New Reviews: Ceder, Dunn, Frank, Johnston, Kasasian, Kelly, Kernick, Mogford, Radmann

Here are nine reviews which have been added to the Euro Crime website today, two have appeared on the blog over the last three weeks and seven are completely new.

The competition closes tonight at 11.59pm: win an iBook of Invisible by Christine Poulson (no geographical restrictions).


NB. You can keep up to date with Euro Crime by following the blog and/or liking the Euro Crime Facebook page.

New Reviews

Lynn Harvey reviews Camilla Ceder's Babylon tr. Marlaine Delargy, the sequel to Frozen Moment, set in Gothenburg;

Amanda Gillies reviews Slingshot by Matthew Dunn, the third in his "Spycatcher" series;

Geoff Jones reviews Matthew Frank's debut novel, If I Should Die which introduces ex-Army turned trainee police officer Joe Stark;

Terry Halligan reviews Paul Johnston's The White Sea, the seventh in the Greece-based Alex Mavros series;

I review The Curse of the House of Foskett by M R C Kasasian, the sequel to the excellent The Mangle Street Murders;


Michelle Peckham reviews Erin Kelly's The Ties That Bind;

Terry also reviews Simon Kernick's Stay Alive which is now out in paperback;

Rich Westwood reviews Thomas Mogford's Hollow Mountain, the latest in the Spike Sanguinetti series based on and around Gibraltar

and Lynn also reviews The Crack by Christopher Radmann set in 1970s South Africa.





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: Slingshot by Matthew Dunn

Slingshot by Matthew Dunn, March 2014, 416 pages, Orion, ISBN: 1409144003

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

This book grows on you, so if you don’t think it is your thing when you start to read, give it time and you won't regret it. The story starts off slow but then picks up pace until at the end it is at fever pitch. As a result, it took me far longer to read SLINGSHOT than it deserved but by half-way it had me hooked. Well written and by a former MI6 spy officer, SLINGSHOT is a classic spy thriller, full of authenticity and with the perfect balance between scene description and action. There is also an extremely useful glossary at the back of the book that not only gives the full meaning of specific terms and acronyms but also explains a little bit about them.

A Russian defector has a deadly secret, drawn up by top-level Russian and US army generals twenty years ago, and wants to tell the world what he knows. The secret is so dangerous that the paper the man carries, as well as the man himself, is wanted by just about everyone – MI6, CIA not to mention a Russian spy team, SVR. Cochrane is heading up an MI6/CIA team and they are well positioned to intercept the defector. However, he and his secret are stolen from under their noses just as he gets within their grasp. Cochrane becomes involved in a deadly game of hide-and-seek as he attempts to track down the defector and his kidnappers before the secret falls into the wrong hands.

If you like highly charged, well written and authentic spy fiction then you are going to love this book! SLINGSHOT is the third in a series that features the highly skilled master spy Will Cochraine. If, like me, this is your first look at a book by this author, then it is probably going to be well worth you reading his earlier books as well!

Highly Recommended.

Amanda Gillies, June 2014.

Government Crime

A couple of publishing deals have been announced for former Government employees. Today in The Bookseller:

The Interceptor by Cameron Addicott will be published in paperback on 22nd July, priced £7.99. Addicott was an investigator for HM Customs and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) for 20 years. Addicott worked with fellow undercover Customs officers in the Alpha Projects unit. He intercepted and decoded phone calls, gaining a glimpse into the private lives of notorious criminals

...."It's like a real life version of ‘The Wire' but he's talking about a 90 mile an hour chase around the M25 rather than driving through Los Angeles. Drug busts are taking place in Little Chef rather than somewhere like Boston. The fact that it's written about somewhere close to home makes it exciting."

and on Book2Book:

Rowland White, Publisher at Orion, has acquired debut thriller writer ­– and ex-MI6 field operative ­– Matthew Dunn from agent Luigi Bonomi at LBA in a substantial pre-emptive deal for three books. All three will feature Dunn's charismatic British MI6 operator Will Cochrane.

The first thriller, titled Megiddo after the codename of the book's villain, has the British spy leading a joint US/UK team hunting an Iranian terrorist mastermind before he's able to launch a devastating attack in the West. The pursuit turns out to be a great deal more personal and desperate than Cochrane could ever have imagined.

The books will be published on White's new imprint, launched next year.