New Reviews: James, Link, Persson, Russell, Ryan, Shepherd, Spedding, Steinhauer, Varesi

During April you can enter a competition to win a copy of Julia Crouch's Every Vow You Break. There are no geographical restrictions.

Answer the question and fill in the form here.

Here are this week's reviews of which there are 9 again this week as I'm taking next weekend off. There are also plenty of updates to the new releases pages (see below):

Susan White reviews Dan James's (aka Dan Waddell's) Unsinkable set on the Titanic;

Maxine Clarke reviews Charlotte Link's The Other Child, tr. Stefan Tobler set in Scarborough;

Laura Root reviews Leif GW Persson's Another Time, Another Life tr. Paul Norlen, the second in the "Story of a Crime" trilogy;

Amanda Gillies reviews the paperback release of Craig Russell's A Fear of Dark Water which is the latest in the Jan Fabel series;

Rich Westwood reviews William Ryan's The Holy Thief, the first in his Captain Alexei Dmitriyevich Korolev series, set in 1936;

Terry Halligan reviews Lloyd Shepherd's debut, a historical crime novel - The English Monster, calling it "superb";

Geoff Jones reviews Sally Spedding's creepy thriller Cold Remains;

Lynn Harvey reviews Olen Steinhauer's "gripping" globe-trotting spy thriller An American Spy

and Michelle Peckham reviews Valerio Varesi follow-up to his International Dagger short-listed River of Shadows, The Dark Valley tr. Joseph Farrell.

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. Titles by Elizabeth Bailey, M C Beaton, C C Benison, Rhys Bowen, Audrey Braun, Alison Bruce, Tania Carver, Kimberley Chambers, Lee Child, Sam Christer, Elizabeth J Duncan, Carola Dunn, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Charles Finch, Friis & Kaaberbol, Frances Fyfield, Eliza Graham, Susanna Gregory, Helene Gremillon, Penny Hancock, Anne Holt, Will Jordan, Ali Knight, Stephen Leather, M L Longworth, G M Malliet, Edward Marston, Peter May, Andy McNab, Fergus McNeill, Regina O’Melveny, Andrea Penrose, Anne Perry, Ann Purser, Rob Ryan, Lloyd Shepherd, A K Shevchenko, Eva Maria Staal, Nick Stone, Peter Tickler, Simon Tolkien, Lee Weeks, Jeri Westerson and Timothy Williams have been added to these pages this week.

Crime novels storm the ebook chart

I've received a tip-off from Dan Waddell, author of The Blood Detective that his book is top of the ebook chart (across all genres) beating the mighty Stephenie Meyer Twilight series. Three of the top five places are held by crime novels.

Looking at Waterstone's chart, the top 5 are as follows:

1. Dan Waddell - The Blood Detective
2. Mark Pearson - Hard Evidence
3. Stephenie Meyer - Twilight
4. Stephenie Meyer - New Moon
5. James Becker - The First Apostle

Steph at Wheredunnit has just bought a Sony e-reader and makes a plea for authors to try and get their books into e-format.

New (Whole Story) Audio Books for January

Whole Story Audio Books produce unabridged audio books on CD. A new feature of their website is that you can now upload your own review of an audio book.

The new Euro Crime titles for January are:

The Blood Detective by Dan Waddell
The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst Review

Publishing Deal

Joining Fiona Mountain in using a genealogist as sleuth:

Dan Waddell's THE BLOOD DETECTIVE, the first in a new mystery series featuring a genealogist as part of the investigative team of a series of murders in London, linked to a another set of murders committed more than 100 year prior, and BLOOD ATONEMENT, to Daniela Rapp at Minotaur.

According to the Guardian's mini profile - "Dan Waddell is the author of Who Do You Think You Are?, the book accompanying the BBC TV series of the same name. His crime novel about genealogy is to be published by Penguin."