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The people of Black Spring have a problem with the paranormal, but they've learned to live with it. Up until now. The remote little town is living under a 300 year old curse, haunted by a witch whose apparitions are somewhat random and unsettling. Bound in chains, her eyelids stitched together to prevent the power of her evil eye, her mouth also stitched to keep her from whispering the curses that provoke suicidal thoughts, there's nothing for it but to pop a tea towel over her head when the Black Rock Witch decides to stand for a couple of hours or even days in your bedroom or kitchen. It's still disturbing, but what are you going to do about it? Leaving or moving out of Black Spring isn't an option, as any extended absence will result in nightmares and suicidal thoughts. Far easier to just live with the curse than try to fight against it - you have no idea what will result from any direct disturbance of the witch. The citizens of the town also evidently need to preven

The Piet Barol of Richard Mason's latest novel is not the same Piet Barol you might expect to find after his adventures in History of a Pleasure Seeker . Even though we know that Barol was heading off on a steamer for foreign lands at the end of that novel, Who Killed Piet Barol?  nonetheless takes an unexpected turn away from the class and erotic considerations of a businessman's family in turn-of the-century Amsterdam and locates their former tutor now in a very different society in South Africa several years later in 1913, where the concerns around matters of class and gender distinctions - and their expression in sexual behaviour - are given another dimension through questions of race and inequality. As a married businessman himself now with a child, a furniture manufacturer in Cape Town, it's not surprising that Piet Barol is a different person in Mason's new novel. What remains of Barol however is his charm and adaptability. On the steamer from Amsterdam to South

There's an ominous ring to the title of Noah Hawley's latest novel that perhaps has implications beyond the obvious. On a basic plot-driven level, the fall in question is that of a small luxury private aeroplane that plunges into the sea, resulting in the deaths of two very important businessmen and most of their families. The investigation of the event by the FBI, the press and by the author, examines the lives of each of the people on-board the flight in the days 'before the fall' and presents a fascinating view of character and circumstance in each of those chapters. In the process the novel also reveals much about society, the media and public attitudes in a wider world that seems oblivious that it is heading down a path to destruction, to an even greater fall. The two very important people on board the private plane are David Bateman and Ben Kipling, both of them returning from a short holiday on Martha's Vineyard with their families. Bateman is the Chief Execu

There have been disappointing signs of a softening in Val McDermid's crime fiction in recent years, and one or two downright badly plotted books.  here's a sense then that the author is attempting to get back to basics in Out of Bounds by revisiting and expanding on her series about Edinburgh police officer, DCI Karen Pirie. As a detective for the Scottish Police Historical Crimes Unit, there's an opportunity here to build up a wider view of relevant Scottish issues, establishing connections between the past and the present, and - as seen in the Balkans investigation in McDermid's most recent DCI Pirie novel The Skeleton Road - extend that view out to Scotland's place in Europe and the wider world. With a strong focus on procedural and personality, it should be a winning combination, but for a variety of reasons McDermid doesn't make it work. If only the author could apply the same kind of rigour to character that she applies to contemporary issues in her nove