Favourite Discoveries 2013 (9)

Today's instalment of favourite discoveries of 2013 comes from Terry Halligan who reviews at Euro Crime.

Terry Halligan's Favourite Discoveries of 2013

My favourite TV discovery of 2013 was The Doctor Blake Mysteries featuring Craig McLachlan as Dr Lucien Blake and set in 1959 Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. The first 10 episodes were shown daily Monday to Friday on BBC One from the 25th November. The stories are really different and very interesting and Dr Blake in an unusual protagonist in being a single Doctor who has inherited his practice from his late father and also works as a Police Surgeon. There are hints that he has been separated from his wife and child since the start of the Second World War, when he was interned as a POW, in a Japanese Camp and when released discovered that his wife and child were missing. I recorded all of the episodes and I'm currently enjoying them and I hope that more episodes will be shown.

Back in early October, I was staying overnight in a hotel in Buffalo, New York State and I saw an episode of Blue Bloods for the first time and now back here I'm able to watch that also on Sky. It is about a family in New York who are either serving police officers, one is commissioner of police (Tom Sellick) and his two sons are a detective and a patrol man and a daughter is an assistant district attorney. It has some very good plot lines.

Looking over the list of books that I've read during 2012, two American authors that I read as alternates to Euro Crime books stand out. The first is the US author Steve Berry who specialises in mystery adventure stories and the first I read was THE TEMPLAR LEGACY which is a much better written and interesting book than THE DA VINCI CODE. The second US author I discovered is Stephen Cannell and and the book is titled THE TIN COLLECTORS. Cannell is a similar author to Michael Connelly and has written many books but has sadly now passed away.

For Euro Crime, an author that I was introduced to this year was Chris Collett who writes really thrilling mysteries with her Birmingham based detective DI Tom Mariner. I've only read one by her for review called BLOOD AND STONE and I would like to read more.


The second author I was introduced to in doing a review for Euro Crime was the Sussex-born author Terry Hayes who wrote one of the best books of the year with his debut one I AM PILGRIM, which has been described as incredibly strong, absorbing and a thrilling story and compared to the sensation that was caused in publishing when Frederick Forsyth's THE DAY OF THE JACKAL was first released. Hayes although born in England, has lived in Australia most of his life and trained as a journalist and worked as a screenwriter on the Mad Max series of movies before turning to writing.