New Reviews: Cutler, Forrester, Macbain, Morgan, Nesser, Preston, Rankin, Von Schirach, Welsh

Here are 9 new reviews which have been added to the Euro Crime website today:

Lizzie Hayes reviews Judith Cutler's Burying the Past, the fourth in the Chief Superintendent Fran Harman series;

Terry Halligan reviews James Forrester's second in the Clarenceaux, Elizabethan series, The Roots of Betrayal;

Amanda Gillies reviews the first in the Pliny the Younger series by Bruce Macbain: Roman Games which now has a UK release;

Fidelis Morgan, author of a well-loved historical series, switches to modern day with The Murder Quadrille, reviewed here by Susan White;

Lynn Harvey reviews the paperback release of Hakan Nesser's Hour of the Wolf, tr. Laurie Thompson, the seventh in the Van Veeteren (and team) series;

JF reviews Australian author Luke Preston's Dark City Blue an ebook from Momentum, the digital-only wing of Pan Macmillan Australia;

Maxine Clarke reviews Ian Rankin's Standing in Another Man's Grave which sees the return of Rebus;

Earlier this week I reviewed on the blog, Ferdinand von Schirach's The Collini Case, tr. Anthea Bell

and Michelle Peckham reviews Louise Welsh's: The Girl on the Stairs set in Berlin.

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: Creed, Forrester, Franklin, Neville, Nickson, Sjowall & Wahloo

Two competitions for August and one is open internationally:
Win one of three sets of Lockdown and Deadlock by Sean Black (Worldwide)
Win one of five copies of Inspector Cataldo's Criminal Summer by Luigi Guicciardi, tr Iain Halliday (UK & Europe)

Here are this week's reviews, which this week include several historical novels:

I review Adam Creed's second outing for DI Staffe, Willing Flesh set in a seedy, modern-day London;

Terry Halligan goes back to the Elizabethan era for James Forrester's debut novel Sacred Treason;

Norman Price travels back to Henry II's time when he reviews Ariana Franklin's, fourth Adelia Aguilar outing, The Assassin's Prayer in which the leads traipse off to Sicily;

Back in modern-day, Laura Root reviews Collusion, Stuart Neville's follow-up to the very well-received The Twelve (apa The Ghosts of Belfast);

Michelle Peckham travels back to eighteenth century Leeds in The Broken Token by Chris Nickson

and Maxine Clarke reviews the penultimate title in the classic Martin Beck series by Sjowall and Wahloo, Cop Killer, tr. Thomas Teal.

Previous reviews can be found in the review archive and forthcoming titles can be found by author or date, here.

Tudor Crime II

I posted back in March about the rise of Tudor-era crime fiction and here are a couple more titles to add to the wish list, if you like that sort of thing, both published this month:

The Courier's Tale by Peter Walker
Reginald Pole, diplomat, friend of scholars, cardinals and artists, and cousin to Henry VIII, is first seen stealing into the Medici chapel at dead of night to catch a forbidden glimpse of Michelangelo's masterpiece of funerary sculpture. But as the king's representative in Italy, and an admired scholar himself, it falls to him to make the case for Henry's divorce from Katherine of Aragon. And it falls to the hapless Michael Throckmorton to become Thomas Cromwell's courier to Pole in Rome. In Peter Walker's imaginative novel, in which two worlds, increasingly opposed, are beautifully evoked, we see these famous events that saw England become a Protestant nation through the eyes of the luckless courier. The dubious privilege of being courier to Cromwell and the King, makes of Michael Throckmorton's life a tragicomedy of endless journeys back and forth between England and Italy. And even though in time he becomes the loyal friend of the disgraced Pole, who can never risk returning to England while Henry lives, this is no compensation for the childhood love who appears to have been lost along the way.

Sacred Treason by James Forrester
London, 1563. England is a troubled nation. Catholic plots against the young Queen Elizabeth spring up all over the country. The herald William Harley - known to everyone as Clarenceux - receives a book from his friend and fellow Catholic, Henry Machyn. But Machyn is in fear of his life... What secret can the book hold? And then Clarenceux is visited by the State in the form of Francis Walsingham and his ruthless enforcers, who will stop at nothing to gain possession of it. If Clarenceux and his family are to survive the terror of the state, he must solve the clues contained in the book to unlock its dangerous secrets before it's too late. And when he does, he realises that it's not only his life and the lives of those most dear to him that are at stake...