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Review: Dead Money by Ray Banks
Alan Slater is a double-glazing salesman whose best-friend, Beale, a man he doesn’t even like very much, is an addicted gambler with a booze problem and a very fast temper. When that fast temper gets...
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Review: Fuckin’ Lie Down Already by Tom Piccirilli
As the story begins, Clay, a New York detective, is pretty close to the end. His family have been murdered and he has been gut shot and left for dead by a junkie hitman hired by a mob boss who …...
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Review: Frank Sinatra in a Blender by Matthew J McBride
When a lot of money is stolen in a bank robbery that goes wrong (at least for the two-man crew who perpetrate it) P.I. Nick Valentine sees a chance to get his on the loot and become a wealthy man. …...
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Potted reviews: Street 8 by Douglas Fairbairn and City Primeval by Elmore...
Douglas Fairbairn wrote, in the form of Shoot, one of my all-time favourite crime novels (although it is ultimately much more than just a crime novel), so I had high hopes for Street 8, a noir set on...
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Review: Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill
Over the last year or so I’ve heard a lot about Frank Bill. This collection of hard, violent shorts has been getting glowing reviews by critics whose word really means something – pretty much anybody...
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Review: Mr Suit by Nigel Bird
Liza is a gangster’s wife who has tired of taking care of her husband Archie, who has been suffering from Locked-In- Syndrome due to a kidnapping that went badly wrong (for him at least). She asks Mr...
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Review: No More Heroes & Beast of Burden by Ray Banks
In No More Heroes, Cal Innes is working for Donald Innes, a slum landlord, handing out eviction notices to non-paying tenants. He’s still addicted to painkillers, and still drinking too much, and he’s...
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Review: The Magpies by Mark Edwards
When Jamie and Kirsty buy a dream flat together everything seems like it is going to be happy ever after, but when unwanted parcels, junk mail, and fast food they didn’t order start arriving they...
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Review: Red Esperanto by Paul D Brazill
This is the first part of Paul D Brazill’s Luke Case series of shorts. It is set on the bleak wintry streets of Warsaw. Our less than intrepid hero puts himself in extreme danger when he begins an...
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Review: Piggyback by Tom Pitts
When mid-level criminal enforcer Jimmy is contacted by dealer Paul about a lost load of marijuana with a piggybacked load of coke, despite his reservations about getting involved, he sees an...
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Review: The Baddest Ass by Anthony Neil Smith
Billy Lafitte, the anti-hero from Yellow Medicine and Hogdoggin’, is now in prison after the massacre at the end of the second novel. Considered as a traitor and a dirty cop by other inmates and guards...
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Potted reviews: World War Z by Max Brooks, Savages by Don Winslow, Gumshoe by...
World War Z, which I read earlier in the summer, is a superbly constructed ‘oral history’ of the Zombie War. It builds via long monologues the beginning, middle and aftermath of the war for the future...
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Review: Sacrifices by Roger Smith
Anybody who has read my ramblings, moans and reviews for long enough knows that I’ve got a major literary jones for Roger Smith. Dust Devils was one of my favourite reads of 2011 and Capture was in my...
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Review: The Fix by Keith Nixon
Set in 2007, a year before the financial crash, The Fix is about investment banker and everyman Josh Dedman. He’s having a pretty bad time of things. He’s framed and fired after £20 million goes...
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Review: Strangers Are Just Friends You Haven’t Killed Yet by Ryan Bracha
I like ambition in a novel. It suggests that the writer gives a damn about their work and, more importantly, suggests that the writer wants to create something that will one day match their ambition....
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Review: The Liberator by Paul D. Brazill
Paul D Brazill’s latest, The Liberator, is about Father Trent – a priest who doesn’t exactly believe in turning the other cheek unless it’s somebody else’s and he’s applied one of his fists to it first...
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Review: The Least Of My Scars by Stephen Graham Jones
William Colton Hughes is one of those successful serial killers – you know, the ones you never hear about. He has been set up in an apartment block by a crime boss to deal with problem individuals that...
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Review: Our Blood In Its Blind Circuit by J David Osborne
J David Osborne has become a player in crime fiction circles over the last few months. From out of nowhere, it would seem. But, as is always the case with these things, the reality is rarely how it...
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Review: Paul Carter Is A Dead Man by Ryan Bracha
Regular readers will know that I was pretty taken with Ryan Bracha’s Strangers Are Just Friends You Haven’t Killed Yet last year. It was enjoyable, ambitious, well-written and tried to do things a...
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Review: Low Down Death Right Easy by J David Osborne
J David Osborne’s Our Blood In Its Blind Circuit was a fine collection of strange stories from a young writer with obvious talent, both in his ideas and prose, and automatically sent his second novel...
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