Exasperated tenants have been venting their anger about having to put up with Dickensian squalor and ruthless landlords. Members of the Generation Rent group asked renters to post their experiences on Twitter using the hashtag #ventyourrent and were inundated with tales of woe. They ranged from stories of damp and mould to a landlord who constructed a glass-bricked room inside the tenant’s flat to sleep in when he visited from ...keep reading
The Taken gripped me from start to finish. I felt bereft when I reached the last page of this excellently plotted and assured tale – but I was in for a pleasant surprise. Why? Because for some unknown reason I’d assumed this was Alice Clark-Platts’s first novel. In fact it’s the second of her series about Detective Inspector Erica Martin, a Durham police officer with a fierce intellect and a ...keep reading
When it comes to crime fiction few writers can match the classy Patricia Cornwell. So the arrival in the post of Chaos, Cornwell’s 24th Kay Scarpetta novel, was a treat. I lit the fire, settled down on the sofa and read it from cover to cover. And yes, I was gripped from start to finish, my jaw dropping (metaphorically speaking) throughout at Cornwell’s clever, intricate plotting. Unlike some crime novels, where ...keep reading
Barely a week goes by without a new crime novel being tipped for bestsellerdom. Now, following in the footsteps of The Girl on the Train, The Widow and I Let You Go comes another one – and trust me, Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner is a surefire winner. There’s no doubt that Steiner’s second novel is pacy, compelling and very well written but what makes it stand out from the ...keep reading
I adored Ruth Rendell’s books and as today would have been her 86th birthday I‘m rerunning part of a blog I wrote about her back in 2013. It has just been announced, by the way, that a new award is being launched in her memory by the National Literacy Trust and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. The annual Ruth Rendell Award will be presented to the author or writer who has ...keep reading
If The Girl on the Train was last year’s stand-out title then The Widow could well be this year’s mega-success. A taut psychological thriller, it’s written by journalist Fiona Barton. A former senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph and chief reporter at The Mail on Sunday, she garnered multiple scoops and was hugely admired by her peers (me included). For the last few years, ...keep reading
On the first day of my holiday in France I sat down with a literary treat. The fifth of Nicci French’s gripping Frieda Klein series has just been published and it’s a belter. I didn’t look up again until I’d whizzed through its 375 pages. Frieda Klein is one of my favourite fictional detectives. To be strictly accurate, she’s a psychotherapist rather than a detective but she has the uncanny ...keep reading
The brilliant Sophie Hannah appeared on BBC One’s Breakfast earlier this month to promote her new novel, A Game for all the Family. As always she was witty, engaging and pretty self-deprecating for a writer who’s sold stack-loads of books. One particular anecdote stood out for me though and that was a story about her favourite crime writer, the late Ruth Rendell, who insisted that a novelist’s job is to grip ...keep reading
The best way of getting through an interminably long car journey is by downloading a gripping audiobook. The Mumsnet Bloggers Network has just sent me a copy of Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo and it kept me glued to my driving seat all the way up the M1 and into North Yorkshire. It’s exciting, pacy and compelling – just as you’d expect from a writer who’s been dubbed the king ...keep reading
The brilliant Stylist magazine has just run a feature about “the most addictive page turners to chomp through in one weekend or less.” As the magazine says: “An addictive book is like a particularly tempting hunk of crumbly cheddar cheese. We know we should step back and take time to covet it over a series of slow, delicious weeks. But we can rarely resist the urge to dive straight in and ...keep reading