Murders for February

Well, this is not The Times, which on 2 January offered five picks, one on the killings of multiple infants, another on the repeated disappearance of girls, and a third on a serial killer who feeds human eyes to ravens and has an “expurgation room” in the basement. These, nevertheless, readers will be delighted to hear, are not the sole alternatives to what Mark Sanderson called “the plague of tiredness that infects so much crime fiction today”. So, if you want perverts turn to the Times. Otherwise keep going.

Indeed, one of the great pleasures of writing this for The Critic is that I am under no obligation to focus simply on recent publications, however limited or, more commonly, transient in interest. I can in fact say no to the publicists pushing their books as “the best ever” (well, since their last offensive), and be amused to see their offerings turn up in reviews elsewhere.

From that perspective, having praised Simon Lewis’s most recent book last month, I turned back to Bad Traffic (Sort of Books, 2008, £7.99), an introduction to Inspector Jian, “This Man Have Come from China to find his daughter who have some trouble. He does not speak English”; his lively but misled daughter, Wei Wei; the noble and overly trusting illegal migrant, Ding Ming; and the villains, Chinese and British, who act as parasites notably in human trafficking. A fast-paced thriller, violent and, thanks to the culture-clash and to Jian’s driven amorality, amusing, in which the puzzle is to work out links, and the page-turner the adrenalin Lewis skilfully generates. Has stood the test of time so far. One very much to read and enjoy.

It is also good to turn back to consider the well-conceived and written novels of Trevor Wood. His first, The Man On The Street (Quercus, 2019, £10.99), won the 2020 CWA New Blood Dagger. This is a 2012-set Newcastle story told from the perspective of Jimmy, a Falklands veteran, who is a down-and-out. This brings in privation, drugs, police brutality, and a skilful account of deceit, danger and cruelty. Having myself lived in Newcastle for 14 years, I thought this city very well-captured. Certainly deserves attention. So also, for example, with DCI Jack Parker, the protagonist of Wood’s The Silent Killer (Quercus, 2024, £9.99), who is affected by an early-onset dementia that he is trying to keep secret. The foreground is the killing of his DS, and the wish to search for justice in the face of villains and a hard world. Newcastle again, and a very good read.

Bernard O’Keeffe’s latest D.I. Garibaldi, Barnes-set tale The Carousel of Time (Muswell Press, 2026, £10.99), is, like his first, The Final Round (2021), a reunion-set story, with, this time, a group who were at school together meeting at the Barnes Fair, only for one to be killed. There is a lot of criticism of Barnes’s life, as in: “she exuded the kind of self-confidence Garibaldi had come to expect from a certain kind of Barnes woman – a smug, and highly irritating, sense of entitlement…. Cosy on the surface but dig down a little and you find all kinds of shit.” Some brilliant misdirection in a well-written tale. A very good series.

Lauren Schott’s Very Slowly. All At Once (HQ, 2025, £16.99) reminds me of the film American Beauty (1999) in its account of dystopia, its black comedy and its invitation to think anew. Set in Cleveland, Ohio, this is an account of Hailey Evans, a successful divorce lawyer, and her academic husband, Mack, who, with two young children, have moved to an expensive house close to Lake Erie. But both are in trouble, Hailey from an ungrateful and non-paying client, a real grotesque of entitlement, and Mack from an unreasonable accusation of harassment. On top of that come care costs for Mack’s mother. Overspent, they accept anonymous cheques for $47,000 and then spend them. As they totter in a world of callous suburban cruelty and the conformity of expectations, demands arrive with threats and menace, demands that they repay the money by first committing arson and then murder. An excellent novel that gathers pace with great success.

So also with Tracy Maton’s debut novel, The Artful Anna Harris (Viper, 2006, £16.99), an extremely well-written account of the background to murder in which survival strategies and blending in become taking on identities and fighting off others. And so to murder. An account of village life that is very different to that which is usually offered. Well worth reading. 

Another village is the setting for Kate Ellis’ Killing in the Shadows (Constable, 2026, £22), with the murder of television celebrity Lexi Verity in her swimming pool and, separately, the haunting legacy of a murder in nearby York throwing up a wave of possible villains that provides Ellis with the challenge of marshalling her plot. She does so with great success in a clearly-written book that reads well. Ellis is my detective novel of the month, with the emphasis on detection, and Maton mine with the emphasis on novel.

I have never favoured reading about crimes against or by children, but for those who accept such works, it is worth reading Catriona Ward’s dystopian Nowhere Burning (Viper, 2026, £16.99) and Carmel Harrington’s The Nowhere Girls (Headline Review, 2026, £22).

Often, professors of creative writing are hopeless stylists (just as chairs of teaching committees rarely teach much or with skill), but Louise Welsh, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, writes with ability and welcome concision in her latest Rilke novel, The Cut Up (Canongate, 2026, £16.99). Set in contemporary Glasgow, which is presented without illusion, nostalgia or excessive dramatization (the Taggart body bag count), this is a plot in which everyone is on the edge, living in compromise, not least because key characters are homosexuals. The launch is quick, with a dubious auction-house customer killed outside, and the attempt thereafter to clear things up leading to fresh violence, chaos and expediencies. Ably plotted, well-written, and good to see Glasgow not from the perspective of police or villains.

Glasgow again is the setting for Eva Macrae’s A Death in Glasgow (Century, 2026, £16.99), the protagonist this time is Sergeant May Mackay who probes the suicide of a young woman at Glasgow Central Sation, only to discover a seedy world of exploitation, brutality, drugs, prostitution, and much else alongside the energy of the city. The plot is good with effective twists all introduced at the right moment, and an accelerating sense of menace. The writing is simple, not allusive, poetic or menacing, but not necessarily the worse for that although at times it might feel pedestrian: “The steep descent form employed to unemployed, from homeowner to homeless was all too easy, as May had seen countless times before. She wasn’t going to let it happen if she could prevent it. As Dimple had said that first morning when May had asked her why she was investigating Holly’s death, a moment’s kindness had the power to change lives.” Not exactly writing that fizzes.

Set in 1924, Faith Martin’s Murder by Candlelight (HQ, 2024, £9.99), the first of her Arbie and Val stories, offers amateur sleuths and a locked room murder. Cyanide, inheritance, self-conscious references to Christie, a serious plot that pulls aside the archness. Light and pleasant.

I had less good fortune with several other arrivals, although some of the writing in Chris MacDonald’s The Actor (Michael Joseph, 2024, £16.9) was nicely wry, as in searching among Essex psychiatric units: “I became convinced someone who thought they were Medea of Colchis would have gone to Colchester, but it was in the less aptly named Basildon we got the breakthrough”: A “that” missing. An historic-crimes-haunts-one novel.

Rob Parker’s Forbidden Waters (Raven, 226, £18.99) has a fine grasp of the Norfolk Broads, where a body appears from the waters early on. There is a somewhat conventional protagonist, Cam Killick, who is ‘wedged in the long-term grip of post-traumatic stress disorder … from his time with the Special Boat Service”. Too many of the descriptions are very conventional as in “jangling nerves” or “forged arrow-straight south” or “Rogers’ eyebrows arched”. Incidentally, arrows looked at in three dimensions do not go ‘straight”, although the false description may be intended to handicap book-taught killers. Nevertheless, an easy read that will satisfy many.

Others served up include C.E. Hulse’s Vivian Dies Again (Viper, 2026, £16,99), a time-looper, Howard Linskey’s Muse of Fire (Canelo, 2026, £18.99), a clunkily-written but ably-plotted Shakespeare-as-detective novel, and Leodora Darlington’s The Exes (Michael Joseph, 2026, £18.99), another journey amidst recurrences among the metropolitan affluent, with too much of ‘a precarious intimacy, walking the tightrope of all the things we’re not saying’. Linskey has a very good start, with the murder of one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting and the politics and personalities of that plot works very well. However, there is too much of the didactic approach as in:

… the Babbington plot provided Cecil’s father, William, with the evidence he needed to condemn Mary Queen of Scots as a traitor. Even an unwilling Queen Elizabeth had to accept she must die then, reluctantly signing the death warrant of her own cousin, but it was William Cecil who actually managed her execution.

Turning to the box, we have the new version of Lynley (BBC). This is different to the 2001-8 series in tone and photography. Filmed in Ireland, but set in East Anglia, the series has Leo Suter as Lynley and Sofia Barclay as Havers, and, so far, is varied and well-scripted, although I doubt that a DI would show parents the corpse of their child in the morgue while his shirt was unbuttoned. Always watch for the unexpected killer.

Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) is the basis for the Netflix three-parter just released. The reviews have been mixed, being particularly critical in the Guardian, but it is very hard to get a 1920s’ thriller involving a secret society right, and Christie herself had a somewhat unsteady passage in this respect. The Suchet Poirot series essentially ignored this urgent aspect of her work in her The Big Four (1927). Possibly it would be better to accept that period views are best understood rather than being treated as anachronistic and/or embarrassing. Anyway well acted and shot, and less addled than some recent Christie adaptations.