Stefan Tegenfalk’s Anger Mode gets off to a dramatic and shocking start, setting the pace for the next 430 pages. A judge coming home from a meeting brutally murders a taxi driver; previously of good demeanour, the judge seems like unlikely murderer. He’s admitting the crime, but can’t explain why he did it. Jaded (aren’t they always?) Detective Inspector Walter Grohn is charged with investigating the case, assigned to him is Jonna de Brugge, a rookie with the Swedish Investigations Unit. Two more equally horrific yet unexplainable murders follow, each one involving an employee of the Swedish judicial system.

Stefan Tegenfalk

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“Twenty-four hours ago, there were 269 people on board a train. Then we became 196. When two men died, we were 194. Now there were only 118 of us left. I thought about Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. I immediately tried to dismiss the thought. And Then There Were None is a story that doesn’t exactly have a happy ending.”

On her way to a medical appointment in Bergen, wheelchair bound former police officer Hanne Wilhelmsen is injured when the train she is travelling in is derailed during one of the worst blizzards in Norwegian history. She passed out when a piece of metal is impaled in her thigh and when she comes round finds herself with the other passengers in Finse 1222, a hotel so called because of its height above sea level.

Anne Holt

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Hapless 23 year old Taras Krohe is torn between two women; while that’s a situation most lads his age would envy, the women in Taras’s life are his mother, an eccentric but kind-hearted Romanian woman who can see not fault in her son, and Katya, his Russian ex-girlfriend who recently dumped him for a middle-aged pony-tailed aesthete. “Mami” isn’t too sympathetic to Taras’s plight; she says he’s better off without the Russian but you get the feeling that no girl would be good enough for her “pourchi”. Taras and his mother have lived for years in the same one and a half bedroomed central London flat; ten years after winning a scholarship to a good private school, Taras now works for a company in the city, the unfortunately named IBS while his mother scrapes a living taking in sewing. All pampered Taras has to worry about is how he’s going to win back Katya, – that is until Mrs. Bartlett dies and everything starts to unravel.

Penny Rudge

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Guido Guerrieri is a defence counsel lawyer living and working in the city of Bari on Italy’s Adriatic coast. He runs his own small but successful office with a team of loyal staff and has plenty of business to keep things ticking over nicely so when an old friend, a criminal lawyer, asks him to take on some work that he feels is not his area of expertise, Guido reluctantly listens to what he has to say. A young woman, a student from Bari but living in Rome has gone missing and, with little to work on, the police are about to shelve the case. Manuela’s family hope that Guerrieri can run a legal eye over the paperwork and spot any errors in the police handling of the investigation that might give them the leverage they need to get the case re-opened.

Gianrico Carofiglio

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Those moments in life when you feel a genuine connection with another person are few and far between; I’m talking about that moment you realise that there’s someone thinks the same as you, has the same values and ideas. Often it can come from books, for me it came through music and the person who made everything make sense was Andy Kershaw. As a teenager I did not follow the crowd; I had my own firm ideas about what made good music and those ideas were fueled by Kershaw’s Radio 1 broadcasts. You might say I grew up with Kershaw; as the content of his shows grew wider and his travels took him all over the world so too did my musical (and often political) horizons expand. Did I mention I also had an enormous crush on the man too?

“No Off Switch” is an autobiography I’ve been eagerly awaiting for a long time. The shelves of bookstores real and virtual teem with so-called celebrity autobiographies but few of them can offer the stories that Kershaw has to tell.

Andy Kershaw

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In Vladivostok a young woman recalls how, as a child, her grandmother secretly taught her to speak Estonian and told her about a place far removed from the cold, stark landscape of Siberia. The old lady made Zara promise never to tell her mother what they had talked about. Zara lived for these happy times with her grandmother; her mother was an undemonstrative woman who said very little. Zara dreams of one day being able to visit Estonia but for the meantime she follows up the suggestion of an old school-friend, temporarily back from Germany and clearly prospering, to move to Berlin to work in a hotel.

In rural Estonia elderly Aliide Truu spends her days canning fruit and vegetables and trying to ignore the harassment doled out by those of her neighbours who know about her Communist past.

Sofi Oksanen

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I’ve long been a fan of Marcus Brigstocke, finding his engaging delivery and intelligent material a breath of fresh air compared with his peers who seem currently to churn out endless clichéd observations on everyday life. “God Collar” is based on Brigstocke’s Edinburgh Festival show that I wasn’t able to get to so I was especially interested in reading this book.

The premise of “God Collar” is that Brigstocke wants to challenge his own atheism; he wants to believe in God but can’t find any compelling intellectual reasons so to do.

Marcus Brigstocke

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The blogosphere is well suited to the coverage of extended journeys or endurance achievements; there have, in recent years, been several excellent blogs written by cyclists (Tom Kevill-Davies’s The Hungry Cyclist and currently Alastair Humphreys’s terrifically entertaining blog covering his round the world cycle ride are just two of them) and a few of these have been the catalyst for full length books, proving not only the enduring popularity of cycling but just how much the public’s imagination i-s fired by tales of such feats of strength, daring and will to succeed.

Following on from “The Man Who Cycled the World”, an account of his record breaking trip of 2008, “The Man Who Cycled the Americas” is Mark Beaumont’s next major undertaking, cycling down the back bone of the continents of North and South America.

Mark Beaumont

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It is a skilled author that can create a central character who is quite deceitful and ruthless yet still manages to have the readers rooting for him. Miguel Lienza tries to fix the markets by selling things he doesn’t actually own and even obtains credit for his schemes secretly in his brother’s name, but those who would put an end to any chances of him being successful are so much more odious and underhand that you would forgive Miguel almost anything.

Miguel Lienza is a Portuguese Jew living in Amsterdam and trying to make a decent living on the stock market, at the time the most important trading floor in Europe. When the story opens Miguel is living in the basement of his brother Daniel’s house; he’s recently been down on his luck after losing a great deal of money trading in futures.

David Liss

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The wartime experiences of Channel Islanders have been a popular topic in fiction recently, most notably with the quirky Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Mary Horlock’s much darker The Book of Lies. There are a few that don’t make the grade however, among them Margaret Leroy’s The Collaborator.

The premise is hardly original but there are plenty of opportunities for the story to be developed; these chances are not taken and the novel suffers because of that. Vivienne de la Mare lives on Guernsey with her daughters – Blanche is fourteen and has just left school, Millie is much younger, still at the age for bedtime stories – and her aged and increasingly infirm mother-in-law, Evelyn; her husband, Eugene, is away fighting in the war.

Margaret Leroy

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Alarm bells should have sounded when I picked up Roger Boyes’s “To Prussia with Love” in a bookstore and I thought to myself “this sounds a bit contrived”. Call me naïve but when I browse the travel writing section in Waterstones, I tend to believe that those books are based on the writers’ real life experiences. Not so, it seems; at least not if this book is anything to go by.

It all starts off quite reasonably. Boyes is a British journalist living in Berlin and submitting stories about German life to his editor back in Blighty; rather fortuitously, just as he’s yearning to do something different with his life, his German interior designer girlfriend informs him that she’s inherited a country house, not, as he hopes in rural Italy, but in Brandenburg ( in eastern Germany to most people these days but, as luck would have it for those looking for a catchy title for a book, it used to go by the name of Prussia).

Roger Boyes

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