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★★★★☆ A book, television show, or movie set somewhere in Scandinavia leads the reader or viewer to expect dark, foreboding landscapes and ominous, threatening events. Susanne Jansson’s sparkling debut novel The Forbidden Place fulfills...
★★★☆☆ Benjamin Black’s “historical fantasy…(shows that) real life at the court of Rudolf II was entirely phantasmagorical.” Wolf on a String is a brooding historical noir that imagines the sordid underbelly of Rudolf’s court...
★★★★☆ Welcome back, old friend. Now in his twenty-first novel, part-time detective Dave Robicheaux is a character readers can count on. A walking conundrum, both saint and sinner, he will get into trouble and...
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Reminders of the first lines of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House underpin the opening of Margery Allingham’s small and wonderful 1929 mystery novel The Crime at Black Dudley: “The view...
★★★★☆ Murder in multiple guises invades the six intimate stories of death in P.D. James’ Sleep No More, with emphasis not on the victims but the perpetrators and how they came to commit this ultimate...
★★★★☆ The name “Dorothy B. Hughes” may not be one that elicits immediate recognition from casual readers of noir fiction, though that should change with the release of a new edition of her much...
★★★★☆ Lisbeth Salander is back! In all her dark glory, she is fighting against the forces of institutional greed that seek to control lives. Her fights for Truth and Justice have been rather unconventional...
★★★★☆ People’s lives were changing at an accelerated pace in the 19th Century. How would new technologies and scientific discoveries mold this brave new world? Authors reflected on this disturbance in the force as...
★★★★☆ Maben and her daughter Annalee walk along a lonely highway, a black garbage bag of clothes their only possession. Three days of “walking to nowhere with nothing” have rendered them dead tired, nearly...
