Уильям Шоу0.0 Five years ago, teenager Alexandra Tozer was murdered on her family farm. Her sister Helen Tozer will never forget. Returning home after quitting the Met Police, she brings with her the recovering Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen, who slowly becomes possessed by the unsolved case.
He discovers the Tozers were never told the whole truth. Alexandra was tortured for twenty-four hours before she died. But when he tracks down the original investigating sergeant, the man goes missing. And so does Helen.
Suspicion falls on her. But Breen is on a trail that goes far beyond the death of a schoolgirl. For the two men connected to this case met in Kenya, during the Mau Mau uprising; and the history that Britain has turned its face from is now returning to haunt it.
So when another innocent woman is abducted, Breen knows he has just twenty-four hours to save her.
The third book in a powerful deconstruction of the sixties, A Book of Scars tears strips off the Drug Squad, the Kenya Emergency and the upheaval of society as we knew it - to lay bare forgotten crimes, and tell the history of the losers.
Фиона Вич Смит0.0 Introducing Poppy Denby, a young journalist in London during the Roaring Twenties, investigating crime in the highest social circles!
In 1920, twenty-two year old Poppy Denby moves from Northumberland to live with her paraplegic aunt in London. Aunt Dot, a suffragette who was injured in battles with the police in 1910, is a feisty and well-connected lady.
Poppy has always dreamed of being a journalist, and quickly lands a position as an editorial assistant at the Daily Globe. Then one of the paper's writers, Bert Isaacs, dies suddenly--and messily. Poppy and her attractive co-worker, photographer Daniel Rokeby begin to wonder if it wasn't a natural death, but murder.
After she writes a sensational exposé, The Globe's editor invites her to dig deeper. Poppy starts sifting through the dead man's files and unearths a major mystery which takes her to France--and into deadly danger.
Эй Джи Райт0.0 1893. Wigan is in the grip of a devastating national miners' strike and a harsh winter. Arthur Morris, a wealthy colliery owner whose intransigence on miners' pay is the main cause of the strike, is found brutally murdered in Scholes, a rough working-class district where he is universally hated and blamed for the grinding hardship the strike is causing. Detective Sergeant Brennan is tasked with finding the murderer and when a mysterious stranger is found bludgeoned to death, Brennan starts to unravel a twisted thread of interwoven clues that will lead to the murderer.
Moat was the fugitive Geordie bodybuilder-mechanic who became notorious one hot July week when, after killing his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, shooting her in the stomach, and blinding a policeman, he disappeared into the woods of Northumberland, evading discovery for seven days – even after TV tracker Ray Mears was employed by the police to find him. Eventually, cornered by the police, Moat shot himself.
Andrew Hankinson, a journalist from Newcastle, re-tells Moat’s story using Moat’s words, and those of the state services which engaged with him, bringing the reader disarmingly close at all times to the mind of Moat. It is a reading experience unrelieved by authorial distance or expert interpretation. The narrative Hankinson has woven is entirely compelling, even if Moat’s weaknesses are never far from sight, requiring the reader to work out where they should stand.
Martin Edwards5.0 A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors’ darkest secrets. Now an Edgar Award Nominee!
This is the first book about the Detection Club, the world’s most famous and most mysterious social network of crime writers. Drawing on years of in-depth research, it reveals the astonishing story of how members such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reinvented detective fiction.
Detective stories from the so-called “Golden Age” between the wars are often dismissed as cosily conventional. Nothing could be further from the truth: some explore forensic pathology and shocking serial murders, others delve into police brutality and miscarriages of justice; occasionally the innocent are hanged, or murderers get away scot-free. Their authors faced up to the Slump and the rise of Hitler during years of economic misery and political upheaval, and wrote books agonising over guilt and innocence, good and evil, and explored whether killing a fellow human being was ever justified. Though the stories included no graphic sex scenes, sexual passions of all kinds seethed just beneath the surface.
Attracting feminists, gay and lesbian writers, Socialists and Marxist sympathisers, the Detection Club authors were young, ambitious and at the cutting edge of popular culture – some had sex lives as bizarre as their mystery plots. Fascinated by real life crimes, they cracked unsolved cases and threw down challenges to Scotland Yard, using their fiction to take revenge on people who hurt them, to conduct covert relationships, and even as an outlet for homicidal fantasy. Their books anticipated not only CSI, Jack Reacher and Gone Girl, but also Lord of the Flies. The Club occupies a unique place in Britain’s cultural history, and its influence on storytelling in fiction, film and television throughout the world continues to this day.
The Golden Age of Murder rewrites the story of crime fiction with unique authority, transforming our understanding of detective stories and the brilliant but tormented men and women who wrote them.
Уэнсли Кларксон0.0 In what has been described as a true-life blend of "Grumpy Old Men" and "Ocean's Eleven, SEXY BEASTS is an insider account of the 2015 Hatton Garden Heist, in which a group of retirement-age career criminals--the so-called "Diamond Geezers"--robbed a London jewelry vault, in what would be the biggest burglary in UK history.
The Hatton Garden Heist captured the British public's imagination more than another other crime since The Great Train Robbery. It was supposed to make a fortune for a team of old time professional criminals. Their last hurrah. A final lucrative job that would send the old codgers off on happy retirements to the badlands of Spain and beyond. It seemed to be the stuff of legends. Tens of millions of dollars worth of valuables grabbed from safety deposit boxes in a vault beneath one of the most famous jewelry districts in the world.
But where did it all go wrong for this band of old time villains? And how did the gang's bid to pull off the world's biggest burglary turn into a deadly game of cat and mouse featuring the police and London's most dangerous crime lords?
Nobody is better placed to reveal the full story of the Hatton Garden Heist than Britain's best-connected true crime writer, Wensley Clarkson. Through his unparalleled contacts inside the criminal underworld, he's finally able to reveal the astonishing details behind Britain's biggest ever burglary.
Люк Хардинг4.3 On November 1, 2006, journalist and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. He died twenty-two days later. The cause of death? Polonium—a rare, lethal, and highly radioactive substance. Here Luke Harding unspools a real-life political assassination story—complete with KGB, CIA, MI6, and Russian mobsters. He shows how Litvinenko’s murder foreshadowed the killings of other Kremlin critics, from Washington, DC, to Moscow, and how these are tied to Russia’s current misadventures in Ukraine and Syria. In doing so, he becomes a target himself and unearths a chain of corruption and death leading straight to Vladimir Putin. From his investigations of the downing of flight MH17 to the Panama Papers, Harding sheds a terrifying light on Russia’s fracturing relationship with the West.
Tom Grant0.0 Born in 1915 into the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, Jeremy Hutchinson went on to become the greatest criminal barrister of the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The cases of that period changed society for ever and Hutchinson's role in them was second to none. In Case Histories, Jeremy Hutchinson's most remarkable trials are examined, each one providing a fascinating look into Britain's post-war social, political and cultural history.
Адам Сисман0.0 John le Carré is still at the top, more than half a century after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a worldwide bestseller. From his bleak childhood - the departure of his mother when he was five was followed by 'sixteen hugless years' in the dubious care of his father, a serial-seducer and con-man - through recruitment by both MI5 and MI6, to his emergence as the master of the espionage novel, le Carré has repeatedly quarried his life for his fiction. Millions of readers are hungry to know the truth about him.
Written with exclusive access to le Carré himself, to his private archive and to many of the people closest to him, this is a major biography of one of the most important novelists alive today.
