For some reason, I’d lost a little of my reading mojo and just couldn’t get excited about books. I returned two to the library without finishing them, I couldn’t decide what to re…

As has become a tradition, I decided to start off our latest club reading week with some crime novels, and 1949 was certainly a bumper year for those. I mentioned some in my post last week on previ…

A thriller I couldn’t put down.

Love him or loathe him, Boris Johnson has been one of the most consequential British politicians of recent times. In this lively political memoir, he explains how his ideas developed and how he sou…

Dive into Greg Rhyno's gripping novel 'Who by His Own Hand' as Dame Polara faces personal stakes and dark connections in Toronto.

This week has been Banned Books Week in the US. I don’t think I have to convince you that banning books limits critical thinking, the sharing of ideas, and much more. From early childhood on (perha…

In my recent post about the problematic new series, Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, I asked a simple question: why can’t TV producers leave Tommy and Tuppence alone? There are plent…

This week has been Banned Books Week in the US. I don’t think I have to convince you that banning books limits critical thinking, the sharing of ideas, and much more. From early childhood on (perhaps even before birth), exposure to a variety of reading material supports cognitive development, boosts critical thinking skills, and encourages empathy. The question doesn’t seem to be so much whether we should support freedom of reading, but how we should do so.

I hope you’re all as excited as I am about our upcoming week of club reading which this time is from 1949! When I first started looking for titles I soon realised it was a bumper year and the…

A serial killer is at work on the streets of London, and he’s good – he’s leaving no forensic evidence and no clues as to identity. John Rebus is surprised when he is invited down to help the inves…

If Perry Mason had practiced law in England, would he have been considered a barrister or a solicitor?  According to AI (which untied and fed me in order to allow me to write this article), Ma…

Forbidding or prohibiting things doesn’t seem to stop people from having or doing those things. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any laws, but it does mean that passing laws doesn’t always chan…

Forbidding or prohibiting things doesn’t seem to stop people from having or doing those things. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any laws, but it does mean that passing laws doesn’t always change what people do. Some laws (like the US’s prohibition law of the 1920s) are so ineffective that they’ve been repealed. Some people say that laws like that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

The current state of the TBR, and a preview of four books I’ll be reading soon: The Casuarina Tree by W. Somerset Maugham, The Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Lessons in Harmony by J…

It’s always a good day when a new title in the British Library Crime Classics range pops through the door, and a recent arrival looked to be an enticing read. It’s another one of their …

Detective Sergeant Ivan Lucic has been dispatched to the small mining town of Finnigan’s Gap to investigate a murder. An opal miner, Jonas McGee, has been found underground in his claim, apparently…

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“There must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar …

Discover techniques for making readers care about solving murders with unlikeable victims in cozy mysteries.

I was still feeling in the mood for something substantial after finishing “A Happy Death”, and the stacks of Instagram-inspired titles I’d put together included a number of books …

In 1827, young farmer Gilbert Markham lives with his widowed mother and siblings when nearby Wildfell Hall, long empty, is finally let. The new tenant, Mrs Helen Graham, arrives with her small son,…

Short Prose - Gabriela Marie Milton - Poet and Publisher, #1 Amazon Bestselling Author

Dive into 'The Way You Say My Name,' where PI Declan Shaw's missing person case intertwines with secrets and danger. Unravel the suspense!

I’m very excited and privileged that my short story, Teamwork, has been published at Snapshots of Noir! Thanks much to Paul D. Brazill for includng my work  (I borrowed the photo from Snapsho…

I'm very excited and privileged that my short story, Teamwork, has been published at Snapshots of Noir! Thanks much to Paul D. Brazill for includng my work  (I borrowed the photo from Snapshots of Noir, too)!  You can read the story right here. While you're there, do check out some of the other short fiction. They're well written and show that short stories can pack a lot of punch! And do read Brazill's own fine fiction. You want <i>noir</i>? He brings it!

A stunningly beautiful hardback edition of one of the most famous stories in the world. Book blurb After losing her parents, young Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle’s gloomy…

October starts as usual with another set of six degrees of literary separation, as hosted by our lovely Kate. This month’s starting point is Life of M by Rachel Cusk, which I haven’t re…

The Fedora podcast celebrates its second anniversary today and to make things even more special, I am joined by co-host Simon Brown to discuss Richard Attenborough’s 1978 suspense thriller, M…

Greenland is a visually stunning place. It has a long history, and its indigenous people have lived there for thousands of years. The climate can be unforgiving, though, and those who live there kn…

For a moment in 1935, it looked like there could have been, not twelve, but thirteen Miss Marple novels. If you pull out your volume of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks and turn to the …

Greenland is a visually stunning place. It has a long history, and its indigenous people have lived there for thousands of years. The climate can be unforgiving, though, and those who live there know to respect the power of nature. It’s a fascinating place, and for a lot of people, it’s a sort of exotic place, too. It’s no wonder, then, that it can be an effective setting for a crime novel.

Short Prose - Gabriela Marie Milton - Poet and Publisher, #1 Amazon Bestselling Author

Last weekend I went to the artificial hill called Teufelsberg (Devil’s Hill), set in a lush forest on the outskirts of Berlin. The hill was built from the rubble left after the Second World W…

The topic of posthumous releases of author’s works has been on my mind a little lately, no doubt because of the Kafka rabbit hole I disappeared down! However, as I mentioned in my end of Sept…

Recovering from a near-fatal illness, Dalgliesh finds himself adjusting not only to survival but to the business of living again. While he was in hospital, Father Baddeley – an old friend of his fa…

Privilege, especially combined with wealth, can give the illusion of invulnerability. People in that position may even be oblivious to any danger around them – they feel safe. The fact is, though, …

Privilege, especially combined with wealth, can give the illusion of invulnerability. People in that position may even be oblivious to any danger around them – they feel safe. The fact is, though, that no-one is immune to tragedy.  And sometimes, privileged people can be in an even riskier position than ‘the rest of us.’ A quick look at crime fiction will show you what I mean.

Two years ago, as the 2024 Agatha Christie Festival came to a close, a trio of California lads who had bonded over their passion for the Queen of Crime vowed then and there that they would meet up …

As you might have surmised from my previous post, I’ve been enjoying life a little too much (when I haven’t been working) in September, and my reading reflects that. I only read seven b…

A look back at the past three months to see how I’m getting on with all the various challenges I set myself. Stats plus brief summaries of books reviewed for each challenge – the Classi…

Short Prose - Gabriela Marie Milton - Poet and Publisher, #1 Amazon Bestselling Author

I don’t quite know what it is about September, but it always seems to whizz past; maybe because I’m always back to work after the summer break and so things are frantic, with a lot of c…