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Book review: Irresistible crime wave by masters old and new
A round-up of the best crime fiction with MAT COWARD
When the ravages of Alzheimer’s leave an elderly woman marooned in painful memories of October 1950, her grandchild comes up with a creative strategy.
New releases from Simone White, Brass Funkeys, and Souad Massi
SUE TURNER is compelled by a history that shows how far a country can turn in on itself to collude with abuses of power
RON JACOBS is persuaded by the parallel drawn between Charles Manson and Donald Trump
In this comparison of Britain pre- and post Thatcher, WILL POMORE applauds the analysis, but distrusts the solutions offered
MARIA DUARTE defends a solid, late-career Spielberg conspiracy flick that calls for empathy in a hostile world
It’s always a pleasure to encounter a really unusual setting for crime fiction, but novelty alone is no good — it needs a decent story to go with it. Luckily, Forty Days Without Shadow by Olivier Truc (Trapdoor, £12.99) scores both ways.
It’s set in a Norwegian Lapland winter, at the end of the Polar Night, when there are only a few minutes of sunlight each day and where a sudden rise in temperature to -17°C strikes the locals as “almost springlike.”
Here the Reindeer Police patrol vast distances on their snowmobiles, settling disputes between the Sami reindeer breeders who make their hard living out on the tundra as they have done for millennia.
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PETER MASON is gripped by a novel that confronts corporate callousness with those prepared to act to bring about change
Timeloop murder, trad family MomBomb, Sicilian crime pages and Craven praise
PAUL BUHLE agrees that a grassroots movements for change in needed in the US, independent of electoral politics
JOHN HAWKINS welcomes the passion, grief, precision and elegance of an eloquent witness of genocide