bob Farrell teams up with rookie cop Kevin Kearns and sets out to track down their lethal prey. But Farrell & Kearns are not playing by the rules any more than the killer is, and soon the FBI have all of them in their sights… The bulk of this novel is set in the late 1980s and this gives the story a refreshingly uncluttered air. With not a mobile phone or Internet connection in sight, this is a proper old school police procedural. No country-wide database searches here, well not ones that would give an immediate response anyway. Farrell and Kearns have to rely on chasing up leads the old fashioned way and actually…

Born and raised in Chicago, Detective John Lynch might just be about to die there too. Because one dark secret might be about to tear a whole city apart. A pious old woman steps out of the Sacred Heart confessional and is shot dead by a sniper with what at first appears to be a miraculous and impossible shot. Colonel Tech Weaver dispatches a team from Langley to put the shooter and anyone else who gets in the way in a body bag before a half century of national secrets are revealed. Detective John Lynch, the son of a murdered Chicago cop, finds himself cast into an underworld of political corruption and guilty secrets, as he tries to uncover the truth about what s really going on before another innocent citizen gets killed. In some weird cosmic synchronicity, I finish one book about a killer loose on the streets of Chicago only to pick up the next from my review pile and discover that it’s a book about a killer loose on the streets of Chicago. No need to panic though, the good news is that The Shining Girls and Penance could not be more different. Both are fun reads but, I’m…

When a rotting torso is discovered in the vault of New Scotland Yard, it doesn’t take Dr Thomas Bond, Police Surgeon, long to realise that there is a second killer at work in the city where, only a few days before, Jack the Ripper brutally murdered two women in one night. Though just as gruesome, this is the hand of a colder killer, one who lacks Jack’s emotion. And, as more headless and limbless torsos find their way into the Thames, Dr Bond becomes obsessed with finding the killer. As his investigations lead him into an unholy alliance, he starts to wonder: is it a man who has brought mayhem to the streets of London, or a monster? Earlier this week @Madnad took a look at Poison by Sarah Pinborough. Only two days later and I’m reviewing another new release from her. We find ourselves asking the tricky question – Is it possible to achieve the double and have two great Sarah Pinborough books released within the space of one week?* When it comes to darker fiction there is something wonderfully evocative about Victorian London isn’t there? Foggy streets and dark lonely alleyways feel like the ideal habitat for a sadistic killer. At…

In the dying days of 1850 the young detective Charles Maddox takes on a new case. His client? The only surviving son of the long-dead poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his wife Mary, author of Frankenstein. Charles soon finds himself being drawn into the bitter battle being waged over the poet’s literary legacy, but then he makes a chance discovery that raises new doubts about the death of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, and he starts to question whether she did indeed kill herself, or whether what really happened was far more sinister than suicide. As he’s drawn deeper into the tangled web of the past, Charles discovers darker and more disturbing secrets, until he comes face to face with the terrible possibility that his own great-uncle is implicated in a conspiracy to conceal the truth that stretches back more than thirty years. The story of the Shelleys is one of love and death, of loss and betrayal.  Last year I read Tom-All-Alone’s and I’ll happily admit that I had no idea what to expect. I was just getting back into reading historical fiction, after a long absence, and though the idea of a historical crime novel appealed, I was unsure…

Technology Isn’t Always Used With Good Intentions Crime Net is a collection of stories that delve into the nefarious side of cyberpunk and tech-thriller fiction. In a modern society, filled with affordable technology and always-on networks, some electric dreams aren’t always what we expect. People can check out help against criminal charges in Tampa area Featuring stories from four talented authors, we get inside the head of a man heading for rock-bottom until a too-good-to-be-true job opportunity comes his way; watch a devoted fan get a little too close to her idol; see what happens when gene splicing technology falls into the wrong hands, and experience a driven woman’s mission to kill in the underworld of a futuristic city.  Anachron Press, the independent publisher, has been around for a while now and each new book that they publish continues to impress. The latest addition to their ever-growing catalogue is a short story anthology that mashes together crime and science fiction. According to lawyer for traffic ticket defense cases,  crime Net contains five short tales. Each story offers the author’s own unique interpretation of how crime is going to evolve in the future. Click here to find lawyers for sex crimes…

The world is about to end – would you investigate a murder?  An asteroid is about to collide with the Earth in six months time, and wipe us all out. Would you give up your life and go of to fulfill your ambition, take solace in drunken pleasure, live in fear, or solidly carry on doing what you do? Detective Hank Palace faces this stark question, and as others walk away from their jobs he carries on. A murder has been committed, and it is his job to solve it – problem is, none of his colleges believe it is a murder, and neither does the coroner – just Hank’s instinct, and in a city that has a dozen or more suicides a week even that might be wrong. What’s the point in solving murders if we are all going to die anyway? As Hank investigates further, undercurrents begin to surface –who was the victim obsessed with the asteroid? Did he know something about it that the rest of us don’t? Is there a conspiracy afoot? In a world where politicians have run of to the Bahamas for one last sun-drenched beach holiday, where the US Army runs internment camps…

Fifteen years ago a young girl was brutally attacked as she picked flowers in a meadow near her parents’ Swedish country home. The crime went unreported; the victim silenced. Cut to the present. It is a bleak February morning in Stockholm, when Alex Recht’s federal investigation unit is assigned to two new cases.  A man has been killed in a hit and run. He has no identification on him, he is not reported missing nor wanted by the police. Investigative Analyst Fredrika Bergman has the task of finding out who he is. At the same time, a priest and his wife are found dead in their apartment. All evidence suggests that the priest shot his wife and the committed suicide. But is that all there is to it? Two different cases, seemingly unrelated. But it is not long before the investigations begin to converge and the police are following a trail that leads all the way back to the ’90s, to a crime that was hushed-up, but whose consequences will reach further and deeper than anyone ever expected. The cover of Silenced has a sticker on it that boldly proclaims “For fans of The Killing”. I’ve seen the television series…

Siri Bergman is terrified of the dark She lives alone, an hour outside Stockholm where she practices as a psychotherapist, her nearest neighbor far away. Siri tells her friends that she has moved on since her husband died in a diving accident. But when she goes to bed at night, she leaves all the lights on, unable to shake the feeling that someone is watching her. With the light gone, the darkness creeps inside.  One night she wakes to find the house pitch black, and the torch by her bedside has vanished. Later, the body of one of her young patients is found floating in the water nearby. Thrown headlong into a tense murder investigation, Siri finds herself unable to trust anyone, not even her closest friends. Who can she turn to for answers? The truth is hidden in the darkness. Siri is a curious character, it’s almost as though she displays two distinctly different personalities to the outside world. On one hand she is a strong, successful, self-assured doctor, but there is also the other Siri who is beset with doubt, afraid of the dark and still traumatised by the loss of her husband, Stefan. Though these are only…

The Empire State is the other New York It’s a parallel-universe, Prohibition-era world of mooks and shamuses that is a twisted magic mirror to our own bustling Big Apple. It’s a city where sinister characters lurk around every corner, while the great superheroes who once kept the streets safe have fallen into deadly rivalries and feuds. Not that its colorful residents know anything about real New York…until detective Rad Bradley makes a discovery that will change the lives of all its inhabitants. There is a pretty good chance that if you are a fan of genre fiction you are already well aware of Empire State. You may even be wondering why I didn’t review it way back in January when it was first released. There were a couple of reasons if I’m honest. Firstly, there were so many reviews floating about, I was concerned that rather than form my own opinion I’d just end up regurgitating someone else’s. Secondly, the fact is that I’m a one-man outfit and I can’t fit in every single book I’d like to read, never mind review. (If I had the time I would pretty much try and read everything). Over the following months, I…

Homicide detective Adam Garrett is already a rising star in the Boston police department when he and his cynical partner, Carl Landauer, catch a horrifying case that could make their careers: the ritualistic murder of a wealthy college girl that appears to have Satanic elements. The partners make a quick arrest when all the evidence points to another student, a troubled musician in a Goth band who was either dating or stalking the murdered girl. But Garrett’s case is turned upside down when beautiful, mysterious Tanith Cabarrus, a practicing witch from nearby Salem, walks into the homicide bureau and insists that the real perpetrator is still at large. Tanith claims to have had psychic visions that the killer has ritually sacrificed other teenagers in his attempts to summon a powerful, ancient demon. All Garrett’s beliefs about the nature of reality will be tested as he is forced to team up with a woman he is fiercely attracted to but cannot trust, in a race to uncover a psychotic killer before he strikes again. For me personally, the most effective kinds of horror are the stories that seem the most plausible. Those are the stories that make the hairs on the…

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini team up to search for a literary-minded killer It is 1923 and a beautiful young woman has just been found outside a tenement, bones crushed, head ripped from her shoulders. A few stories above, her squalid apartment has been ransacked, and twenty-dollar gold pieces litter the floor. The window frame is smashed. She seems to have been hurled from the building by a beast of impossible strength, and the only witness claims to have seen a long-armed ape fleeing the scene. The police are baffled, but one reporter recognizes the author of the bloody crime: the long-dead Edgar Allan Poe. A psychopath is haunting New York City, imitating the murders that made Poe’s stories so famous. To Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the killing spree is of purely academic interest. But when Poe’s ghost appears in Doyle’s hotel room, the writer and the magician begin to suspect that the murders may hold a clue to understanding death itself. Conan Doyle and Houdini make for an intriguing double act.  Hjortsberg has taken a nugget of truth, the fact that they knew one another, and crafted a story around it. Both men were…