Crime Author Panel – 17th May 2019

17th May is Crime Fiction night and have we got a line up for you!

Come along to Mostly Books for a spine-tingling night out with best-selling crime writers Cara Hunter, J.P. Delaney, Olivia Kiernan and William Shaw.

This event is an absolute must for Crime Fiction fans.

Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start.  Tickets are £7.50, including a drink with £2.50 redeemable against a purchase on the night.  Tickets are available from Mostly Books and from EventBrite.

3 4 Friday - New fiction for 2016: Secrets, Lies and Blurred Realities

2016 has started with a bang, with loads of new fiction coming into the shop. For today's '3 4 Friday' selection, we've picked three new titles for you to enjoy.

In ‘The Girl in the Red Coat’ documentary maker Kate Hamer has written an intriguing debut: with elements of a thriller, it is more an exploration of religious ideas, family ties and personal identity.

Inspired by fairy tales - as well as Hamer's discovery of an infamous ancestor who ran a cult - it is the story of an abducted girl - Carmel - told from the point of view of both her and her family. The book is published in paperback this month.

When Carmel disappears the police comb every piece of evidence trying to discover who on earth might have snatched her. But the reader sees the story from Carmel’s eyes and know her abductors have been planning this meticulously for years. Her captor, pretending to be her estranged grandfather, believes Carmel has special powers and has taken her because he believes she should be doing the work of God. So begins Carmel’s extraordinary new life, struggling to keep her identity while ‘grandfather’ plans something quite different. But at home, neither her mother nor the police have ever given up on finding a lead that will lead them back to Carmel...

With plenty of themes to discuss, we think it would make a great bookgroup read.

Different points of view are also at play in 'The Widow' by Fiona Barton. This is one of 2016's big new hardback releases, and it's definitely tapping into the unreliable narrator aspects of last year's huge hit 'The Girl on the Train' (even the cover looks familiar).

What works brilliantly is this three-way story – the widow of a man (Glen Taylor) who went on trial for child abduction, the policemen who doggedly collected evidence, and the journalist who sees a career-making chance at a story when Glen Taylor dies.

As the truth is teased out of the widow, will it emerge that the police set him up as Glen always claimed? Or has the silent widow always known a lot more than she claims?

Barton is a former journalist who covered some infamous court cases for The Daily Mail and The Telegraph - and found herself drawn to the wives of those men accused of terrible crimes. You'll be hearing a lot about this book as the year progresses...

Our first event of 2016 is in conjunction with Abingdon Library, when author Francesca Kay will be discussing her new novel 'The Long Room'.

The novel - set in 1981 - is the story of Stephen Donaldson, who’s day is spent listening into the endless taped conversations of others – ageing communists and small-time revolutionaries – for giveaway signs of terrorist activity. But being part of the secret service is not the dashing job Stephen imagined and life has failed him in so many ways.

Listening brings him into the world of the wife of one of the suspects and he quickly becomes obsessed with offering her a better life. From diligent, quiet and lonely, ‘The Long Room’ charts Stephen’s descent into risk-taking and rule-breaking as the line between obsession and reality starts to blur,

Francesca Kay’s first novel, 'An Equal Stillness', won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2009. She lives in Oxford with her family. She will be at Abingdon Library on Wednesday, January 27 at 7.30pm. Tickets are £2 and are available from the library - and find out more here.

Here's to finding your next favourite author in 2016...and we'd love to hear what you are reading!

Books for Christmas Part 11: Do the Time, Read the Crime

Sherlock Holmes was originally going to be called Sherringford Holmes. Detective Inspector John Rebus' name comes from a word puzzle popular in medieval literature in which letters and pictures represent a surname. Jack Reacher's name came when Lee Child's wife, on being told he was giving up his job to become a writer, suggested he could always become a 'reacher' in a supermarket...

Where their names come from, the protagonists in crime and thriller novels become larger than the novels that spawned them. I bet if you close your eyes, you can see at least one of those characters as a living, breathing human being. That's the magic of the storyteller genius.

Here are our pick of favourite crime and thriller books out this year which will live in your imagination this Christmas. Enjoy.

A Study in Murder - Robert Ryan (£7.99)
128 years after he first appeared in print, Sherlock Holmes continues to enthrall and capture our imaginations unlike any other detective. Although plenty of different authors have written 'new' Holmes and Watson adventures in the meantime, few have been as brilliantly and imaginatively done as Robert Ryan's 'Dr Watson' thrillers.

This is the third in the series following 'Dead Man's Land' and 'The Dead Can Wait', and sees Dr John Watson being held in a notorious POW camp deep in enemy Germany in 1917, there as Medical Officer for the British prisoners.

With the Allied blockade, food is perilously short in the camp and when a new prisoner is murdered all assume the poor chap was killed for his Red Cross parcel. Watson, though, isn't so sure. Something isn't quite what it seems and a creeping feeling of unease tells Watson there is more to this than meets the eye. And when an escape plot is apparently uncovered in his hut and he is sent to solitary confinement, he knows he must solve the crime and escape before he is silenced for good. All he needs is some long-distance help from his old friend, Sherlock Holmes...

Crime at Christmas - C. H. B. Kitchin (£8.99)
We've loved the British Library 'Crime Classics' reissues, with their vintage cover designs and classic plots - so it's perhaps not surprising that other publishers are revisiting some of the 'forgotten classics' lying in their vaults.

'Crime at Christmas' has been re-issued by Faber & Faber, and features the stockbroker sleuth Malcolm Warren. It's Christmas at Hampstead's Beresford Lodge, and a group of relatives and intimate friends gather to celebrate the festive season. But their party is rudely interrupted by a violent death, and it isn't long before a second body is discovered. Can the murderer be one of those in the great house? A brilliantly witty and unashamedly old-fashioned murder mystery.

  

The Case of the 'Hail Mary' Celeste - Malcolm Pryce (£8.99)
Jack Wenlock is the last of the 'Railway Goslings': that fabled cadre of railway detectives created at the Weeping Cross Railway Servants' Orphanage. Sworn to uphold the name of God's Wonderful Railway, Jack keeps the trains free of fare dodgers and purse-stealers, bounders and confidence tricksters, German spies and ladies of the night. But now, as the clock ticks down towards the nationalisation of the railways Jack finds himself investigating a case that begins with an abducted great aunt, but soon develops into something far darker and more dangerous.

It reaches up to the corridors of power and into the labyrinth of the greatest mystery in all the annals of railway lore - the disappearance in 1915 of twenty-three nuns from the 7.25 Swindon to Bristol Temple Meads, or the case of the 'Hail Mary' Celeste. Shady government agents, drunken riverboat captains, a missing manuscript and a melancholic gorilla all collide on a journey that will take your breath away.

Carol - Patricia Highsmith (£8.99)
Therese is just an ordinary sales assistant working in a New York department store when a beautiful, alluring woman in her thirties walks up to her counter. Standing there, Therese is wholly unprepared for the first shock of love. Therese is an awkward nineteen-year-old with a job she hates and a boyfriend she doesn't love; Carol is a sophisticated, bored suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce and a custody battle for her only daughter. As Therese becomes irresistibly drawn into Carol's world, she soon realizes how much they both stand to lose...First published pseudonymously in 1952 as The Price of Salt, Carol is a hauntingly atmospheric love story set against the backdrop of fifties' New York.

Even the Dogs in the Wild - Ian Rankin (£19.99) - signed copies whilst stocks last
Some of our customers have expressed their 'surprise' at a new Rebus novel, but as Ian Rankin cheerfully states, Rebus never went away, he just retired. And like a lot of men, he found retirement didn't really suit him, and couldn't resist getting involved again...

This time his old partner DI Siobhan Clarke asks for his help, and Rebus is soon up to his necks in the gruesomely familiar: a dead lawyer, his old enemy Big Ger Cafferty, and all the time DI Marcus Fox is working with a covert team against one of Glasgow's most notorious crime families. This isn't going to end well... 

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins (£12.99)
Many readers really enjoyed the unreliable narrator of SJ Watson's 'Gone Girl', and the shifting sands of amnesia and memory in Emma Healey's 'Elizabeth is Missing'. And if that sounds like you, you should really try this utterly compelling thriller about a woman who thinks she's witnessed a murder.

Rachel Watson travels the same route on the train, every day, and one particular house, with its perfect occupants, occupies her mind as a pleasant fantasy. But one day she sees something that drives her to become involved in these anything-but-perfect lives. Questions are difficult to unravel: what was she really doing there and who is really in danger? This is a very original, extremely chilling thriller that keeps you guessing until the very end. A real treat and a fantastic debut.

Tabula Rasa - Ruth Downie (£7.99)
There's nothing worse than getting into a series of books - and then realising you've just read the most recent and you are going to have to wait. Which is why we loved discovering the 'Medicus' series of crime novels set in Britannia under the Romans - the latest, Tabula Rasa, is number six in a series that is just waiting to be discovered. Ruth Downie isn't as well know as (say) Lindsey Davis, but this mystery story - packed full of details of Roman life, and set during the building of Hadrian's Wall - is satisfying, hugely enjoyable and just the right amount of quirky British-Roman humour!

Monsters - Emerald Fennel (£7.99)
We really debated whether or not this book should be in YA, but a) it's extremely black humour, and b) we reckon plenty of adults would enjoy it! This is a book about two twelve-year-olds that is definitely not for kids. As one reviewer admitted "it's very difficult not to overuse the word 'disturbing' to describe this book"

When the body of a young woman is discovered - murdered - in the nets of a Cornish fishing boat, most of the town's inhabitants are shocked and horrified. But there is somebody who is not - a twelve-year-old girl. In fact, she is delighted; she loves murders, and soon she is questioning the inhabitants of the town in her own personal investigation. But it is a bit boring on her own. Until another twelve year-old boy arrives with his mother, and they start investigating together. Oh, and also playing games that re-enact the murders. Just for fun, you understand...