New Reviews: Bonner, Chase, Colfer, Forsyth, Jones, McIntosh, Masterton, Sundstol, Zouroudi

This week's set of reviews, added to Euro Crime today, is a mixture of new reviews and a catch-up of those posted directly on the blog in the last two weeks, so you may have read some of them before if you're a regular :).

Useful Information:
I've now set up the 2014 International Dagger Eligibles post so you can see which 76 (so far) titles are  published in the qualifying period.
There is a similar post for the 2014 Petrona Award Eligibles.
There is also a Euro Crime page on Facebook which you can like and will keep you up to date with the blog (plus occasional extras).

New Reviews

It's been a 9 year gap between books but Hilary Bonner is back with The Cruellest Game reviewed here by Susan White;

Michelle Peckham reviews  Wicked Game, the first in a new series by E V Seymour writing as Adam Chase, starring assassin for hire, Hex;

Lynn Harvey reviews Eoin Colfer's Screwed, the sequel to Plugged, which is now out in paperback;

Terry Halligan reviews Frederick Forsyth's The Kill List;

Geoff Jones reviews J Sydney Jones's Ruin Value set in Nuremberg at the time of the trials;

Terry also reviews The Fourth Crow by Pat McIntosh, the ninth in the Gil Cunningham series set in medieval Glasgow;

Rich Westwood reviews Graham Masterton's Broken Angels, the second in the Superintendent Katie Maguire series set in Cork, and warns it has some strong content;

Laura Root reviews Vidar Sundstol's The Land of Dreams, tr. Tiina Nunnally, the first part in his "Minnesota Trilogy"


and Amanda Gillies reviews the seventh in the Greek Hermes Diaktoros series from Anne Zouroudi: The Feast of Artemis.




Previous reviews can be found in the review archive.

Forthcoming titles can be found by author or date or by category, here along with releases by year.

Review: The Feast of Artemis by Anne Zouroudi

The Feast of Artemis by Anne Zouroudi, June 2013, 288 pages, Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN: 140883751X

Reviewed by Amanda Gillies.
(Read more of Amanda's reviews for Euro Crime here.)

THE FEAST OF ARTEMIS is the seventh book in Anne Zouroudi’s very lovely series featuring her mysterious, overweight detective Hermes Diaktoros and his pristine white tennis shoes. As with her earlier books, Hermes appears in the right place at the right time and gets to the very heart of the matter that is troubling the community with relative ease. Again he is affectionately referred to as “the fat man” throughout the book but this is the first time we see him feeling uncomfortable about his size – and he has to make a trip to the tailors to have his trousers taken out a bit, much to his disappointment. One of the many likeable things about our Greek hero is that he never says precisely who his employer is. He says that he works for “A Higher Authority”, not the police, and doesn’t necessarily see arrest and punishment as appropriate in every case he deals with. I hope we are never told more about this, as I love the air of mystery about him.

In this particular tale, Hermes bumps into his wayward brother and goes to a Greek town called Dendra in time for a feast at the end of the olive harvest. Instead of the good cheer he is expecting, he witnesses a bad accident as a young man falls whilst leaping over a bonfire in a contest. He lands in the fire and ends up badly burned. Very disturbed by what he has seen, and not sure it was an entirely innocent accident, Hermes books into a hotel, to stay longer than he had intended, and starts to investigate. He soon discovers a long-running bitter feud between two neighbouring olive growers. The feud has been the cause of much bad feeling between the families and has resulted in the loss of crops, ruined feasts and injuries over the years. Things come to a head when the patriarch of one of these families dies and it looks as if it is in retribution for the “accident” in the bonfire contest. Hermes continues to dig and the truth that he discovers is enough to shock everyone – including the reader.

Anne Zouroudi is a very gifted writer and her penmanship makes Dendra and its problems seem very real. I love her descriptions of Hermes, especially when he bends down to clean his white shoes, and was saddened by his frustration at his increasing girth. I hope he is back to his usual cheery self in his next outing and am already looking forward to reading it.

Very Highly Recommended.

Amanda Gillies, October 2013.

New Reviews: Carrisi, Durbridge, McCreet, Mackay, Sharp, Zouroudi

Here are six new reviews and a reminder of the competition:
Win the 'Nikki Heat' novels by Richard Castle (UK only).

Here are the new reviews:

Lizzie Hayes reviews Donato Carrisi's follow-up to The Whisperer - The Lost Girls of Rome tr. Howard Curtis;

Geoff Jones reviews Francis Durbridge's A Game of Murder which is now available as an ebook;

Amanda Gillies reviews James McCreet's third Newsome novel, The Thieves' Labyrinth set in Victorian London;

Susan White reviews Malcolm Mackay's debut, The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter;

Terry Halligan reviews the paperback release of Zoe Sharp's Fifth Victim

and Lynn Harvey reviews Anne Zouroudi's The Whispers of Nemesis which is also now out in paperback.

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive.

Forthcoming titles can be found by author or date or by category, here along with releases by year.

New Reviews: Cain, Cleeves, Cregan, Eriksson, Lewis, Morris, Pearson, Roslund-Hellstrom, Zouroudi

The final set of reviews for 2011 will be uploaded next weekend. There are 9 new reviews this week (to make up for missing last week). Look out for some forthcoming blog posts from the Euro Crime review team on their new discoveries this year.

Here are this week's new reviews:

Terry Halligan reviews the fifth (and best so far he thinks) in Tom Cain's Carver series - Carver;

Lynn Harvey reviews her first but the fourth "Vera" book in Ann Cleeves's (now televised) series - Silent Voices which is now out in paperback;

Laura Root reviews the second of Sean Cregan's Newport set series, The Razor Gate which is an example of "futurist noir writing";

I review the latest title that has been made available in English in Kjell Eriksson's Ann Lindell series, The Hand That Trembles, tr. Ebba Segerberg;

Susan White reviews the second in Jonathan Lewis's DCI Bale and dog-handler Kate Baker series, Into Dust;

Geoff Jones reviews the fourth (and last I believe) of R N Morris's Porfiry Petrovich series, The Cleansing Flames;

Lynn Harvey also reviews the fourth in another series, Murder Club by Mark Pearson which features DI Jack Delaney and is set in London;

Maxine Clarke reviews Roslund-Hellstrom's Cell 8, tr. Kari Dickson

and Amanda Gillies reviews Anne Zouroudi's The Whispers of Nemesis, the fifth in the Hermes Diaktoros series.

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive.

Forthcoming titles can be found by author or date or by category, here and new titles by George Arion, James Becker, Nancy Bilyeau, Ken Bruen, Paul Grossman, Oliver Harris, James Henry, Antonio Hill, Hjorth-Rosenfeldt, Bogdan Hrib, Camilla Lackberg, Andy McDermott, Roger/R N Morris, Leif GW Persson, Sarah Pinborough, Oana Stoica-Mujea, Roland Vernon, Jason Webster, Kate Williams and Juli Zeh have been added to these pages this week.

Greece is the word

There're quite a few crime novels being published (or re-issued) this year set in Greece including Euro Crime's current competition prize, The Black Monastery by Stav Sherez (competition is open world-wide).

January saw the publication of Jeffrey Siger's Murder in Mykonos:

Synopsis: A young woman on holiday to Mykonos, the most famous of Greece's Aegean Cycladic islands, simply disappears off the face of the earth. And no one notices.

That is, until a body turns up on a pile of bones under the floor of a remote mountain church. Then the island's new police chief - the young, politically incorrect, former Athens homicide detective Andreas Kaldis - starts finding bodies, bones, and suspects almost everywhere he looks.

Teamed with the canny, nearly-retired local homicide chief, Andreas tries to find the killer before the media can destroy the island's fabled reputation with a barrage of world-wide attention on a mystery that's haunted Mykonos undetected for decades.

Just when it seems things can't get any worse, another young woman disappears and political niceties no longer matter. With the investigation now a rescue operation, Andreas finds himself plunging into ancient myths and forgotten island places, racing against a killer intent on claiming a new victim who is herself determined to outstep him.

Yesterday saw the re-issue by MIRA of the Alex Mavros trilogy by Paul Johnston. NB. The first book in the series has been retitled to Crying Blue Murder (formally A Deeper Shade of Blue).

Synopsis: Murder in paradise. American tourist Rosa Ozal has disappeared from an idyllic Greek island and investigator Alec Mavros is hired to trace her. Half-Greek, half-Scots, Mavros is in the perfect position to play the innocent holidaymaker.Mavros soon discovers there's more going on than meets the eye. Two young islanders have ended up in the nets of a local fishing boat; a British journalist has left the island without warning and the resident millionaire and museum owner seems to be very ill at ease. In a race to stop a terrible crime being repeated, Mavros must break through the whitewashed walls of silence to uncover the secrets and lies at the heart of this island paradise.


At the end of the month, Frances Lloyd's first crime novel, Nemesis of the Dead will be published by Robert Hale.

Synopsis: Ten holidaymakers are bound for Katastrophos, a tiny Greek Island steeped in superstition and ancient myth. Ten people whose lives are about to change forever, because one of them is planning a ruthless murder. Detective Inspector Jack Dawes of the Murder Squad is working undercover to prevent it, and takes his wife, Corrie, to the island, ostensibly on a belated honeymoon. Mayhem ensues when a storm destroys the island's primitive communications, cutting it off from civilisation. This, and a bizarre island ritual, provide the murderer with a perfect opportunity - but fate intervenes. Finally, time runs out and a deadly battle of wits develops between policeman and killer. It is Nemesis, dark-faced goddess of justice, who ends it with her powerful spirit of vengeance and retribution. Of the ten who arrive on Katastrophos, not all will return home.

July sees the third in the Greek Detective series from Anne Zouroudi, The Doctor of Thessaly.

Synopsis: A jilted bride weeps on an empty beach, a local doctor is attacked in an isolated churchyard - trouble’s come at a bad time to the backwatered village of Morfi, just as the community is making headlines with a visit from a national government minister. Fortunately, where there’s trouble there’s Hermes Diaktoros, the mysterious fat man whose tennis shoes are always pristine and whose investigative methods are always unorthodox.

In the latest instalment of the Mysteries of the Greek Detective, Hermes must solve a brutal crime that the victim does not seem to want solving, thwart the petty machinations of the town’s ex-mayor and his cronies and pour oil on the troubled waters of a sisters’ relationship.

And on 27 August, Arcadia is due to release Basic Shareholder by Petros Markaris the third in the Haritos series.

Synopsis: It's a very hot June when Commissar Kostas Haritos suddenly receives terrible news: the boat on which his daughter Katerina was travelling has been sequestrated by a terrorist commando. Moreover, his has to investigate the murder of an advertising model. Commissor Haritos must now keep cool to battle on two different fronts - the world of advertising and that of international terrorism.

Do let me know of any more new crime novels set in Greece, via the comments.

The Messenger of Athens

Whenever I read of mysteries set in Greece, I always think of Mary Stewart's novels. Here's one that definitely looks worth seeking out from Bloomsbury next month:

Synopsis from Bloomsbury website: Captain Corelli's Mandolin meets Hercule Poirot in this evocative mystery set on a small Greek island.

Idyllic but remote, the Greek island of Thiminos seems untouched and untroubled by the modern world. When the battered body of a young woman is discovered at the foot of a cliff, the local police — governed more by archaic rules of honour than by the law — are quick to close the case, dismissing the death as an accident. Then a stranger arrives, uninvited, from Athens, announcing his intention to look into the crime he believes has been committed.

The stranger’s methods of investigation are unorthodox, and his message to the islanders is plain — tell the truth or face the consequences. Before long, he’s uncovering a tale of passion, corruption and murder. But the stranger brings his own mystery into the web of dark secrets and lies. Who has sent him to Thiminos, and on whose authority is he acting? And how does he know of dramas played out decades ago?

Rich in images of Greece’s beautiful islands and evoking a life of which few outsiders know, this wonderful novel leads the reader into a world where the myths of the past are not forgotten and forbidden passion still has dangerous consequences.