YOU never know where you’ll end up with author Ann Cleeves. An ongoing anticipatory game for crime fiction fans is guessing where her next book will take us. Or rather, which of her characters will be leading our way. Maybe dour  Jimmy Perez will be donning his monkey jacket to traipse around the wind-blown Shetlands. Perhaps we will be watching heart-of-gold grumps Vera Stanhope jollying her crew over Northumberland’s moorlands and coast. Or, more recently, the rather pallid and low-key Matthew Venn coping with community rifts along the North Devon estuaries and marshlands. Each are distinctive. Each has an appeal,… Continue reading

What makes a good page turner? Anyone seeking the answer needs only to devour the final fifty or so pages of Bad Apples. Allow yourself to be drawn in – which is a hands down certainty in itself – and you will be turning pages with increasing rapidity, helpless to resist. Desperate to know the outcome. Curbing impatience. Reining in an inevitable urge to skip ahead. This is the third of Will Dean’s deeply atmospheric thrillers featuring deaf journalist Tuva Moodyson. Again she is embroiled in the eerie closed-in communities of Sweden’s northern forests. A harsh land of hard-living people;… Continue reading