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This issue of Crime Scene we’re celebrating the coolest shows coming your way. From maverick cops and smooth criminals to Scandi noirs and Belgian clans we’ve rounded up the sharpest, edgiest crime drama, kicking off with the icy class of PEAKY BLINDERS. Read on for an exclusive first look at season three of the Birmingham-set gangster show starring the Hollywood A-list. Elsewhere in the issue we’ve gone behind the scenes of Welsh drama HINTERLAND, ventured on set of RIPPER STREET SERIES 4, chatted to MARK BILLINGHAM and HARLAN COBEN and put TV phenomenon MAKING A MURDERER on trial, UK-style. This month the team and I have chosen our favourite cool detective to represent us – I’ve gone with Jessica Jones (more on her next issue) for her sharp tongue, super-strength…

“An intriguing character, at work in Paris during a fascinating period” We may be be forced to wait till 2017 for our next fix of Sherlock, but now another legendary literary detective played by the cream of UK talent is set to grace our screens. In two standalone two-hour films, Blackadder and Mr Bean star Rowan Atkinson will play Jules Maigret. Created by George Simenon and star of 75 novels (the first was in 1931), Maigret is an incisive and insightful Commissaire, and the two films will be set in Paris in the 1950s. The first part, Maigret Sets A Trap, sees the detective on the tail of a serial killer, while in Maigret’s Dead Man a mysterious corpse draws him into the criminal underworld. Shooting was completed at the…

“Acting is what I’ve wanted to do since I was 10 years old” What was the initial attraction to Undercover – the character, the cast or working in Britain? All of the above! Actually, I should put it in the order I meant it. Sophie Okonedo – that’s number one. She is just splendid. The BBC was number two! Then to get a chance to come back to London. The last time I was in London, I was promoting 24, and I really missed it. I haven’t had the chance to come in and work or relax since. And the character – I haven’t played anything like it, and I’ve played a lot of different characters. The character’s been falsely imprisoned and on Death Row for…

“I try to cast a light on lives thrown into chaos by crime” Do you want to know what really energises me when I’m writing a book? It’s not plot or setting, although I do my best to get those elements airtight. It’s character! I’ve always been a character-driven writer. My first books, written at the age of 17 (as Alicia Scott), were in the “romantic suspense” idiom, but the books I write now are very different – more intense. We’re all intrigued by criminals. In my books, though, I always try to cast a light on to those whose lives are thrown into chaos by crime. Take my latest book, Find Her. I’ve tried to screw down the tension more tightly than I’ve ever done, but I’ve done it…

“It’s about people who are still alive; the families of murder victims” Andrew Hankinson is a nervous man. His book – a journalistic account of the 2010 Northumbria manhunt titled You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] – is on the cusp of release when we speak to him. His publishers are excited, the cover is decorated with glowing blurbs, and all the advance word is positive. But Hankinson is not enjoying himself. “If this was a novel, then I would feel happy, I think,” he says. “But because it’s journalism, it’s just nerve-wracking. It’s about big powerful organisations, and also it’s about people who are still alive, the families of people who were murdered.” Moat, who shot three people, killing one before shooting himself…

It’s the crime writing fraternity’s annual pilgrimage – the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival – and we have an exclusive glimpse into the 2016 line-up. ‘King of the police procedural’ Peter James, who recently won the CWA Diamond Dagger award, takes the helm as Programming Chair. Heading to Harrogate for the 14th festival is Jeffery Deaver, in conversation with BBC broadcaster Mark Lawson. Martina Cole will be chatting to Peter James, Linwood Barclay will converse with Mark Billingham, Gerald Seymour is put under the forensic spotlight by Joe Haddow, producer of the BBC Radio 2 Book Club, and Val McDermid will be in conversation with Edinburgh Festival stand-up Susan Calman. The festival also headlines Tess Gerritsen and Neil Cross. Girl On A Train author Paula Hawkins joins Clare Mackintosh…

Created by Chris Chibnall Starring David Tennant, Olivia Colman (ITV) TBC “I have no idea what the story will be yet,” Olivia Colman has admitted of the third series of Broadchurch, which goes in front of cameras this summer. Those who lost all their fingernails over the shocking Series 2 finale are in for a bit of a wait, though – an air date hasn’t been confirmed. The good news is that both Tennant and Colman are returning as detectives Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller, and Series 3 will pick up after the end of Series 2. Meanwhile, Tennant has hinted the new series will be the final part in the Broadchurch “trilogy”, but if the show’s ratings continue to climb, we wouldn’t count out a fourth round for the…

“The stakes are incredible high in this series” Created by Michael Connelly and Eric Overmyer Starring Titus Welliver, Jamie Hector, Amy Aquino, Lance Reddick (Amazon) 11 March You can’t keep a good man down, and that’s especially true for LAPD Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver). The first season of his self-titled show, inspired by Michael Connelly’s books, was a hit when it premiered on Amazon Instant Video last year, prompting the quick commission of Season 2, which will draw from the novels The Drop, Trunk Music and The Last Coyote. This time around, Bosch goes after serial killer Chilton Hardy while investigating the murder of a Hollywood producer. But will his actions endanger his family? “The stakes are incredibly high in this because there’s a level of peril that not only…

There are lots of police dramas. Why has this one stood out? It’s the writing. With any long form telly or a wonderful novel, when you invest in the characters it gets better and better. It’s Richard Warlow’s writing and ideas, and the wonderful production team bringing that to the screen. It’s so exciting getting new scripts. And sometimes we have them very late. [Laughs] Sometimes a couple of days before we have to start, which makes it even more exciting... Season three was traumatic for Reid. Is he in a calmer place today? I think so, but possibly he’s found living by the seaside a little challenging. Too tame. He’s had his rest and recuperation, and he seems to be drawn back to Whitechapel. His daughter Matilda has grown…

Walter’s a real person. Not a gimmick, not an actor, he’s a man who watches a ridiculous amount of TV. New foreign language streaming channel Walter Presents launched on All4 in January and has rapidly built traction with founder Walter Iuzzolino appearing in the ads giving enthusiastic summaries of shows he’s selected. When Crime Scene sits down with Walter for hot chocolate in Soho it’s immediately apparent that none of that exuberance is an act. “It’s born out of individual passion and a slight obsession,” he laughs. “It’s been my obsession forever. I was born in Italy and lived there for the first 25 years of my life. I was raised in a world where everything is dubbed. While it’s terrible, because it means all actors have the same voice,…

JURY BIAS Ample evidence of jury bias was presented by Avery’s attorneys before the trial began. This arose due to the massive, widespread adverse media attention with photos and video of Avery in Dickensian prison outfits. None of this would have happened in the UK. Until the trial is over, the case is sub judice and cannot be reported in that manner. In addition, a UK judge would have told the jury to pay no attention to the media coverage and given them a special warning. This didn’t happen in the US. NEIL: It is agreed that the same degree of press coverage would not occur in England, meaning that this limb of the defence case would have no impact in England. In the US, however, this is a system…

“What it did give me was a slight advantage when it came to standing up in front of audiences,” he tells Crime Scene. “If you can handle 600 drunks on the Comedy Store late show, you can handle 25 people in Waterstones.” “My first few books were almost marketed as horror” Are you OK with dogs?” asks Mark Billingham as Crime Scene approaches the front door of his North London home. Once inside we’re greeted by a ground-level sausage dog and shaggy cream-coloured golden retriever, later joined by one of a couple of cats he owns. An animal lover, a family man, a warm and generous host (tea and almond slices), in person Billingham doesn’t exactly ooze ‘dark side’. But don’t be fooled. With 13 Thorne novels under his belt,…

THE AUTHOR Lisa Lutz spent most of the 1990s hopping through a string of low-paying odd jobs while writing and rewriting a screenplay. After the film was made in 2000, she vowed she would never write another one. She is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including How To Start A Fire, six novels in the Spellman books series, and Heads You Lose, co-authored with David Hayward. She has received numerous accolades for her work, including an Alex Award, and nominations for the Edgar, Barry and Anthony awards. She lives in the Hudson Valley, New York. She has spent years being Tanya Dubois. But that wasn’t the name she was born with. And now it looks like she’ll have to become someone else. Again… When I found…

Like Making A Murderer, Rectify captures the devastating impact of an apparent miscarriage of justice – although this is crime drama rather than documentary. Daniel Holden (Aden Young) was released from death row after serving 19 years for the rape and murder of his high-school girlfriend. Now he’s readjusting to small-town life amid family tension and the legal chicanery of the wily old prosecutor demanding a retrial. While the first series was a perfectly formed six-part story, this runs to 10 and feels a little flabby, especially as Daniel is indisposed in the early episodes. When the slow-burning drama in the American South heats up, as in the haunting prison flashbacks, it’s a lyrical, powerful portrayal of a broken man dealing with his newfound – possibly temporary – freedom. As…

Who would have thought it? The young Morse (Shaun Evans) can mope with the near-comical wounded dignity of a teenager. At least that’s how it seems when Series 3 of Endeavour, following on from tumultuous events in the second series, begins. Here is Morse in exile from policing, partying and taking up with a Gatsby-like figure in millionaire Joss Bixby. Except when the death of a young woman calls Morse back to duty – in a case that rather stretches credulity – he’s far too much the copper to stay sulking. Good luck for us because, while it never packs the emotional punch of Morse, there’s much enjoyment to be had from this prequel. In particular, the scripts, filled with sly pop culture references, are frequently a joy. And then…

It was inevitable that Giancarlo De Cataldo’s novel about three young criminals in Rome would lead to a film adaptation and then a TV series, but the latter was a victim of its own success, with Season 1 finally becoming repetitive. Season 2, however, recaptures the energy of the early days, with a commendable refusal to make any of the self-serving, violent characters sympathetic (or possessed of even minimal moral or humane qualities). As with De Palma’s Scarface, we are happy to see monstrous, overindulging – but charismatic – characters bring about their own triumph and destruction. We watched the ruthless criminal Libanese take over Rome’s underworld, forging a highly organised gang, and in the new season there is a vicious leadership struggle. The show presents a fascinating picture of…

Everyone knows Stan Lee, right? The co-creator of Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four and many more of popular culture’s best-known superheroes is almost as famous as his creations. And now he’s turned his attention to this curious cop show... DI Harry Clayton (James Nesbitt) is an unlucky chap. He’s lost family members, is entangled in a messy divorce and has a bad gambling problem. But an encounter with a mysterious woman changes all that – he wakes up to find a mysterious bracelet attached to his wrist that magically gives him the power to create his own good luck. Despite Stan’s name on the title and magical powers of the bracelet, Lucky Man is more crime thriller than comic-book adventure. The series remains largely grounded in Harry’s life and…

Woody Allen isn’t usually thought of as a go-to guy for crime stories, but a skim of his CV reveals a fair bit of dabbling in the genre, from Take The Money And Run to Manhattan Murder Mystery to Scoop. And now his latest, IRRATIONAL MAN (out now), which offers a meditation on murder – one involving a middle-aged philosophy tutor who hooks up with a younger woman (this is Allen, after all). There’s fewer one-liners and more Kant references than you might expect, but it’s a taut little drama with solid work from Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Parker Posey… Bigger by half, and louder by roughly 900 per cent, is war-on-drugs shellshocker SICARIO (out now), starring Emily Blunt as an FBI agent who joins a task force policing…

Ashwin Chopra is technically a police inspector for only one day of this novel, though the inheritance of the title – a baby elephant named Ganesha – is with him till the end, proving unexpectedly useful to Chopra as he tries to uncover the killer of a poor young man whose death would otherwise be covered up by his successor. The novel is overwhelmingly cosy, a restricted cast of characters (including Chopra’s wife Poppy and his unpleasant mother-in-law) giving events a small-town feel even as the action unfolds across the sprawling city of Mumbai. You need them as an emotional anchor; the city is almost too large and varied to comprehend, and his investigation takes Chopra everywhere from a slum that’s a city in itself to one of the glittering,…

There are thousands of books out there in which a detective with a troubled personal life takes to the streets of London to track down a killer, but few of them have the ghosts of murdered gangsters to deal with on top of crime fighting. In her debut novel, AK Benedict has combined the hardboiled with the supernatural in a manner that is both gripping and stylish, and much less silly than the concept initially sounds. We see the city through the fingertips of Maria, an archaeologist, history buff and mudlark born blind but, after corrective surgery, choosing to remain sightless and blindfolded. When searching the banks of the Thames for washed-up treasure, a gruesome discovery makes it clear that she’s being stalked, leading detective Jonathan Dark into a case…

Mark Douglas-Home’s second novel sees the return of Cal McGill, an investigative oceanographer known as the sea detective. He finds things lost at sea – ships, cargo, and dead bodies. At a funeral in the far North West of Scotland, paying his respects to his late mother’s friend, he is drawn into a mystery that has haunted the village of Poltown for 26 years. One morning a young woman, Megan Bates, walked into the sea and was never seen again. Her daughter, Violet Wells, who was abandoned at just a few hours old, has returned to Poltown to seek the truth and asks Cal for help. Violet and Cal are warned off but this only makes them more determined to uncover the truth. Douglas-Home weaves a complex web of lies…

Mourning the death of her four-year-old only son, brittle New York journalist Charlie Cates finds her sceptical view of the universe tested as the spirits of dead or missing children begin to visit her in dreams. When she’s offered the chance to escape her soul-sucking job on a glossy magazine and investigate the decades-old kidnapping of two-year-old Gabriel Deveau, the resonances hit painfully close to home, but Charlie can’t shake off visions of a lost little boy begging for help. The case leads her to Evangeline, a Louisiana mansion, where a privileged family nurses a legacy of loss, lies and danger. The central mystery of the missing child may not present the reader with much of a challenge, but this spooky thriller does produce some genuine surprises along the way.…

You’d think that after the JFK assassination had been covered in fiction by such diverse but eminent authors as James Ellroy, Don DeLillo and even Stephen King, alongside many other conspiracy-dazzled novelists over the years, and countless movies and documentaries, it would be daunting for a newcomer to try to say something new. Not so for Australian-born debut author Tim Baker, who pulls a scary rabbit from his hat. His sprawling corker of a thriller revisits the web of intrigue surrounding that fatal day in Dallas through the doomed interactions of a series of striking characters: a merciless killer with a conscience, a writer obsessed by the killing but unaware of his true identity and connection to it, and a fallen FBI agent operating several years before the event. Add…

Middle class London-based couple Rab and Erykah Macdonald win £20 million in the new charity lottery – what could be better? A body washes up in a suitcase on a remote shore in the Highlands. The vote in Scotland comes down against independence and a new political party, the SLU, is created to promote the Union from a Scottish perspective, while a report is commissioned into fracking. How these seemingly unconnected events relate is at the core of the plot of The Turning Tide. In her debut novel as a crime writer, Magnanti weaves a story told from the perspective of each of the characters in turn, and at times this feels a little disjointed and distancing. Erykah Macdonald is the heroine yet she fails to fully connect with the…

Having dealt with how difficult it was to be a detective in the middle of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1980s – and a Catholic one at that – the Sean Duffy series takes things to another level with Rain Dogs. In a job dominated by kneecappings and car bombs, how odd is it that a detective should face a locked-room mystery? FT reporter Lily Bigelow, who came to Belfast to cover a Finnish trade junket, is found dead in the courtyard of Carrickfergus Castle. How did she get in when the fortress was locked up? Did she jump, or was she killed? Why? It doesn’t sit right with Duffy, and neither does the fact that two books ago he solved another locked-room mystery. So he starts to…

If The Catcher In The Rye’s Holden Caulfield was a black kid who works as a look-out for drug runners in Los Angeles, he would be East, the doughty but often hapless protagonist of this impressive-as-hell debut novel. Wrongly blamed for a police bust, he is sent as penance by his kingpin uncle on a road trip across the land, accompanied by his own malevolent younger brother and an overweight friend on a mission to murder a key witness hiding out in Wisconsin. The journey is full of tragic and comic encounters and, naturally, never quite goes as intended, but the interaction of the three kids and aspiring criminals and the bleak landscapes they travel through makes for a wonderfully evocative and touching yarn marking the emergence of a…

Most writers of police procedurals stick largely to a single voice within a novel. Sophie Hannah clearly thinks this is a dull idea. Her 10th Culver Valley book, starring socially dysfunctional but super-smart DC Simon Waterhouse and self-sabotaging Sergeant Charlie Zailer, shows us events from the perspective not just of cops investigating a series of murders, but a comedian, Kim Tribbeck. The killer, Billy Dead Mates, has a literary bent. Murdering pairs of best friends, Billy’s trademark is to give victims a small, hand-made white book with a line of poetry in it, precisely the kind of volume Tribbeck has received. Granted, as sections told in her own words reveal, Tribbeck isn’t always the most admirable of people, but why is she potentially a target? While the answer to this…

“SHE’S A ONE-WOMAN ANTI-KIDNAPPING MACHINE, LETHAL TO CRIMINALS” When you wake up in a dark wooden box, you’ll tell yourself this isn’t happening. You’ll push against the lid, of course. No surprise there. You’ll beat at the sides with your fists, pummel your heels against the bottom… and you’ll scream.” No, not a passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial, but the arresting opening of Lisa Gardner’s new book Find Her, which effortlessly overcomes the problems of an overcomplicated plot to deliver psychological crime writing of the first order. The central character is Flora Dane, who, to all appearances, has survived a horrifying ordeal when she was abducted on holiday in Florida seven years previously. Her abductor, truck driver Jacob Ness, was a sadist who subjected her to a…

“When somebody is pointing a gun at you, what does that make your brain do?” THE REALITY For eight years I worked as a consultant providing training to police forces on the psychology of critical incidents. I’d go into mainly specialist units – firearms, body recovery, that sort of thing – and provide training on how your brain reacts when you’re in a very dangerous situation. When somebody is pointing a gun at you, what does that make your brain do? What you see is that the bloodflow in your brain changes. Rather than the areas that can do rational thought, our bloodflow directs to a lower part of the brain where we rely on instinct, which is why we tend to see lots of fight or flight behaviour. One…

You've heard of good cop/bad cop, but how about a heroine who's both? ITV's new drama The Level follows Detective Sergeant Nancy Devlin , who has helped family friend and drug trafficker Frank Le Saux elude the authorities for years , but when Frank turns up dead , Nancy is targeted by a deadly stalker. Described as a "taut , tense" thriller in six parts by ITV Director of Drama Steve November , the series comes from BAFTA-nominated Shetland writers Gaby Chiappe and Alex Perrin. An air date is yet to be confirmed. You devoured the first season of Mating A Murderer in a day (probably), and Netflix could be looking to feed that obsession with a second series of the true crime doe. Creators Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi…

“It’s a big issue in Iceland: he never zips up his jacket” What is the story of Trapped ? It takes place in a little village in Iceland. A corpse is found at the port where the ferry comes in from Scandinavia. Also, they’re expecting a blizzard, so the town is closed down with people trying to come off the ferry, and there’s possibly a murderer on the loose… It has a bit of Nordic Noir and Agatha Christie. It’s a mix of that and a lot of Icelandic weather! What kind of a man is police chief Andri? He has some of the qualities of noir heroes – he’s quiet and not overly happy – but we wanted to change it up a bit. His wife…

1. AND THEN THERE WERE NONE BY AGATHA CHRISTIE Ten strangers are lured to an isolated mansion on an island, stuck there and accused of a guilty secret. When one is found murdered, tension builds. If you missed the BBC’s lavish adaptation of the nation’s favourite Christie in 2015, fear not: the book is even better. 2. THE TIGER IN THE SMOKE BY MARGERY ALLINGHAM J.K. Rowling’s favourite classic, this outing of the great amateur sleuth Albert Campion sees him face one of his trickiest adversaries. Post-war London has never felt so dangerous, and as an exploration of evil, it’s totally timeless. 3. THE MYSTERY OF A BUTCHER’S SHOP BY GLADYS MITCHELL Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley is wonderfully described as “a hag-like pterodactyl” and has all the arrogance and…

SERIES 1 From its opening scene, Peaky Blinders is clearly a period drama like no other. Set in Birmingham in 1919, Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) rides a horse through a muddy slum – more like an American outlaw than a Brummie gangster. Tommy is the leader of a crime family – the Peaky Blinders – alongside his brothers, the wayward Arthur (Paul Anderson), single parent John (Joe Cole) and their hard-as-nails aunt Polly (Helen McCrory), who ran their illegal betting business while the men were fighting in World War I. In a nuanced and magnetic performance by Murphy, Tommy’s still haunted by the Somme and retreats into opium to escape the horrors. Back from the trenches, they face a fresh battle at home with the arrival of Inspector Campbell (Sam…

Created by Allan Cubitt Starring Jamie Dornan, Gillian Anderson, Colin Morgan (BBC Two) TBC 2016 The second series finale (no spoilers here) caused a bit of an outcry among fans of The Fall, but rest assured that all your favourite characters will be present and correct for Series 3, including Jamie Dornan as we-shouldn’t-fancy-him serial killer Paul Spector and Gillian Anderson as Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson. Other returnees include Colin Morgan as DC Tom Anderson (last seen acting as a human pin cushion) and John Lynch as Stella’s co-worker Jim Burns. With ex-BBC controller Ben Stephenson hinting that the show’s cat and mouse game has “one last act to play out”, this looks set to be the final series for Spector and Gibson – show creator Allan Cubitt himself has…

1 BEST MOUSTACHE NOMINEES • John Watson (Martin Freeman) • John Watson (Edward Hardwicke) • John Watson (Nigel Bruce) • John Watson (David Burke) • John Watson (Colin Blakely) – Sherlock • Leland Stottlemeyer (Monk) – Monk AND THE WINNER IS JOHN WATSON (EDWARD HARDWICKE) IN SHERLOCK Most assistants steer clear of facial hair in case it draws attention away from the hero. Not John Watson – Sherlock’s best bud is rarely seen without a well-covered upper-lip. Martin Freeman gets an honourable mention for his work in The Abominable Bride, but Hardwicke – who played opposite Jeremy Brett – earns the prize for a truly top flight piece of facial fluff. 2 BEST HEAVY NOMINEES • Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell) – Ironside • George Carter (Dennis Waterman) – The Sweeney…

What’s it like to work on this show that makes it different to any other? The things that made me want to come back are the quality of the production and the writing. The world Richard Warlow created, and the character relationships he created. That’s also partly down to filming in Ireland. The feeling the crew are able to create here. It’s just a very rich, wonderful job. I would be lucky if I find one like it again in my career. How has the relationship between the lead characters evolved? They’re not just buddies. There’s spikiness between the three of them. And yet there’s an obvious kind of love underneath that’s there. Reid has been away, down to the seaside, and Drake’s taken over. Reid hasn’t answered any of…

The defence case is speculation and wild accusation, nothing more. The truth is less exciting, however, as all we have are the imperfections of a small police department, not a deliberate conspiracy to frame Steven Avery. There’s a well-known legal tactic: if strong on the law, argue the law; if strong on the facts, argue the facts; if strong on neither, bang on the table. The defence are banging on the table, that’s all. Ask yourself whether there is any actual evidence of the following: • That Teresa was seen with anyone after Avery? • That Teresa’s vehicle was seen anywhere other than Avery’s scrapyard after her appointment there? • That the blood in the car came from a vial of Avery’s blood as opposed to a cut? • That,…

‘Jack In The Box’ (Series 1, episode 2) An ageing comedian is found shot dead in his nuclear fallout shelter, with the door locked from the inside and the gun in his hand. But when Alan discovers that the man had crippling arthritis and couldn’t have shot himself, the mystery deepens. ‘The Scented Room’ (Series 2, episode 3) A painting disappears from a locked room and its owner has offered a reward. Maddy and Jonathan investigate, but what does a spam sandwich have to do with its recovery? ‘The Omega Man’ (Series 3, episode 3) Maddy is contacted by a man claiming to own the skeleton of an extra-terrestrial, but after the alien goes missing after being locked up in a truck by the American military, Jonathan must find out…

1 SLEEPYHEAD (2001) The debut novel that introduced DI Tom Thorne was a huge hit thanks to its sinister plot about a stroke victim with locked-in syndrome. The woman is unable to move and a cat-and-mouse scenario ensues between the killer who induced her cruel condition. 2 SCAREDY CAT (2002) Thorne’s Moriarty is the manipulative Stuart Nicklin, who appears in three books. During their first encounter, the harassed detective spots the connection between simultaneous murders in London, he realises this case involves a pair of serial killers. 3 GOOD AS DEAD (2011) There’s a twist for the 10th book in the Thorne series – he’s a supporting character in the suspenseful story of police colleague Helen Weeks (from earlier standalone In the Dark). Weeks is taken hostage at gunpoint by…

The Bridge was a better show than The Killing right from the start. There, we said it. Although it entered our consciousness later, after we’d already taken Sarah Lund and co. to our hearts, it proved to be the better written and more atmospheric of the Nordic Noir dramas. Saga Norén is cooler and weirder than Sarah. Its premise was that Saga (Sofia Helin), a troubled detective with personality issues from Sweden, must work with a laid-back detective from Denmark to solve a crime that connects both countries. That double act was key to the series’ emotional core but the returning show had a big problem: Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia), the down-to-earth Copenhagen cop, has gone. Could Season 3 recapture that magic without him? The show teases you at first…

An isolated mansion hosts an unconvivial dinner party for 10 strangers, each with a guilty secret, in Agatha Christie’s pitch-black classic whodunit. Adapted and reinterpreted multiple times for the screen (the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Sabotage and M. Night Shyamalan’s Devil are both loose reworkings, for example), this version commissioned for the BBC at Christmas remains faithful to the very bleak spirit of the book while adding its own twists. Invited to an island off the coast of Devon by the mysterious Mr and Mrs Owen, the guests quickly realise they’re being offed one by one. One of them must be the killer, but who? Could it be debonair military man Sam Neill? Overprivileged society boy Douglas Booth? Charles Dance’s gravitas-soaked judge? Charming mercenary Aidan Turner? Or someone else entirely? The…

With Reagan in the White House and the Cold War hotting up, naïve young East German conscript Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay) finds himself coerced into spying for the DDR. Given a new identity, he’s sent to Bonn to work as aide-de-camp to a top Bundeswehr general and ferret out secret nuclear agreements between West Germany and the US. His handlers tell him all he’ll have to do is surreptitiously copy a few documents; but things soon get rather more complicated, and far more lethal, than that. Here and there the action skirts implausibility (would the famously efficient East Germans really be quite so slapdash?), and there’s the odd continuity glitch – but altogether this is an intriguing tale, told from an unfamiliar perspective and twisty enough to grab our interest.…

Based on author Arne Dahl’s crime books, this series returns with a newly-reformed A Unit, a crack gang of detectives who tackle cases with an international dimension from their Stockholm HQ. Three years have passed and Hultin and Norlander, the older characters from the first series, have retired. Kerstin Holm heads up the new unit with the team including familiar faces Arto, Gunnar, Sara and Chavez, plus the rookie Ida, striving for acceptance. They’ve got five cases to deal with on this DVD, the first of which involves Polish health workers who are being murdered across Sweden. The tension ratchets up nicely with an overarching story stretching across episodes about Kerstin’s affair with Paul Hjelm, also from the first series but now in Internal Affairs. ‘Afterquake’ is perhaps the best…

Is there anything in life quite as comforting as this midweek BBC crime drama? Five series in, the formula is as set as a Mary Berry Victoria sponge recipe: an oddly gore-free murder will take place on the glorious (fictional) Caribbean island of Saint-Marie, gawky Brit detective Humphrey Goodman (Kris Marshall) will bumble his way through the case before revealing all, Columbo-style, in front of the guilty party, while his comrades (Red Dwarf’s Danny John-Jules and a suave Don Warrington) provide comedic backup. Marshall has been at the helm now for longer than his predecessor, the equally golly-gosh, Hugh Grant, fish-out-of-water type Ben Miller, and has the Labradorish, floppy-haired smarts down to a tee, playing off guest stars such as a reliably slimy Keith Allen like an overgrown schoolboy with…

Being a forensic psychologist specialising in missing persons, Paula Maguire is in the business of uncovering secrets. And there’s no shortage of those in Ballyterrin, the small Northern Irish town where she grew up. The fourth in this gripping series finds Paula, now a mother, reluctantly planning a wedding to childhood sweetheart Aidan whilst investigating the disappearance of student Alice Morgan. The only trace of Alice, an anorexic, is a pool of blood in a church, and a priceless relic – the finger of a long dead saint – has vanished too. As Paula and her police colleagues search for Alice, fellow students at a wonderfully sinister private university close ranks. Outside the ivory tower, the oppressive atmosphere of Ballyterrin is quite brilliantly evoked, as are the battles scars left…

Nazis are the ultimate bad guys in thrillers, and now it’s private detective Charlie Parker’s turn to contend with them. In this 13th book in Connolly’s series of paranormal procedurals, Parker has retreated to a quiet town in Maine to recover from serious injuries. He’s also troubled by the supernatural powers of his daughters (one living, one dead), but the paranormal remains in the background; the Nazis and their pitiless henchmen are terrifying enough. After the suspicious drowning of Nazi-hunter, Parker becomes concerned for his Jewish neighbour, a single mother, and is soon pursuing a shadowy network of German exiles. When Connolly breaks into his narrative to explain US hypocrisy in recruiting war criminals with technical expertise to help fight Soviet communism, it’s powerful, but his real gift is as…

Gerald Seymour’s thrillers always have a journalistic sense of realism, and his succinct writing style gives characters and locations a real sense of veracity and immediacy. Here, his focus turns to the little-written-about ’Ndrangheta, the immensely powerful Mafia-like families in the Reggio Calabria region of Italy who apparently control much of Europe’s cocaine trade. So No Mortal Thing is remarkably educational, revealing how the ’Ndrangheta’s influence reaches out from a small village on the toe of Italy to Germany and the rest of the continent – including the UK. Through the characters of elderly patriarch Bernardo and his brutally self-assured grandson Marcantonio, Seymour chillingly shows us the viciousness underscoring their code of family honour. Through his principal character, the “innocent abroad” Jago Browne, he even shows that it’s still possible…

Modern day San Francisco is dipped in old-school noir in Jonathan’s Moore’s seductive debut. After a violent argument with his girlfriend, toxicology expert Caleb finds himself in a late-night bar being seduced by the impossibly glamorous Emmeline, silky-skinned, satin-draped and sipping on sugar-soaked absinthe (French pour). When bodies in the bay turn out to have a cocktail of poisons coursing through their systems, indicating a particularly torturous method of murder, Caleb doesn’t quite understand what he’s being drawn into – just that Emmeline and the Berthe de Joux has a hold on him like an addiction. A tale of femmes fatales, speakeasies and gum-shoes mixed with modern forensics and the realities of research grants, there’s a respectful mix of the old and new here, a neo-noir with none of the…

Forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway might not be doing much actual digging in this, her eighth outing in print, but she’s still not averse to getting her hands dirty in pursuit of a wrongdoer. In a clash of ancient and modern, a celebrity model and recovering addict is found dead close to a holy shrine in Walsingham, Norfolk. Chloe Jenkins was murdered, and one of the last people to see her alive was Cathbad, Ruth’s Druid friend, who was cat-sitting in a nearby cottage (but at first thought it was a vision of the Virgin Mary, Walsingham being notorious for religious apparitions). Another old friend, now a priest, contacts Ruth after receiving an anonymous letter threatening women priests – and then, not long after, one is murdered. The case falls in…

Set for the most part within sight of the Hollywood Hills, Mason Cross’ second Carter Blake book (after 2015’s The Killing Season) has movies in the blood, wherever it’s spattered. LAPD detectives Jessica Allen and Jonathan Mazzucco are hunting a killer abducting damsels (one from the legendary Mulholland Drive) and slitting their throats. Blake, a former black-ops soldier turned PI, thinks he recognises the handiwork. At one point Mazzucco compares the killer’s elastic MO to Tarantino: “Tarantino makes gangster movies and kung fu movies and westerns, but they’re all Tarantino movies, right?” Cross, it has to be said, doesn’t aim for anything so distinctive. His writing is at best generically compelling, and often has a touch of the Crayola. “People go crazy when it rains in LA,” he informs us.…

They say you can’t bury the past. That was probably true, but what they really meant was that trauma ripples and echoes and somehow stays alive.” That’s what Maya Stern, central character in Harlan Coben’s Fool Me Once thinks, but it’s also a pretty good summary of the New Jersey-based author’s work, which frequently hinges on the present-day resurfacing of unresolved or misinterpreted events – usually violent. Starting at a funeral, ending with a birth, Fool Me Once is a terse, no-nonsense page-turner with just enough of a domestic tone to soften its occasionally brutal edges. The driving narrative is Maya’s investigation into the shadier history of the very rich Burkett family into which she married, but the novel also touches on aspects of veterans returning to civilian life, the…

“Yes, ‘cosy’ crime is alive and well, but Britcrime these days is as steely and uncompromising as anything else” Times change, don’t they? There was a time when the use of a French word such as “noir” would have seemed pretentious, certainly in the context of crime fiction, but now we crime aficionados use it all the time. It became the term for something darker and more menacing than the standard detective novel, but now covers (lazily, perhaps) virtually all of the crime genre. It’s fair enough that the term has become the default description; after all, they coined the phrase “film noir” for the atmospheric American crime films of the 1940s when British crime wasn’t even in the running – but all of that has changed, as I’ve discovered…

“Social media can really accelerate word of mouth” A year after it first hit the shelves, Paula Hawkins’ novel The Girl On The Train is still riding high in the Sunday Times bestseller lists, selling over one million copies in print and digital formats in the UK alone. With thousands of new books out each year, what makes one book stand out and become the one that everyone is reading, while others languish on shelves and Kindles? Publishers jump on trends such as the psychological thriller genre, but spotting and making a book the ‘Next Big Thing’ is an art form. A Hollywood movie adaptation, foreign rights frenzy or a celeb photographed holding a copy of a book will certainly help. Examining the campaigns behind some recent monster hits, here…

“Sherlock Holmes has been a great influence, I always mention him in my books” What’s the very first crime novel you remember reading? Marathon Man by William Goldman, which my dad gave me when I was 15 or 16. It was one of the first adult thrillers I read, and I remember gripping the book so tightly and thinking, ‘If somebody put a gun to my head, I wouldn’t put this down.’ Subconsciously, there was a part of me that thought, ‘Wow, what a great job this would be.’ What’s your favourite crime novel ever and why? Anybody who writes detective fiction owes a debt of gratitude to Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series – my favourite is Ceremony. I joke that 90 per cent admit he was an influence, and…

Created by Lynda La Plante Starring TBC (ITV) 2016 Helen Mirren made DCI Jane Tennison famous in long-running procedural Prime Suspect until 2006. A decade after she hung up her truncheon, this prequel series delves into Tennison’s 1970s origin story. Again written by PS creator Lynda La Plante, Tennison will follow the 22-year-old copper as she patrols the streets of Hackney. “I have had so much fun writing the young Jane, creating her family background and the start of her career in the police force,” says La Plante, while ITV director Steve November commends the writer for “perfectly capturing the sounds and the mood of the ’70s period”. We’re sure Mirren will tune in.…

“ It’s like time-travelling,” smiles Stephen Mangan, looking very much a man out of time as he sips Diet Coke in full Victorian gentleman regalia. “ It’s great. You go to all these amazing locations that are still intact, and they de-modernise it, bring in everyone in costumes, and horses and carts, and you might as well be in 1901.” He’s chatting to Crime Scene on the Liverpool set of Houdini & Doyle, and we can see what he means. The ITV drama is filming in the basement of a 150-year-old terraced house, and while the modern world has made its mark on the outside of the building (drainpipes, security lights, double glazing) the inside is still cosily period-appropriate. Victorian houses weren’t built with television crews in mind, though, so…

How are you finding working on these new sets? I prefer it. These sets make you feel very focused. Whenever I work outside in the real world, I can’t help but feel like everything is real, except me! When you know everything is a set, you’re made to act in front of it. Has Jackson’s attitude changed? I once saw a documentary about prisons with people on death row, and how the families will move into the town and just become advocates. So that’s where Jackson is: secretly working on Susan’s behalf, on her legal defence. He’s trying to put over to Drake and to anyone who’s watching that he’s just a drunk who doesn’t care but he’s saving his money; his first and fiercest passion is for Susan, and…

What was it like being the new boy? It’s always a bit daunting when you come in to a show that’s so established and so well received. You’ve got to try and find your place in it. But everyone’s been so welcoming, and the environment is really fantastic. How did you enjoy being on the Ripper Street set? The production design and values are second to none. I’ve been fortunate to work on some big budget stuff and these sets are just impeccable, some of the best I’ve worked on. It just adds to the whole atmosphere. I’ve never done anything period before, so it was a really great opportunity to jump into a bit of history. Were you surprised by the science of the time? I like how we…

THE PROSECUTION Neil White is the author of nine novels, published by HarperCollins and then Sphere. These include the number one ebook bestseller Cold Kill and the Parker Brothers series. As well as writing novels, Neil is a criminal lawyer, starting out as a defence lawyer before switching sides to the prosecution, where he was a Senior Crown Prosecutor for 17 years. Now Neil writes full time but still works as a freelance criminal lawyer. NEIL WHITE PROSECUTION OPENING This is not entertainment. This is not fiction. A woman was murdered in 2005, Teresa Halbach, by Steven Avery. A jury concluded that and the evidence shows that. I will present the key facts to lead you to the same conclusion as the jury, so that you are sure that not…

I’m inviting you to consider that the prosecution have not, on any aspect of the evidence, proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Steven Avery is guilty. Doubt is abundant here. And that’s the only test. Not: “Do you think he did it?” Bear in mind, always, Manitowoc County Sheriffs had already framed Steven Avery for a crime he didn’t commit. Surely the worst bad character evidence in this entire case relates to the Manitowoc Sheriff’s department, and the previous District Attorney. Now that’s bad character. Each piece of prosecution evidence has a question mark hanging over it, doesn’t it? The key that wasn’t found the first five times the trailer was searched, the blood and lack of fingerprints in the car, the inexplicably broken seal on the blood vial. In…

Bob Monkhouse (The Scented Room) The late TV stand-up and perennial game show host turned in a rare dramatic turn as a waspish theatre critic in this how-dunnit episode from the second series. Rik Mayall (Black Canary And The Clue Of The Savant’s Thumb) The former Young One’s debut as inspector Gideon Pryke was Mayall’s first acting gig after his near-fatal quad bike accident. Nigel Planer (The Reconstituted Corpse And The Clue Of The Savant’s Thumb) Mayall’s erstwhile Young Ones colleague had two different roles in Creek, and was once up for the role of Creek himself. Simon Day (The House Of Monkeys) Best known for The Fast Show, Day made a guest appearance as a conspiracy theory-addled chair inventor in this first season episode. Clarke Peters (The Problem At…

2 JULY 1961 Mark Philip Billingham born in Solihull, Warwickshire. Grows up in Birmingham and graduates from Birmingham University with a BA in Drama and Theatre Arts. 1985 Moves to London, takes on acting roles, works as a standup comedian and also as a screenwriter for TV. 1997 Billingham and his writing partner Peter Cocks are held hostage in a hotel room in Manchester. The incident would provide inspiration for Scaredy Cat. 2001 His first novel Sleepyhead, introduces Detective Tom Thorne. It becomes a bestseller. 2002 Second novel Scaredy Cat is published. Wins the Sherlock Award for Best Detective Novel Created by a UK Author. 2004 Novel Lazybones wins Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award. Billingham would win again in 2009. 2010 Sky adaps Sleepyhead and Scaredy…

“A FIENDISHLY LABYRINTHINE PUZZLE THROWS IN EVERYTHING FROM MORIARTY TO SUFFRAGETTES” Three seasons and nine episodes in, the makers of Sherlock have earned the right to let their hair down. Which is precisely what they do in this head-spinning Victorian era one-off, an experimental crowd-pleaser that not only breaks the rules on which Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ update is founded but also tests how much we’ve been paying attention over the five years that Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman have been making Holmes and Watson their own. Taking its cue from a one-line reference in Conan Doyle’s 1893 story The Adventure Of The Musgrave Ritual, The Abominable Bride finds a frock-coated, deerstalker-sporting Holmes and a mustachioed Watson on the trail of a suicidal wife who has seemingly returned from…

“NOT LUTHER’S PROUDEST TV OUTING, BUT EVEN SUB-PAR LUTHER IS A GLORIOUS TREAT” It seemed such a deliciously definitive end in 2013 with John Luther sauntering off into the sunset with deranged psychopath Alice Morgan. And of course that was meant to be the last hurrah of TV Luther. Writer Neil Cross and star Idris Elba spent every interview at the time stressing that small-screen Luther was over and that London’s broodiest cop’s future was in the Multiplex. Two a half years on from that closing shot on London’s Southwark Bridge comes the somewhat unexpected Luther Series 4. But, like Only Fools And Horses’ unwanted three-episode coda in the noughties, this two-episode follow-up never feels as though it needs to exist and, sadly, rather messes up the pitch perfect full…

“A MASTERCLASS IN SLOWLY ESTABLISHING MOOD, PLOT DIRECTION AND CHARACTER” Viewing the US version of The Killing, it’s all too tempting to see it solely through the prism of the original. After all, the Danish version not only gave us an iconic detective in Sarah Lund, it proved subtitled shows could pull in the ratings on British TV. No Lund, no Walter Presents. Yet in transposing The Killing to Seattle, Washington, for US channel AMC, showrunner Veena Sud clearly wasn’t aiming at those who knew the original series, but at a new audience. For a while at least, this worked, with Season 1 attracting both strong ratings and critical acclaim. It’s easy to see why: the first few episodes offer a masterclass in slowly but surely establishing mood, plot direction…

“THIS SECOND NCIS SPIN-OFF HAS A DISTINCTLY COSIER, FOLKSIER FEEL TO ITS PARENT SHOW” The second spin-off from the hugely successful NCIS (the other being NCIS: Los Angeles), NCIS: New Orleans has a distinctly cosier, folksier feel. That’s not just due to the setting, though New Orleans is almost a character in itself, and locations such as a Victorian cemetery and the bayou and events such as Mardi Gras really help emphasise this and set the show apart from others in the franchise. The core team – agents Dwayne Cassius Pride (Scott Bakula), Christopher LaSalle (Lucas Black) and Meredith Brody (Zoe McLellan) and ME Loretta Wade (CCH Pounder) and lab assistant Sebastian Lund (Rob Kerkovich) – is smaller than that of its parent show, which gives more time to explore…

“IT ISN’T AFRAID TO PUT ONGOING RELATIONSHIPS TO THE TEST WITH GENUINE DRAMATIC TENSION” It might come as a surprise that award-winning crime drama Silent Witness soon starts filming its 20th series, but this 19th run of 10 episodes – starring Emilia Fox, Richard Lintern and David Caves as a dedicated team of forensic pathologists – provides ample evidence of why it remains fresh and relevant. These five two-part tales cover a wide range of stories and issues. Opener “After The Fall” is a sharply delivered psychological thriller which puts Fox’s Nikki Alexander on the wrong side of the law, while “Flight” – about the murderous return to the UK of two young Jihadists – touches on the horrors of belief-motivated violence. “Life Licence” asks some difficult questions about the…

“SUDDENLY FREED FROM A MANIPULATIVE HUSBAND, SHE HAS HER OWN AGENDA” Gone Girl proved that marital strife could be the stuff of nerve-shredding suspense. The Widow is Fiona Barton’s portrayal of a marriage infected by suspicion, following accusations of paedophilia. While it’s difficult subject matter, the efficient prose and plotting draw you into a debut novel that feels uncomfortably realistic. The Widow begins with the death of the main suspect in a child abduction case. Glen Taylor, never convicted, avoided prison but not the bus that ran him over outside Sainsbury’s. His sudden demise prompts the police and tabloids to close in on his widow, Jean, and find out what she really knows about the little girl who went missing several years earlier. Barton heightens the suspense by taking us…

“AS MUCH MORAL ALLEGORY AS CRIME NOVEL, LACED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL MUSINGS” Any novel that kicks off with a hellish vision of 1916 revolutionary Mexico (“Not a country – a state of mind”) and ends with a showdown between hero and villain over the Holy Grail might suggest a bizarre collaboration between Cormac McCarthy and Dan Brown. But no, with its richly poetic prose, dark morality and scenes of graphic, inexorable violence, this is very much the work of prolific Texas-born novelist James Lee Burke. Burke is best known for his series of 20 or so novels featuring Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux. But he’s also created an extensive family saga that, for its sense of inherited flaws and of destiny working itself out through the generations, bears comparison with Zola’s classic…

“DIALOGUE WORTHY OF ELMORE LEONARD AND EXPLOSIVE ACTION” For three decades, Joe R. Lansdale was a cult author ranging from horror and crime to comics and westerns. Now, suddenly, he’s enjoying the belated attention of Hollywood. Cold In July starred Michael C. Hall (Dexter), while Game Of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage is up for historical thriller The Thicket. But it’s the Sundance TV series Hap And Leonard, a “swamp noir” pairing James Purefoy with Michael K. Williams (The Wire), that will bring Lansdale’s darkly comic crime writing to a wider audience. Honky Tonk Samurai is the ninth novel – and first in five years – featuring his gung-ho private detectives in East Texas. Yet this present-day story sits oddly with a TV series set in the 1980s. Hap Collins is 40…

“MIKAMI, A DEPRESSED EX-DETECTIVE, IS A TOUGH MAN TO SPEND TIME WITH” Six Four isn’t so much a crime novel as a publishing sensation, selling a million copies in its native Japan in just six days. Hideo Yokoyama’s sixth book has finally been translated, with the four-year gap doing nothing to diminish the wave of expectation carrying it onto UK shores. A first glance at the set-up might make you wonder what the fuss is all about. It follows police press officer Mikami as he struggles to do his job whilst worrying about his missing daughter Ayumi. Meanwhile, 14 years after a (titular) tragically botched kidnapping investigation, Mikami still deals with the repercussions. The story is told entirely from Mikami’s perspective, and he’s initially a tough man to spend time…

“OULD’S WRITING ALWAYS FEELS FRESH AND THE CHARACTERS AUTHENTIC” The premise of Chris Ould’s first adult novel is pretty bog standard: protagonist reluctantly heads back to the birthplace he left as a child and, once there, digs up uncomfortable family secrets – and helps to solve a crime. Though it’s a tried, tested and somewhat tired plot device, it doesn’t mean it can’t and hasn’t worked – think Peter May’s The Blackhouse or Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. But it’s a risk to attempt such a well-cooked concept, because if it goes wrong, the reader will be left with a predictable story about an outsider coming to terms with their own personal history while, of course, going on to solve a crime. Fortunately, while The Blood Strand does have many familiar…

“COMICALLY DEFUSED DRAMA, SPARKY BANTER, CASUAL SEX, LOTS OF FOOD” Janet Evanovich’s latest Stephanie Plum novel starts with a jumper on a window ledge who is fleeing a trial on the charge of chopping her boyfriend’s pecker off. Not to worry: the jumper is only three floors up, as Plum’s wise-cracking gal pal Lula remarks, and an airbag arrives in time to ensure her safe landing. And cute-nosed bounty-hunter Plum is soon back on her on/off lover’s sofa for pizza, TV and sex. Comically defused drama, sparky banter, casual sex, enough food to feed entire armies – if Evanovich found writing Plum’s 22nd outing tricky, you can’t tell. With the formula now set firm, Plum 22 is about as risky as a third-floor leap onto an airbag. And, if you’re…

“TENSE, TIGHTLY PLOTTED, WITH DEEP-BLACK HUMOUR” Stab-proof vests are little help when the rain stings like “a thousand frozen wasps”. The coast is “robbed of colour by the driving rain”; the weather drums and hammers relentlessly. It never rains but it pours in Stuart MacBride’s Logan McRae novels, bracing hits of Tartan noir about a long-suffering Aberdeen copper whose coastal Banff locale makes Scandi-noir’s backwoods look like Tomorrowland. MacBride’s 10th McRae novel evokes its all-edges world so vividly that the setting is practically alive (“Banff sulked…”), then fills it with full-blooded characters and stinging storytelling to match. Tense, tightly plotted, thick with deep-black humour, it’s McRae’s best outing yet. It begins with a corpse found in the woods, which leads to a husband’s infidelities, his business partner, a jittery wife,…

“KELLERMAN’S BOOKS ARE A MASTERCLASS IN PLOTTING” The arrival of a new novel about child psychologist Alex Delaware is always cause for excitement among fans. The LA-set mysteries are ceaselessly entertaining, combining the page-turning energy of an airport thriller with psychological insight and prose that aspiring thriller writers should study. Kellerman’s previous title was the superb standalone The Murderer’s Daughter, so in 2016 we return with salivating anticipation to the series for which he is most famous. World-weary cop Milo Sturgis and the empathetic doc Delaware make for an engaging pair of crime fighters and the murders they investigate are messed-up, gruesome affairs in the gleaming chateaux of the Beverly Hills elite. Breakdown follows that familiar pattern, though there’s not a crime for over 100 pages. Delaware is attempting to…

“PARETSKY’S PLOTTING IS DEFT AS EVER – SHE KEEPS DOZENS OF PIECES IN PLAY” It’s not the most obscure allusion ever in a book title – it’s probably blindingly obvious in the American market – but a brush back is a baseball pitch designed to intimidate the striker, and Paretsky’s wisecracking, justice-dispatching Chicago private investigator VI Warshawski spends a great deal of her 17th adventure dealing with people trying to push her off the plate. Not that she wants the case to begin with. Ex-boyfriend Frank shows up in her office, asking her to look into the long-ago conviction of his mother Stella for the brutal murder of his sister Annie. VI is sympathetic to neither the mother nor the case, but in the end the pull of the old…

Ragnar Jonasson’s Snowblind was one of the must-read debuts of Nordic Noir in 2015. Combining the feel of a Golden Age mystery with a contemporary edge in a bleak, frozen setting, it delivered a taste of something new. Five years after his first case, Ari Thor Arason is still policing the small community of Siglufjodur. The book begins with a boom – that of a shotgun as his superior Herjolfur is ambushed when following up a callout to an abandoned house on the edge of town. Druggies? A corrupt politician? Someone’s lunatic boyfriend? These are all in the mix, and Ari Thor investigates alongside a more experienced officer who’s been drafted in. The police response does seem a little low key, however, considering that an officer has been gunned down.…

Want to discover one of the finest new writers in the UK? Then get your hands on Eva Dolan’s third novel, After You Die (Harvill Secker, out now). Her Peterborough-based hate crime detectives Zigic and Ferreira return for a case involving a gas explosion, a brutally murdered mother, and her disabled daughter dead upstairs. Where Dolan tackles the right to die and disability, Helen FitzGerald looks at the topical issue of cyberbullying in her standalone Viral (Faber & Faber, out now). Teenage girls. Nightclub. Sex act. Online. Mortified… It turns out to be a dark, dirty, humorous and emotional read. Also revolving around social media, smartphones and teenage girls, there’s Sarah Pinborough’s 13 Minutes (Orion, out now). A tense story unfolds after leader of the pack Tasha is found dead…