Review: Dreamland by Keith Nixon
Keith Nixon’s novel The Fix was one of the best I read last year (only just missing out on my annual ‘Best Of’ list). This tale of crooked financiers, betrayal, and murder featured some great...
View ArticleReview: The Big Rain by Paul D Brazill
Regular readers will know how much I enjoy the work of Paul D Brazill – a writer who seems to be on a one-man mission to make Brit Grit (and its various practitioners) known to the outside world. His...
View ArticleReview: Corrosion by Jon Bassoff
Occasionally a writer comes along and gives a performance that makes me sit back and really think about what I’ve just read. Jon Bassoff is one such writer, and Corrosion is one such performance. It’s...
View ArticleReview: Out There Bad by Josh Stallings
Regular readers of this blog might remember my review of Josh Stalling’s superb crime thriller Beautiful, Naked and Dead, which featured the compelling voice of his anti-hero Moses McGuire, a former...
View ArticleReview: One Of Those Days In England (A Case of Noir) by Paul D Brazill
As regular readers know, I’m a fan of Paul Brazill’s work. His snappy dialogue helps bring his characters to life, whilst his rich metaphors and descriptive powers imbue his tales with a wonderful...
View ArticleReview: The Long Lost Dog Of It by Michael Kazepis
Hello there, dear readers. Sorry I’ve been away for so long. It feels like it’s been ages. I’ve been quiet for a while, partly because I’ve been writing frantically to get a decent first draft of The...
View ArticleReview: The Disassembled Man by Nate Flexer (Jon Bassoff)
Having been impressed earlier this year by Jon Bassoff’s psycho-noir stylings with the cracking Corrosion, I decided to find and download some more of his work, which led me to The Disassembled Man...
View ArticleReview: The Scent of New Death by Mike Monson
When Phil Gaines’ new wife, a kinky young barmaid called Paige, and his business partner, a psychopathic pervert and genius getaway man called Jeff, run off together it’s a case of so far, so bad. But...
View ArticleReview: A Day in the Life of Jason Dean by Ian Ayris
Jason Dean is an a hard man, a very hard man, the kind of scary-looking bloke who gets sent to collect debts and, if needs be, kill people, which is exactly happens on this particular day, but the...
View ArticleReview: The Bitch by Les Edgerton
Les Edgerton’s crime novels and short stories have a rich vein of truth and knowledge running through them that most crime writers, even the most talented, simply can’t emulate. Which is hardly...
View ArticlePotted Reviews: Rust and Bone – Craig Davidson, American Death Songs – Jordan...
A couple of heavily altered stories from Craig Davidson’s collection of shorts Rust and Bone were the basis of a recent film of the same name by French director Jacques Audiard. It was a good film, a...
View ArticleReview: Mixed Blood by Roger Smith
Regular readers will know how much I love the work of Roger Smith. In my opinion, he’s the best writer of noir thrillers around. His work is a mixture of razor sharp, clipped prose, incisive and clever...
View ArticleReview: Man Down by Roger Smith
In Roger Smith’s Man Down (his first set in the US), South African ex-pat couple from hell, John and Tanya Turner (who are like George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, if George and...
View ArticleReview of Ben Turner Is A Dead Man by Ryan Bracha
Some months on from the events of Paul Carter Is A Dead Man, things have changed drastically in New Britain. The slow-burning rebellion that Carter started culminates in a short, bloody war with the...
View ArticleReview: Angels of the North by Ray Banks
Set in the Derwent Hall estate in the Eighties, when Margaret Thatcher’s social experiment with selling off public utilities to the highest bidder, selling council houses to willing tenants, and...
View ArticleReview: Perfidia by James Ellroy
I loved James Ellroy’s LA Quartet. They are about as perfect a series of crime novels as it is possible to get, and in White Jazz he produced one of the best novels ever written (in any genre). It...
View ArticleReview: Amsterdam Rampant by Neil Cocker
Fin McPhail is having a difficult time out in Amsterdam. He’s getting over the break-up of his marriage (and a resulting case of sexual dysfunction) by throwing himself into his job as a marketing...
View ArticleReview: Black Gum by J David Osborne
Having read a couple of Osborne’s previous works (Low Down Death Right Easy and Our Blood In Its Blind Circuit), and having found them both rather impressive, I’ve had my eye on Black Gum for some...
View ArticleReview: Zulu by Caryl Feréy
I grabbed this recently while on a book expedition in London. I’d never heard of either the author or the book before, but the blurb appealed to me. It pitched the narrative as somewhere between...
View ArticleReview: How’s The Pain by Pascal Garnier
Simon is an ageing hitman with a terminal illness undertaking one last job before retirement. He befriends the young and simple-minded Bernard and employs him as his driver (telling him that he’s a...
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