Hatred, Ridicule & Contempt is the first novel by David Cooper. As a solicitor, it is perhaps unsurprising that he has written a novel about the law, sticking to what he knows.

Hatred, Ridicule & Contempt follows Alex Harris, a solicitor who at the start of the novel is made a partner at his firm. Having been passed over the previous year, Harris is pleased to finally have his hard work recognized, yet as the novel goes on he learns more and more of the firm’s dark secrets and management style. The main story centres around Harris’s case defending a newspaper against libel accusations, which soon turns out to be connected to a much bigger picture.

David Cooper

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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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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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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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An Agent of Deceit is an intelligent and convincing thriller set in the world of international finance. The story is told alternatively from the perspective of two lead characters.

Lock is a Dutch lawyer, brought up in the UK, who is employed by a shadowy Russian businessman. Over the course of a decade or so finds himself irrevocably tied to an increasingly complex network of companies whose chief purpose appears to be to disguise the passage of large sums of money originating somewhere in Russia. Lock is the ostensible owner of the entire network while retaining a very low media profile, but in practice is irrevocably in thrall to his mysterious Russian boss.

Chris Morgan Jones

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Tanzeem is the final book of Mukul Deva’s Lashkar series, with Iqbal whom we met in Salim Must Die and Blowback on a do or die mission to avenge the death of his wife Tanaz. The enemy he goes up against is the elusive warlord Ameer-ul-Momineem, who is in the process of putting together a group of international jihadi terrorists. We’re used to Deva’s expert detailing of weapons and strategies from his military background.

In this book he outlines how far terror has actually gone sending its tentacles into the very heart of The White House and he speculates on where it may go.

Mukul Deva

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More than twenty years ago, Julia’s 5 year old son Jens went missing and was never found. They were on holiday visiting her parents. She doesn’t know what happened to him, and is now depressed, living on sickness benefits and drinking too much wine. Then her father, Gerlof, rings for the first time in nearly a year, to tell her someone has sent him Jens’ sandal. This prompts Julia and Gerlof to start trying to find out what really happened all those years ago, in the hope that, if nothing else, they can move on.

A lot of evidence points to Nils Kant, who was known to be an unpleasant, sadistic man, and the story of the present day investigation is interspersed with flashbacks to his life from childhood.

Johan Theorin

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Chanakya’s Chant follows very definitely in the footsteps of The Da Vinci Code and other historical thrillers. Ashwin Sanghi brackets past and present to create his page turner, throwing in an ancient chant as a leitmotif. It’s amazing that no one thought of using India’s Machiavelli as the subject or partial subject of novel before, but Chanakya with his king making strategies and devious mapping of power works as the main character of a conspiracy thriller – which is a form that has not really been explored by Indian writers of English.

This is Ashwin Sanghi’s second novel in the genre – the first The Rozabal Line was self published in America under the pen name Shawn Haigins and then published in India by Westland in Sanghi’s own name, where it promptly caught on.

Ashwin Sanghi

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I often find these days, when it comes to crime fiction, that it’s advisable to read the books of a series in chronological order, otherwise you’re likely to run into a spoiler or two. Sometimes an episode works well as a stand alone but when the central character – usually a police officer or detective – has a well developed background, especially one outside the job, readers may prefer to stick to sequence. The Darkest Room is only loosely a second novel of a short series, but, in retrospect, I wish I’d read its predecessor Echoes of the Dead first; not because I needed to be brought up to speed with the story so far but because it might have established a connection that would make me care about the characters.

The Darkest Room is a deeply atmospheric tale and one that doesn’t fit so comfortably under the banner “crime fiction” in spite of attempts by booksellers to hook it up with some of the recent Scandinavian best sellers of that genre.

Johan Theorin

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“Pereira Maintains” is set in Lisbon during the swelteringly hot summer of 1938, a time when the Spanish Civil War was just coming to a close, while war loomed on the horizon in other parts of Europe. Pereira, of the novel’s title, is a former crime reporter but now edits the culture pages for a small circulation independent evening newspaper. It’s clearly a drop in stature for Pereira but he takes his work very seriously. When Pereira, who has never gotten over the death of his wife, reads an article about death which moves him greatly, he tracks down the penniless young author and offers him a job as his assistant, writing obituaries for literary figures.

Antonio Tabucchi, Portugal

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Lydia loves her job as a teacher in an inner city college in Rotterdam, until she is threatened by a student with a knife in front of the rest of her class. The student is suspended, but he still pops up everywhere, threatening her at every available opportunity. She seeks solace from her husband, daughter and twin sister, Elisa, but she still feels very unsettled. Then Elisa’s story begins and it skips forward a few days, explaining that Lydia was shot dead. The obvious suspect is the student with the knife, but he has an alibi, and anyway, where would he have got the gun? As the story unravels, it is clear that there is much more to Lydia’s life than perhaps even she realised. The list of suspects begins to grow and Elisa, determined to find out who murdered her twin, puts herself in danger more than once.

Holland, Simone van der Vlugt

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