2606 Books and counting..........

As I seem to recall having written before, albeit in different ways, literary resurrections can be something of the proverbial curate...

One of the oddities of having been AWOL from the blogosphere is that when, as now, I want to refer back to a book I've reviewed as be...

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have a serious backlog of books to review from my recent period of purdah.  And, of those, a smal...

If ever I receive a free copy of a book (whether solicited or unsolicited), I’m pretty scrupulous about disclosing the fact in my review...

When I come across a crime series I enjoy, there’s a certain pattern to my reading.  At first, I devour instalments one after another un...

A Man Without Breath is the ninth outing for Philip Kerr’s stained white knight, Bernie Gunther, and is closer in spirit to the darker,...

Bryant and May and the Bleeding Heart is the eleventh outing for one of the oddest detective duos in literature.  Since the last instalm...

Eh bien, mes amis, could this really be a new Agatha Christie?  Could this really be a lost Hercule Poirot story, published for the firs...

This may sound rather silly but I’ve still not been able to watch it.  It sat on my Sky+ box for weeks before being replaced by a DVD ve...

Mike Ford, the hero of The 500 , journalist Mathew Quirk's debut novel, has a troubled family history - his father’s in jail for bur...

“I’m Bravo.  And I don’t have a dick.” I was pretty much pre-disposed to enjoy Giorgio Faletti’s The Pimp ( A Pimp’s Notes in ...

The Gilded Edge is Danny Miller’s second novel featuring Metropolitan Police detective Vince Treadwell but the first I’ve read.  In trut...

Mission to Paris is another classic Alan Furst spy novel.  Furst specialises in the immediate pre-war period in Europe, a world of shado...

I have a longstanding fascination with the Paris peace conference that took place during 1919 following the end of the First World War, ...

If you are a more than occasional reader of this blog, you will be well aware that I am a big fan of Donna Leon and her Commissario Brun...

If I were a betting man (which I’m not, largely because I’m too much of a coward to risk lots of money on something I have no control o...

For the benefit of those of you outside the UK, January saw two new adaptations of favourite authors of mine hit the nation’s TV screen...

“There are maybe thirty people on earth who know I exist, and I am not sure if all of them believe I’m still alive.” I’m not an e...