To The Last Page

**Safe review: There are NO SPOILERS below** There are all kinds of paranoia suspense thrillers clogging up the bestseller charts and some of them are pretty unconvincing in their plotting and crude in their use of shock tactics that exploit women's fears and vulnerabilities. Erin Kelly isn't afraid to take on some of those same basic fears but shows how it can be done tactfully, creatively and suspensefully in He Said/She Said . The sense of menace is there right from the start - even the title hints at that idea of conflicting viewpoints from male and female perspectives - and Erin Kelly it builds on it, ramping up the tension at every stage with precision and authenticity in the detail. Kelly's extraordinarily good writing means that He Said/She Said bristles with intrigue and menace right from the first page, even before the nature of the danger is specified. All we know is that Kit and Laura are in hiding, living under assumed names over an incident and a court case t

A record of visits to some of the darkest places of the world, to the scenes of historic atrocities and human suffering, Tragic Shores is not the usual subject matter you expect from a travel memoir, certainly not from an author of this name. Surprisingly however, crime thriller writer Thomas H. Cook's fascination with visiting some of the saddest places on Earth over decades of travel is not all as grim and depressing as you might think, each of the locations visited offering unexpected moments of reflection, personal introspection and collectively a wider perspective on the history and the nature of humanity. Tragic Shores , for example, opens with pilgrimages to two contrasting sites of human misery; Lourdes and Auschwitz. The connections and the comparisons between these two locations are valid, both places being a focus of human suffering and pain, and as such, places that can't help but be defined, affected and tainted by their history. Reflecting on the vulgarity of the

Michel Bussi's Don't Let Go is not a typical whodunnit. If there are doubts about the lead suspect's involvement in the initial crime, there's no question that he is implicated in some way and undoubtedly the cause of further crimes as events spin out of control. The question becomes more one of what has he done, what is he going to do, why is he doing it and who ultimately is responsible for making him do it. That's a lot of questions that are left hanging there for quite substantial part of the novel, and that alone should be enough to keep you involved, but there are a few other aspects that make this an refreshingly different spin on regular crime fiction. Martial Bellion is in trouble. Seemingly with just about everyone, although to be fair Réunion out in the Indian Ocean near Mauritius is a relatively small island. Bellion's wife has gone missing while they are holidaying there, leaving a trail of blood and signs of a violent struggle in their hotel room.

There's a little bit of poetic licence in Phil Harrison's depictions of contemporary Belfast in The First Day , but the emphasis is on the poetic, and the author effectively plays with notions of place and especially time in order to establish a much wider view that is needed to consider the difficult questions it raises. Those are not, as you might expect, related to the traditional subject matter of the Troubles in Northern Ireland - which are long in the past by the time this book reaches its conclusion - but to family and pain, although in that respect it may well have something to say about the past as well. Harrison, a film maker writing his debut novel, also sets out his stall early for The First Day  as a very literary work, with quotes from Beckett, Bataille and Rilke all within the first 12 pages. Within those same pages however there is also a lot of quotations from Scripture - spoken by East Belfast preacher Samuel Orr - but even within all that, the author still ma

I'm not sure what format the published edition will take, but the advance proof of Tin Man is a beautiful little bright yellow clothbound hardcover without a dust-jacket. A little white heart is etched in the corner, it's " a celebration of the transcendent power of the colour yellow ", in the words of Sarah Winman, a description she applies to the use of colour in Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers'. Or, to be precise, to a painted copy of Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers', a painting won as a prize in a raffle by Ellis Judd's mum, Dora when she was pregnant with him in 1950. In 1996 however, which is the present day as far as the majority of Tin Man  is concerned, the painting adored by his mother is now just a memory of a troubled family life that has finally taken its toll on the 46 year old Ellis, who has spend the majority of them working in the car plant in Cowley, hammering out little bumps in the body work. Like a series of doors, all of the openings t