Crime Thriller Book Log: Wilkinson, MacBride, Cleeves, Dickinson

This week’s book releases feature four very different detectives, who all share one thing in common - a rather unhealthy curiosity in other people’s illegal activities.

Kerry Wilkinson has lived the author, dream. His self-published Jessica Daniel novel Locked In became a runaway bestseller and the series was snapped up by Pan Books. Seven novels later, his troubled Manchester copper is still going great guns. Behind Closed Doors is out tomorrow, and there’s another on the way later in the year.

But the blurb finds his heroine in a bad way:

Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel has barely left her house in months, isolated away from friends and colleagues. She may have given up on herself but one man is sure she still has something to offer.

DCI Jack Cole gives her a chance at redemption: An opportunity to help a neighbouring force by discovering what is going on with a reclusive community living in a stately home in the middle of nowhere.

People are going missing, turning up dead with only a vague link back to the house. But can Jessica beat her own demons in time to find out exactly what’s going on behind closed doors?

You can get Behind Closed Doors on ebook and in paperback. Kerry has some sensible advice about writing on his website - we all love some good advice - so go check that out right here.

Redemption is clearly all the rage this week, there’s more of it in A Song For The Dying. Stuart MacBridge steps away from his usual Logan McRae series to publish the sequel to his grimly violent Birthdays For The Dead, which featured dodgy copper Ash Henderson. I don’t know about you, but I love a dodgy copper - in fiction, at least. And I love a red phone box, so full marks to someone for putting one of those on the cover.

Gather round for the blurb, everyone:

He’s back… Eight years ago, ‘The Inside Man’ murdered four women and left three more in critical condition – all of them with their stomachs slit open and a plastic doll stitched inside. And then the killer just … disappeared.

Ash Henderson was a Detective Inspector on the initial investigation, but a lot can change in eight years. His family has been destroyed, his career is in tatters, and one of Oldcastle’s most vicious criminals is making sure he spends the rest of his life in prison.

Now a nurse has turned up dead on a patch of waste ground, a plastic doll buried beneath her skin, and it looks as if Ash might finally get a shot at redemption. At earning his freedom. At revenge.

A Song For The Dying is released in ebook and hardback.

Harbour Street is the sixth book in Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope series, about her bad-tempered Northumbrian detective. It’s now a TV series, of course, the fourth series of which is due to be aired this year – so you may want to read Harbour Street before it’s adapted.

Here’s the blurb, pet:

As the snow falls thickly on Newcastle, the shouts and laughter of Christmas revellers break the muffled silence. Detective Joe Ashworth and his daughter Jessie are swept along in the jostling crowd onto the Metro. But when the train is stopped due to the bad weather, and the other passengers fade into the swirling snow, Jessie notices that an old lady hasn’t left the train: Margaret Krukowski has been fatally stabbed as she sat on the crowded train.

Soon Vera and Joe are on their way to the south Northumberland town of Mardle. Retracing Margaret’s final steps, Vera finds herself searching deep into the hidden past of this seemingly innocent neighbourhood, led by clues that keep revolving around one street . . . Why are the residents of Harbour Street so reluctant to speak?

Harbour Street is released in ebook and hardback.

Death Of An Elgin Marble takes us back to a more noble time. It’s the twelfth Lord Francis Powerscourt novel, about the Victorian detective who is descended from Irish aristocracy.

Look, you may want to smarten yourself up for the blurb:

The British Museum in Bloomsbury is home to one of the Caryatids, a statue of a maiden that acted as one of the six columns in a temple which stood on the Acropolis in ancient Athens. Lord Elgin had brought her to London in the nineteenth century, and even though now she was over 2,300 years old, she was still rather beautiful - and desirable.

Which is why Lord Francis Powerscourt finds himself summoned by the British Museum to attend a most urgent matter. The Caryatid has been stolen and an inferior copy left in her place. Powerscourt agrees to handle the case discreetly - but then comes the first death: an employee of the British Museum is pushed under a rush hour train before he and the police can question him.

What had he known about the statue’s disappearance? And who would want such a priceless object? Powerscourt and his friend Johnny Fitzgerald undertake a mission that takes them deep into the heart of London’s Greek community and the upper echelons of English society to uncover the bizarre truth of the vanishing lady…

Author David Dickinson isn’t the telly chap with the mahogany skin and exceptional hair, but he was once the editor of both Newsnight and Panorama, no less. The first Powerscourt novel, Goodnight Sweet Prince, appeared way back in 2002. Ebook and hardcover, since you ask.