Review Roundup: Collard, Lagercrantz, Larsson, London, Nicol, Palliser, Reading

Here are nine reviews which have been added to the Euro Crime website today, all have appeared on the blog since last time*. With the exception of Stieg Larsson, all these authors are making their first appearance in the review section. The Stieg Larsson reviews are reposts of Maxine's original reviews but I have included the recent paperback cover.

*I am trialling a new approach at the moment in that all reviews will appear on the Euro Crime blog rather than being separate files as part of the Euro Crime website. I feel this will give the reviews more exposure and make them more findable in a search engine. The reviews will usually appear daily ie Monday to Friday, with occasional weekend postings, and roundups will appear on Sundays (or Bank Holidays!). The website will continue with bibliographies etc, the only change is that the reviews will be on the blog.

I'd be interested in any comments about this new approach.

You can keep up to date with Euro Crime by following the blog and/or liking the Euro Crime Facebook page and follow on Twitter, @eurocrime.

New Reviews

Terry Halligan reviews The Devil's Assassin by Paul Fraser Collard which features swashbuckling hero, Jack Lark;

The big release last week was David Lagercrantz's The Girl in the Spider's Web tr. George Goulding which is a sequel to Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. Review copies were released on the day of publication (UK) and Craig Sisterson kindly shared his review with Euro Crime the same day;

To remind ourselves of Stieg Larsson's original trilogy, I reposted Maxine's reviews of:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo;




The Girl Who Played With Fire

and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

which were all translated by Reg Keeland.

I continue my US cozy review feature with Criminal Confections by Colette London, which introduces a chocolate whisperer as amateur sleuth;

Going from cozy to noir, Lynn Harvey reviews Mike Nicol's Power Play, a Cape Town thriller inspired by Titus Andronicus;

Susan White reviews Charles Palliser's Victorian-styled The Unburied

and Ewa Sherman reviews Mario Reading's The Templar Inheritance.


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

Review: The Templar Inheritance by Mario Reading

The Templar Inheritance by Mario Reading, April 2015, 400 pages, Corvus, ISBN: 1782395334

Reviewed by Ewa Sherman.

1198: On the eve of his execution, Bavarian knight Johannes von Hartelius writes a last confession. His parchment conceals the location of the Copper Scroll, said to hold the secret of Solomon’s treasure, and the key to the building of a new Temple in the Holy Land. Years before that, Hartelius attempted to rescue the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, from drowning in a river during a battle. Although now a disgraced Templar knight, Hartelius is still a guardian of the Holy Lance and does not want the Scroll to be sold to finance a Fourth Crusade.

May 2013: In present-day Iraq, British photo-journalist John Hart survives a bomb explosion near a roadside café. He’s accompanied only by Nalan Abuna, his intelligent beautiful Kurdish Christian translator. They are shaken and terrified for different reasons but this event will lead them both to uncover shocking brutal stories, firmly set in the modern history of the area.

At the same time Hart also discovers the message hidden in his ancestor’s testament, placed in the Holy Spear. The famous treasure appears to be concealed in a hollow mountain, known as Solomon’s Prison. Hart, besotted with Nalan, becomes obsessed about getting to Iran where the mountain is located. With Nalan’s help he sets out to find the Copper Scroll, following in Hartelius’ footsteps and his epic battle hundreds of years ago, and his life changes dramatically. What follows is a dangerous adventure where past and present are interwoven, and the finale is utterly unexpected.

Similarities between Hart and Hartelius are plentiful. True love features strongly in their lives, along with the desire for truth and honesty. Both are heroes in a way…

There are vivid descriptions of torture and humiliation in the present times. I assume that style might have been chosen as a way to engage the reader more in the story, and its political context, and also to demonstrate the differences between two separate modern worlds: that of the quite naïve idealistic Hart and that of the disillusioned, older-than-her-years Nalan.

THE TEMPLAR INHERITANCE is an intense fast paced thriller in the 'Dan Brown' tradition. Mario Reading uses short chapters, each ending with a little cliff-hanger which encourages the reader to keep reading and wanting to know more; his preference is for firmly defined characters and the historical background that might not always be accurate but provides an interesting setting for this plot-driven novel.

Ewa Sherman, August 2015

Publishing Deal - Mario Reading

From BookBrunch:

To Ravi Mirchandani at Atlantic, WEL rights in THE NOSTRADAMUS PROPHECIES, a debut thriller by Mario Reading. Mirchandani believes it is "wonderfully readable, a page-turning commercial thriller which takes one not only into the world of Nostradamus but also - fascinatingly - into a gypsy world I knew nothing of. The book is a real departure for Atlantic." The agent is Oliver Munson of Blake Friedmann, and translation rights have been sold in 12 countries, including Germany, France, Spain, Brazil and Japan; more deals will be finalised in the wake of Frankfurt.