Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of a bloody civil war. Enter Anil Tissera, a young woman and forensic anthropologist born in...

I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me. He was a gluttonous man and when his blood came out it looked like the blood of a pig. That’s a cruel...

This book is set on the fictional island of Helios, but as the author explains in this #TalkingLocationWith…  article, the inspiration is very clearly Santorini. A young archaeologist who travels to the remote island of Helios (based on the...

‘He wanted to know who she was, and why he was convinced he had some unremembered connection with her. It was as simple as that. But he knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t simple at all.’ When Dublin pathologist Quirke...

For anyone with the slightest curiosity about travelling, or even if you’ve been, William Sutcliffe’s tremendously funny Are You Experienced? will have you in stitches. The protagonist is Dave, a 19-year-old Londoner on a gap year before starting university....

The setting, as usual, is the picturesque, non-metropolitan region of Vigata in Sicily. And it’s hot –stiflingly hot. In August Heat, we are never allowed to forget the all-enveloping sultriness (the inspector — possessor of miniature fan, the only...

Baba Dunja is a Chernobyl returnee. Together with a motley bunch of former neighbours, they set off to create a new life for themselves in the radioactive no-man’s land. Geiger counter and irradiated forest fruits be damned, there in...

How far would you go? The murder of a promising footballer, son of Brighton’s highest-ranking police officer, means Detective Superintendent Jo Howe has a complicated and sensitive case on her hands. The situation becomes yet more desperate following devastating...

David Booker returns to Romney Marsh on the south coast of England for a holiday. He is expecting to spend time helping his aunt and uncle pack up the stock of their second-hand bookshop in preparation for a happy...

The First in the Bamboo Trilogy. Thailand, 1943: Thomas Ellis, captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, is a prisoner-of-war on the Death Railway. In stifling heat he endures endless days of clearing jungle, breaking stone and...