This is the first in Mark Billingham’s excellent series featuring D.I Tom Thorne. He’s a compelling main character and in many ways the archetypal maverick cop who hates authority. What sets this book apart for me is not so much the antagonist, but the author’s treatment of the victim. She has been forcibly placed in a coma-like state, but fully aware of what’s going on around her. The reality of her locked-in syndrome is heartbreaking.  

Blag Dahlia is the lead singer of the notorious Bay Area punk band Dwarves, arguably the most violent and drugged ensemble ever. But the joke's on us because Blag, aka Paul Cafaro may be one of the smartest and articulate characters in underground music. Highland Falls, his third transgressove novel, is his most delightfully debacherous work to date, I read the 150+ pages in one sitting, and couldn't put it down! A+

It's 1932. For the best history thriller I have ever read, Max Allan Collins spins together characters like Al Capone, Frank Nitti, George Raft, and even Ronald "Dutch" Reagan.

True Detective is the story of a young cop, Nathan Heller, who vows never to be corrupted, even though he's already done something and will do more on the wrong side of the law. Maybe.

While it's a fantastic story, and the characters and dialogue are unbeatable, the best part for me is that while this didn't happen precisely as Collins wrote it, the story was pretty damn close to reality.

The start of a decades-long run of stellar crime novels about the eponymous main character—a hitman who does not suffer fools. Quarry takes his work seriously, and when the trust between the hitman and the handler is broken, he makes it his mission to track down the culprit.

Collins has spun the series into more than a dozen novels, comprising Quarry’s many assignments, his loves, and his struggles to find honor among criminals. What started in 1976 with this novel continues and shows no signs of letting up.

I couldn't get enough of the character, Rocco Schiavone, from the TV series Ice Cold Murders, so I decided to check out the original novels by Antonio Manzini. They are equally good—or better.  Rocco is a police inspector from Rome who gets transferred to Aosta, an alpine ski resort town. In Black Run, Rocco instructs his provincial team in big-city police techniques, including cutting corners and avoiding superiors. He contrives useless errands to get his two dumbest cops out of the office. And he introduces his classification of Things That Are a Pain in the Ass, with "sand in your clams" at Level Seven and "unsolved homicide" at Level 10. Black Run begins on the slopes, at Level 10, with the discovery of an unidentified corpse mangled by a snowcat.

I picked this up cheaply in a second-hand bookstore. What a bargain it was. It introduced me to Detective Sergeant Washington (there is a subplot here) Poe of the National Crime Agency’s Serious Crime Analysis Section and his offsider Matilda ‘Tilly’ Bradshaw, a brilliant mathematician and programmer extraordinaire.

I immediately spent much more per copy (see homo economicus in my third choice entry) buying all of Craven’s books: and consuming (I am an economist at heart) them avidly.

I appreciated the anti-authority stance of Detective Poe but fell in love with the socially naïve Tilly: it was good to see a role-model female geek taking center stage.

The writing is outstanding: the darkest crimes are lightened by humor, and clever solutions are thrown by unexpected twists.

Most people know this book due to its film adaptation, with Robert Mitchum in the title role. To me, it is a splendid book because, like all great fiction, it tells the truth. More than a great many nonfiction books, it tells the truth about the actual nature of organized crime.

It strips away the phony glamour and describes the actual nature of the mob—treacherous, violent, and unforgiving. And the dialogue is amazing! What you see in this book is not the Mafia but Irish gangsters, and they are tired blue-collar men who are just scraping by. That is what organized crime is all about today, just as it was in the 1970s.

Dave Warner writes a genre called 'outback noir'; imagine a gritty detective story, but set in the Australian outback, instead of grimy inner city streets. Think Aussie Carl Hiassen or Elmore Leonard. His protagonist, Dan Clement, is always working against the odds - the weather, nature, crocodiles, spiders or human snakes - are never kind to him. The best thing about Warner's fiction though is that he lays breadcrumbs for the reader, but never telegraphs who the guilty party is before the last chapter. (I hate crime fiction where you guessed or are told who the baddie is halfway through the book, and then have to labor through hundreds of pages that just confirm what you already know!)

It’s hard to find someone who hasn’t heard of Lee Child’s protagonist Jack Reacher.

I recommend his second in the series to start with because that’s when Child started writing the rest of the series in third person as opposed to first.

Die Trying has Reacher witnessing a kidnapping, and ultimately being captured himself. As Reacher and the woman try to outsmart their captors and uncover the truth behind their abduction, the tension never lets up. 

But what really sets this book apart is how Reacher's military background is woven into the fabric of the story, creating a character whose unique perspective, skills, and experience make him an unstoppable force.

It’s always strange when another writer tackles the same city you’re mapping, but it’s also a reminder that we see places in fundamentally different ways. I write about Hull as an insider looking out with David taking the opposite approach, arriving in the city as a journalist. In the debut outing for DI Aector McAvoy, it may be his writing background that allows him to look the place in the eye and draw a fantastically vivid city dealing with multiple social issues, but also one in which he finds its heart packed with spirit and hope.