I admit it: I’m a latecomer to this party. Michael Connelly is an enormously successful writer and his series about Los Angeles detective Harry Bosch is his best-known work. But it’s taken me nearly 30…

If Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about cardboard boxes, I would buy it. He could write about paint drying and make it interesting. I think every non-fiction author wants to grow up to be Malcolm…

Anyone who read through all the previous 11 Erast Fandorin novels by Boris Akunin has been waiting for this moment. Those novels chart the career of the master detective during the final decades of tsarist…

What a long title for such a short book! A short book – but not an easy one. Ahrens is clearly an academic and this heavily footnoted book, full of citations and references, actually tells…

The author of this brand new London-based thriller is honest enough to tell readers — in the Acknowledgments — of her debt to the book Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, which was made into…

Veteran author Lawrence Block has pulled together 17 of the best short story writers around today and given each one an Edward Hopper painting — that’s the idea. And it works exceptionally well, and not…

I just learned what ‘flash fiction’ is this week – and this is the first anthology of flash fiction that I’ve read. If this is any indication of how good very short stories can be,…

Flash fiction – stories of up to 1,000 words – is a new way of writing, and one that sounds quite appealing. Nancy Stohlman’s book is a short (as you’d expect) introduction to the subject….

Master story-teller Val McDermid here presents a dozen short stories all loosely connected to the Christmas holiday season. The first one features her well-known crime-fighting duo, Dr. Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan, but after…

As a fan of Mark Billingham’s crime novels featuring Tom Thorne, I had high hopes for this very short collection of three stories. I was not disappointed. All three are good, and at least one…