Detective fiction
Celebrating Miss Marple, expert on the wickedness of village life
The elderly spinster with a fine sense of evil was a creation Agatha Christie never tired of – unlike the ‘tiresome, egocentric’ Hercule Poirot
An ill wind in Buenos Aires: Portrait of Unknown Lady, by María Gainza, reviewed
How to review a book that pokes fun at critics? When the protagonist of María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown…
On the cowboy’s trail: Powder Smoke, by Andrew Martin, reviewed
Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is back. This is a York novel, or rather a Yorkshire crime novel. The LNER railway…
The death of cosy Christie
This is not Midsomer Murders. The new film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is thick with…
Finders Keepers is not so much a book as a shot-by-shot description of a future film
Finders Keepers is a sort-of sequel to last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King’s first foray into what he called ‘hard-boiled…
