We all have our weaknesses. One of mine: I’m a sucker for an Aussie crime novel, especially one set away from the cities. I can’t say why, but done well, there’s something about the combination of the...

Whenever I start one of these, I check how many pages I’m in for. 385 here. On the hefty side. Worrying. Then I breezed through the first 100 or so without noticing them going. Less worrying. Good, in...

This was dull. Nothing very much happened, and it happened slowly, and repetitively, and in flat affectless prose. Is it a sort of reflection of the slow pace of Icelandic life? I don’t know. A skele...

This was the 11th of Paretsky’s novels featuring V. I. Warshawski. The first came out in 1982; the 22nd came out in 2024; you can pre-order the 23rd now. The author’s own website and other sources ...

Two new labs will back British researchers to develop next generation artificial intelligence (AI) systems, helping secure the UK’s position as a global leader.

This is a less successful retread of the last Walters winner . So much is similar. Location: village Dorset. Situation: rich family, disliked, finds itself in bother and besailed by scurrilous rumour...

Two texts. Above the line, a pastiche of (a translation of) an ancient Greek prose work, in which a “decipherer” called Heracles investigates a set of killings in Athens. Below the line, the translato...

2001 in the UK, but 1995 in Sweden; the first translated winner, and I think the first from outwith the US or UK. Plenty more of those to come. The fifth in Mankell’s much-loved Wallander series, a ...

This was published in the UK by Faber, so you know we’re dealing with a Proper Writer here, and the book was a critical and popular hit well beyond the crime genre when it came out, apparently. You ca...

It’s not a bad read, this one, but it doesn’t feel quite as good as it wants to be. It’s a big chunky book, because it’s one of those dual timeline jobs. You know, you get one story set in the past, a...

In an essay entitled “Schopenhauer’s Flute and Descartes’s Lute” (2024), Helen De Cruz asks: “what can musical practice tell us about philosophy?” The present paper offers an answer to this questio...

This is like the funhouse mirror of the last one, the Rankin book. Both feature protagonists firmly established in a series (this is book 10 of Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels). Both have numerous plot...

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A novel in Rankin’s John Rebus series. I’ve read more or less all of them, many of them twice. This is prime mid series stuff. Early in the series, Rebus is something of a cardboard cutout of a detect...

Britain’s top bakers face off in a church • 1,000 pastries, one Supreme Champion • Welcome to the British Pie Awards

The British Society for Aesthetics invites applications for a two-year postdoctoral award in philosophical aesthetics, to the value of £30,000 per annum with up to £3,000 additional geographical allow...

This is pretty bad. It’s supposed to be a satirical thriller of sorts. We have a film director, Bruce, who makes glossy amoral flicks in which a lot of people are glamorously killed. These films provo...

A nasty serial killer stalks a northern English city. The police bring in a criminal psychologist, Tony Hill, to help them find the baddie by providing a psychological profile. Some of the coppers ar...

In a small village in southern England, an unpleasant rich woman is murdered. No shortage of suspects: Mathilda Gillespie had a lot of enemies, many of whom were intricately bound to her by blood, lie...

This is one of Cornwell’s many books in the Kay Scarpetta series—the fourth of 29. Scarpetta is a forensic pathologist in Virginia (and later in the series Florida). In this one, she starts out with a...

Research Fellow - AR3233, Unit: Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies Salary: Grade 6 / £38,784-£42,254 pa Full time Fixed term: 24 months, <p style="text-align: justify;"><span>Application...

Terry Ball runs elaborate mollusc-based tax avoidance schemes that are costing London councils millions of pounds. Yet when London Centric tracks him down, an even stranger story emerges.

I could pretty much copy and paste the review of the last Morse one here. This one is good and irritating in just the same ways, again with the good outweighing the irritating to a large degree. I sup...

I approached this one with some trepidation. See, I read all the Morse books several times in my early to mid teens. I remember them quite affectionately in general, as clever, intricate works. But I ...

This kind of came and went and I don’t know what else to say about it. It starts off plodding, the pace picks up about a third through, and then it trundles along fine and then it’s over. The setup...

A photobook by Crystal Bennes about the global fertiliser industry and how our collective appetite reshapes the earth

Barbara Vine was Ruth Rendell’s pseudonym, under which she published 14 books to go with the 60 odd under the Rendell name. She was never quite clear on why she needed one, and there was probably a mi...