Looking for the best of tried and trusted crime fiction authors and their latest releases this holiday period? Look no further, writes Kate Turkington. All these authors deliver superb writing, skilful plotting, and page-turning tension:
Rabbit Hole by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown Book Group)
A murderer is loose in a psychiatric ward. DC Alice Armitage is methodical, painstaking and fearless and hot on the heels of the killer. The problem is Alice is a patient, too.
The Nameless Ones by John Connelly (Hodder & Stoughton)
In Amsterdam, four people are butchered by Serbian war criminals in a canal house. The murderers believe they can escape to their homeland, but one of their victims is a confidante of an assassin named Louis. And Louis is going to hunt them down.
The Dark Flood by Deon Meyer (Jonathan Ball Publishers)
Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido are temporarily exiled to Stellenbosch and demoted from the elite Hawks unit after a sting goes bad. They believe it now will all be wine and roses as they sit out their punishment, but they haven’t reckoned on shady arms dealings, the Stellenbosch Mafia and a bunch of corrupt colleagues.
The Midnight Lock by Jeffery Deaver (HarperCollins)
The eagerly awaited new Lincoln Rhyme thriller sees our hero in a wheelchair racing against time to track down a vicious criminal who calls himself The Locksmith. Nobody in New York is safe, and the problem intensifies because Rhyme is under investigation himself.
The dark hours by Michael Connelly (Orion Books)
Detective Renée Ballard teams up with the legendary ex-LAPD detective Harry Bosch to catch a pair of violent predators who stalk the city streets at night and will kill to keep their identities secret.
Autopsy by Patricia Cornwall (HarperCollins)
Another favourite sleuth is back as world-renowned forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta investigates a shocking murder at the same time as a catastrophe occurs in a top-secret lab in outer space, endangering the scientists aboard. The two cases become intrinsically linked as Kay and husband Benton, a psychologist with the United States Secret Service, are drawn dangerously into the killer’s game.
Silverview by John le Carré (Penguin)
Published posthumously after Le Carré’s death in 2020, this is the mesmerising story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. Julian has ditched his life as a high-flying city financier and opened a little bookshop in a once famous, now rather shabby, English seaside town. All seems to be going well until he has a surprise visit from Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big old house on the edge of the town. Who is certainly not what he seems …
The Man with the Silver Saab by Alexander McCall Smith (Penguin Random House)
If you’re a fan of the gentle humour and sly, clever plots and characters of McCall Smith’s No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series set in Botswana, you’ll love his Swedish detective Ulf Varg and his beloved pooch Martin. Varg has been assigned to a sensitive case in Sweden’s esteemed art community where a respected dealer has either mistakenly identified a valuable work of art or is being framed for the mistake.
The Judge’s List by John Grisham (Hodder & Stoughton)
Lacy Stoltz is a world-weary investigator for Florida’s Board on Judicial Conduct, which, due to budget cuts, is in its death throes. But then she receives a complaint from a woman who believes her father, a respected professor of law, was murdered years ago and has been seeking justice ever since. Lucy unravels a string of cold case murders that all point to the perpetrator being a circuit judge sitting in Pensacola. This is classic Grisham for his millions of fans.