Category: Books

Temeraire is set during the Napoleaonic wars. Nelson is battling against the French and he’s got Villeneuve and his fleet on the run. The Battle of Trafalgar has not yet been fought. Against this background we meet Captain Laurence who’s ship has just captured a French “prize”. On board is a large egg which he…

A few weeks ago, I read what turned out to be the second in the Martin Beck series of novels by Sjöwall and Wahlöö. The first is Roseanna, in which we’re introduced to the detective and his colleagues. This book, in a newly published imprint, is introduced by Henning Mankell, a long time favourite of…

The fourth in the Erast Fandorin sequence sees our Holmesian Russian hero returning from the far east with a Japanese colleague in tow. In Moscow he’s given the job Collegiate Assessor, but no sooner than that has happened than his old friend General Sobolev is found dead in vaguely suspicious circumstances. At first, we are…

I think that Black Juice, a collection of short stories with a vaguely fantasy/science fiction feel to them, might count as kids fiction, since the protagonists in most of the tales are children – well apart from the one that’s an elephant. I found the overall collection a bit hit and miss. It opens quite…

With a never-ending stream of Nordic authors currently assailing UK crime fiction publishers, it probably wasn’t going to take long for someone to dust off the novels of Swedish husband and wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Together they wrote a series of detective novels based around the character of Martin Beck. Some while…

Electric Universe is this year’s winner of the Aventis Prize for Science Books. David Bodanis has written a great little book that skillfully and simply tells us the story of electricity. Although much, but by no means all, of what he relates in his book had been taught to me in A Level physics lessons…

Minette Walters is a crime author I’d not previously read. A few of her books have been adapted for TV – actually probably more have than haven’t – and I’ve watched a couple of those, but the review of this from it’s hardback appearance caught my eye a few months back, so I snapped it…

I was intrigued by this book sometime last year when I heard Michael Connelly plugging the hardback edition on the Simon Mayo book panel. A regular Thursday afternoon fixture, authors face the potentially tricky prospect of sitting in the studio while a couple of invited guests and some listeners critique their books practically to their…

Another day, another Scandinavean detective. I’m quite probably addicted to them now. Ake Edwardson is a popular Swedish crime writer who’s written a series of novels featuring Inspector Winter. This is the first of them to be translated into English although it’s clearly not the first in the actual series. It always perplexes me a…

You may well have heard of the Long Tail by now. It’s all based on an article that this book’s author, and Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first published in said magazine a couple of years ago. Simply put, it’s all about the value of the “long tail” of sales beyond the bestsellers, with plenty…

Amazon is running a video commercial on their site for a book called The Death Artist. You can currently see the ad somewhere around the crime book section (I suspect that like other ads, it’s only shown a certain number of times, so it’s tricky to link directly to). Anyhow, the reason that this is…

I picked up this novel by Italian crime writer Andrea Camilleri purely on the basis of it being 99p in Waterstones. It just goes to show that such promotions can work, as undoubtedly be buying more in the series about Sicilian police inspector Montalbano. In this first novel in the series Montalbano is investigating the…