I have noticed that spy fiction has increasingly eschewed the glossiness and glamour of Spooks and James Bond. Protagonists are often dysfunctional, awkward and just winging it.  In this vein, Richard Robinson has proved himself a worthy peer to Mick Herron with his espionage novel, Wild Flowers.  The story is set in a grimy, bleak…

Try to imagine, if you will, the TV series, Motherland as a foreboding psychological thriller, if it were directed by Hitchcock.  In None of This Is True, Lisa Jewell seems to have made this leap to produce a 48-hour binge-read.  Affluent podcaster Alix meets the downtrodden, dispirited Josie by chance in a restaurant.  The two…

There is something about the Australian landscape that inspires the imagination of readers.  Jane Harper has taken full advantage of this with her renowned Outback Noir novels, and Force of Nature is typically compulsive. At the heart of the story is a company teambuilding exercise gone dreadfully wrong. Five women are dispatched by their employer…

Crime fiction has proved so enduring, I think, because it reflects and comments on the world we recognise.  Our nuances, dualities and darker shades can take the form of compelling stories. That is one reason I used real-life events in my novel, Dark in Different Ways.  In February 2004, an Aboriginal teenager, TJ Hickey cycled…

1989 was once thought to be the end of history.  That year, the Berlin Wall fell, seemingly heralding the final triumph of Western liberalism.  We know now that the future was to prove rather different.  In an ambitious novel which uses 1989 as its title, Val McDermid revisits the period.  And it seems that the…

Ruth Ware is a popular crime writer because of her immense talent for drawing upon other authors, but with plenty of originality of her own.  Her previous work has echoed Agatha Christie and Daphne Du Maurier, and in the It Girl, she seems to be borrowing from Evelyn Waugh.  This story reads like Brideshead Revisited…

Reputation by Sarah Vaughan is not so much a political thriller as a thriller about a politician, and very engrossing it is too. Labour MP Emma Webster is on trial for the murder of a tabloid journalist after her campaign against revenge porn goes awry. Before her fall from grace, she is subjected to vicious…

Terms like ‘engrossing’ and ‘twisty’ are well worn, much hackneyed cliches.  They might also be regarded as markers of reliable quality in popular fiction.  If that is the case, B.A. Paris is the John Lewis of the page-turner. In the Prisoner, Paris tells the story of Amelie, an ingenue of the magazine world.  One night,…

I have taken a rare detour away from crime fiction with this book, which was given the big screen treatment. My Policeman by Bethan Roberts is set in 1950s Brighton. Even in this bohemian town, the grey conformity of the era pervades and seeps into every crevice. The story is told by Marion, a young…

In a Winter Grave, Peter May takes a genre-crossing risk; his police procedural combines elements of speculative science fiction with murky political thriller.  And it pays off, at least partly because of the bleak, atmospheric setting. Some thirty years in the future, a watery Scotland has become a frontier in a world ravaged by climate…