Detective Stories Archives | Mal Warwick Blog on Books

5 days ago

A standalone mystery from Tana French set in Ireland’s rural West

American-Irish actor and author Tana French gained prominence in literary circles with the six bestselling Dublin Murder Squad novels. Justly so. The books display the magical charm of her writing and the scope of her understanding of human psychology. But formulas sometimes lose their charm for both writers and readers, and it seems that’s the […]

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a couple of weeks ago

The collapse of the USSR is underway in this detective novel

Why did the Soviet Union implode and the Berlin Wall crumble overnight? For many conservative Americans, the answer is Ronald Reagan. But level-headed analysts have debunked that thesis. In fact, the roots of the crisis that came to a head in the fall of the USSR lay deep in Soviet society. And Edgar Award-winning mystery […]

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a couple of months ago

A murder in Palestine exposes the fault lines in the refugee community

From 2007 to 2010, Welsh author Matt Rees published the four novels of the Palestine Quartet. The first, The Collaborator of Bethlehem, introduces schoolteacher and would-be detective Omar Yussef. It was an outstanding debut for the series that followed—an unconventional but entirely convincing picture of the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-5). Drawing on his many years […]

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a couple of months ago

A grim murder mystery set in the USSR

Set in the USSR not long after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Death of a Dissident paints a savage if all too credible picture of life in Moscow early in the final decade of Communist rule. If you enjoy historical fiction and have a hankering to understand the lies, compromises, and inefficiencies that led to […]

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a few months ago

An African American detective investigates the Rwanda genocide

This is not a book for the faint of heart. In the course of its two hundred pages, the body count mounts again and again. In the end, I counted twenty-seven dead. Now, perhaps that’s to be expected in a novel about the Rwanda genocide, when more than a million perished. But it seems a […]

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a few months ago

Multiple personalities, neo-Nazis, and a psychopathic arms dealer

Now, we’ve known all along that IQ, more formally known as Isaiah Quintabe, is supremely talented at making trouble for himself and practically everyone around him. But in Hi Five, the fourth of the novels in the series, he outdoes himself. In the space of 352 pages, Isaiah manages to infuriate a psychopathic arms dealer, […]

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a few months ago

A nitty-gritty view of Ghana today in this inventive detective novel

Why do you read mysteries and thrillers? For me, the answer’s simple. I read them as much for the light they shed on society as for the suspense and the intellectual satisfaction of seeing a mystery solved. That’s particularly true in the case of historical novels and of stories that take place in unfamiliar settings. […]

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a few months ago

Nordic Noir at its best

If you’re a fan of Nordic Noir and enjoy the likes of Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and Jo Nesbø, you’re certain to love the Joona Linna series of detective novels from Lars Kepler. That’s the pseudonym of the Swedish husband-and-wife team of Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril. Both are successful novelists in their own […]

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6 months ago

V. I. Warshawski: the private eye as investigative reporter

Private eye V. I. Warshawski is the fictional creation of Chicago novelist Sara Paretsky, but she stands in for that city’s best and brightest investigative reporters. Yes, Vic, as she prefers to be known, is a detective, not a journalist. But the cases she pursues, often without being paid to do so, lead her into […]

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6 months ago

John Sandford’s millionaire investigator takes on the alt-right

Lucas Davenport is one of the most engaging protagonists in all of crime fiction, and he has proven as popular as he is commanding. Davenport’s creator, John Sandford, has just published Masked Prey, the thirtieth bestseller in the Prey series that features the millionaire investigator. Here, in the latest entry in the Lucas Davenport series, […]

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