MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Crime fiction with Mat Coward: January 22, 2024
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
FIRST LIE WINS by Ashley Elston (Headline, £14.99) is set in small-town Louisiana, where among the local elite every tiny indicator of social class is picked over as studiously as the results of a CAT scan.
Evie Porter is struggling to fit in. She’s moved in with Ryan, who is as handsome as he is rich, well respected and well connected. She can’t pretend that she’s from the same moneyed background as he and his friends are, but she does have to find some way of making them all like her. It’s a matter of life or death. And the fact that there’s no such person as Evie Porter is just another complication.
This is a churningly exciting scam thriller, a great heart-starter for the dark new year.
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