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If there's one thing that can be said about Sylvian Forge's Parasite , it's that it manages to bring together a surprising variety of ideas together that you might not expect to see in a police crime thriller, but in a way that is precisely the kind of counter-intuitive connections and leaps that sometimes need to be made to resolve complex crime networks. In Parasite those connections are made by Valmont, an experimental artificial intelligence engine capable of processing vast amounts of information to present unexpected deductions and leads.  Valmont has been developed with the help of IT software engineer, Ethan Milo who has been left almost paralysed with a fragment of shrapnel close to his spine after a terrorist attack. The Ministry of Defence want to test the system and have teamed Ethan up with Captain Marie Lesaux, a police officer in family and child protection unit in the provincial town of Clermont-Ferrand. She's been asked to test Valmont from the departme...

Sometimes the title of a book tells you everything you need to know about the content, but in the case of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic it’s hard to know whether the author is making self-conscious allusions to the genre of the Gothic Romance novel and repurposing it for a Mexican setting or just getting wrapped up in an unoriginal play through the genre’s conventions with no new ideas to offer. Either way, whether it seeks to be original or not, whether you think it’s original or not, it certainly delivers on plenty of 'Mexican Gothic'. At the centre of the horror about to unfold (might as well set it up with an suitably ominous opening) is Noemí Taboada, wealthy young socialite in Mexico City in the 1950s. Flighty but stubborn, enjoying life and not quite ready to take anything seriously, least of all earnest young men, Noemí is summoned by her father with an urgent request. Her cousin Catalina has been acting strangely and has sent a rambling letter to Señor Taboada...

I don’t know why I let David Mark do this to me. I know bad things happen to bad people in his DS McAvoy series ( Scorched Earth , Cold Bones ) and other standalone books ( Still Waters , A Rush of Blood ), but good people are by no means immune from the horrors of crime and gang violence in his books either. I just wish he wouldn’t make his characters so relatable and likeable in a way that leaves you approaching each development in each tense chapter of Borrowed Time , his latest standalone thriller, with a sense of trepidation about the danger they seem to have unwittingly got themselves into. As far as Adam Nunn goes it seems to all go very wrong when he simply starts looking into his own origins, having discovered through an inadvertent comment from this Alzheimer’s suffering father that he might have been adopted. Unfortunately the investigator and friend that he asked to look for his birth certificate has turned up in Dedham Vale, also known as Dead Mans Vale, an Essex location ...

After using Arthur Conan Doyle in her debut novel Violet Hill , Henrietta McKervey invokes another famous writer from slightly earlier in A Talented Man , but there also a hint of another great crime writer in that title. Although not quite the same as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, there is indeed a young man in McKervey’s period crime fiction who impersonates another person and embarks on a spree of fraud and deception with the aim of enjoying a life of ease on the continent. In the case of Ellis Spender however, the deception is far more ambitious and requires no small amount of talent turned towards twisted ends; he intends to impersonate Bram Stoker, no less, the author of Dracula . A Talented Man is set in the mid 1930s, where the world is on the brink of an unthinkable new world war and the formerly wealthy middle classes are starting to see a change in their fortunes. Ellis Spender is frustrated by his lack of success as a budding novelist and dissatisfied with his home circ...