To paraphrase a quote from the Sharukh Khan film Don, ‘capturing the Don is not difficult, just impossible’. Oswald Pereira’s Newsroom Mafia explores a perennially fascinating terrain for fans of any kind of Mafia fiction. Pereira used to be a crime reporter in Mumbai before he retired, so he draws on his experiences to tell his story. Newsroom Mafia is the tale of the invincible Don Narayan Swamy and the struggle of ‘supercop’ Donald Fernandez to bring him to book. Narayan Swamy is based on the infamous godfather of Matunga Vardarajan Mudaliar and bears full testimony to the accuracy of the gangster films that crop up in Bollywood. Supporting him the Don has an entourage of journalists who run planted stories in exchange for lucrative remuneration and bottles of scotch.

Oswald Pereira

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The Galician tourist board really ought to be paying author Domingo Villar; his Leo Caldas novels set in the coastal city of Vigo are an enticing advertisement for the region. Imagine having long leisurely seafood lunches with a glass or two of wine; follow that with a quick paddle before going back to work or even a drive to a country vineyard. It’s almost worth dealing with the occasional mutilated corpse to lead that kind of life.

In Water-blue Eyes Caldas has to investigate the mysterious death of Luis Reigosa, a jazz musician. When the call comes through, Caldas is taking part in the weekly radio programme in which he tries to help members of the public with the questions they have for the police; although Leo finds that he has to pass most questions to his colleagues in the traffic section, his new found fame helps to open doors that might otherwise remain closed, a definite advantage when for a homicide detective.

Domingo Villar

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Four thirty something friends head to the Scottish island of Islay for a weekend of drug taking and whisky tasting. Friends since their university days, it was a mutual passion for whisky that brought them together but since then their lives have taken different paths. Brash, confident Roddy makes a fortune working in futures; Luke, the quiet one, is a musician who records film soundtracks; happily married Ethan works for the Royal Bank of Scotland; and Adam sells tacky souvenirs (and the odd bottle of Scotch) to tourists in a shop on the Royal Mile. For three of the lads this is a party weekend, a chance to let of steam and get steaming drunk, but one of them has an ulterior motive for the trip.

The weekend starts with a bang when their hire car is stopped by the local police, two hard-cases who don’t take kindly to the fellas from the city but let them off with a warning, or rather a threat.

Doug Johnstone

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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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The Bloody Meadow is the second novel by William Ryan to feature Aleksei Korolev, a detective Working for the Moscow Criminal Investigation Division in 1930s Russia. It follows on from The Holy Thief which was very well reviewed and shortlisted for a number of crime fiction awards. The Bloody Meadow could be read as a stand-alone novel, but I would recommend that a reader starts with The Holy Thief, as it provided some of Korolev’s background; he continues to grow as a character through the second novel.

The Bloody Meadow starts with Korolev in Moscow, but he is quickly dispatched to Odessa to investigate the death of a young woman on the scene of a film set.

William Ryan

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The Blackhouse is a novel by Peter May, set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, the first in a series (trilogy according to Amazon) featuring Detective Fin Macleod. Having escaped Lewis at the age of eighteen, Fin is packed off to the island from Edinburgh when a murder is committed in a similar manner to one he has been investigating in Edinburgh.

The story alternates between the present and flashbacks to Fin’s childhood and adolescence, with the present being in third person and the past in first person. Although packaged as a crime novel or thriller, the whodunnit isn’t really the focus of the novel. Fin never wanted to return to Lewis, and is frequently confronted by bad memories.

Peter May

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If you are a fan of Ruth Rendell’s work, you will have noticed that recently two unthinkable things have happened. Firstly, in The Monster in the Box, her much loved Chief Inspector Wexford retired, and then in her latest book The Vault, she has produced her first sequel in her catalogue of over seventy titles. The Vault is not just unusual in being a sequel, however, it also brings the two distinct strands of her work (the Wexford novel and the non-Wexford crime thriller) together into an intriguing and compelling whole.

Reg Wexford (plain old Mr these days) is taking some time to adjust to no longer being a member of Kingsmarkham’s police force. Making an effort to keep himself busy, he and his wife Dora start dividing their time between their country home and their daughter’s coach house in London.

Ruth Rendell

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You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, and you can’t taste it, hear it or touch it but it’s all around us and it has the potential to be deadly. In the right (or rather wrong) hands, it can kill and in the hands of a killer with a grudge it might just be the ultimate weapon of destruction – how can you guard against an attack using something that’s all around us? It doesn’t need to be smuggled through security or bought from a dodgy rogue nation or flown into airspace and spread through strange carrier systems. Electricity is the killer already in our midst and it’s the technique chosen by the deadly killer or killers at the heart of Jeffrey Deaver’s latest novel The Burning Wire. The setting is New York City, the time is now and the man with the job of preventing a quite literal melt-down in the city is Deaver’s most successful forensic super sleuth, the wheelchair bound Lincoln Rhyme.

Jeffery Deaver

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The Burning Soul is the tenth full-length novel from John Connolly to feature Charlie Parker as the central character. The books could best be characterised as thrillers with supernatural overtones. Towards the beginning of the series (which started with Every Dead Thing), the novels were characterised by extreme and graphic violence, but, as the series has evolved, Connolly has more and more relied on fine descriptive prose to build tension and a sense of menace which only occasionally explodes.

John Connolly

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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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