MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Round-up 2016: Crime fiction with Mat Coward
Star columnists run through what’s impressed them this year
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
WHEN I reviewed A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny (Sphere) earlier in the year, I suggested that it was “the sort of book you might want to save for Christmas” because this series, set largely in an isolated Quebecois village, is rich in snow, reunions, food and booze, neighbourly conviviality and other such seasonal themes.
Its satisfyingly complex mysteries do not exclusively involve criminal matters and all Penny’s books carry an elusive, haunting air of strangeness without ever quite setting foot outside the real world.
I wouldn’t want to give the impression that this is a “cosy,” however, because, as always, it sees retired Chief Inspector Gamache investigating violent death, corruption and the lasting consequences of cruelty.
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