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My review of the first three Camille Verhoeven books by Pierre Lemaitre is now live at TheLifeSentence.net

My new review of Heda Margolius Kovály’s distinctive Czech crime novel Innocence is now live at The @ LifeSentenceMag

Ken Bruen's Green Hell seems at first to be a series finale, but by the end it leaves open the possibility of future entries focused on his melancholy former Garda Jack Taylor. There's a lot of metafiction in it: an American student becomes fascinated with Jack and abandons his research on Becket to write a biography of the Galway private detective, and a good part of the first half of Green Hell is his research on the project. Bruen himself makes an appearance as a customer/drinker in a bar, and Iain Glen, who plays Taylor in the TV series based on these books, also makes a cameo appearance. There is a crime plot, but it mostly takes place offstage. There are some interesting characters, including Ridge, the female cop who's a running character who has survived (many haven't) and a new Goth who seems a bit modeled on the dragon-tattoo-girl (that seems to be the source of the U.S. cover art fro the book). And as usual there are a lot of references to and quotes from cri...

My survey of the Brunetti series by Donna Leon (on the occasion of her new one, Falling in Love) is now live at The Life Sentence .

My review of Helene Tursten's The Beige Man is now live a the new crime fiction magazine and website, The Life Sentence: have a look at the new site! The url is www.thelifesentence.net (and beyond reviews, the magazine features interrogations and feature articles across the spectrum of noir, mystery, cozy, spies, thrillers, etc. The editor is Lisa Levy, until recently the noir editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The third book in Jake Needham's Samuel Tay series finds the detective on administrative leave, following the suspicious (from the police force's point of view) shooting at the end of the previous book, The Umbrella Man. The always independent and skeptical Tay is approached by Emma Lazar, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, who wants him to help her investigate the apparent suicide of a young American software engineer who had been hired by a Singapore company developing a driverless car. Tay is reluctant to help but becomes involved (he after all has nothing else to do right now) and becomes, as usual, involved in the complicated politics and bureaucracy of the hyper-nanny city-state. The danger to Tay and Lazar, and everyone else involved, plus the interest shown by Singapore's security establishment, make it clear that there's something going on besides cars without drivers, but the detective and the small team that he enlists to help him cannot penetrate the comp...

Most dialogue in crime fiction moves forward smoothly, the speakers responding to one another and perhaps gradually revealing the truth of the events in the story. In the novels of Timothy Williams, though, the dialogue follows the patterns of life: the speakers are not really listening to each other and definitely not responding coherently to one another. The reader discovers, in the disconnected conversations, the truths that the speakers are hiding from each other, and even from themselves. His recent novel, The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe, follows this indirect method to its logical conclusion: has a crime taken place, and if so what crime? This is not a whodunit, it's a glimpse into the complex life of the citizens of a post-colonial, conflicted culture. Soho Crime, which published The Honest Folk last year, has recently been reissuing Williams previous series, featuring Italian Commissario Piero Trotti. Trotti, a spiky character with fewer social skills than Judge Anne M...