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Nicci Cloke's Her Many Faces takes a little time to get its murder mystery drama going, but ultimately that's because it has other factors and relevant contemporary issues to raise that are to prove to have a significant impact on the case. Those issues feel just a little 'manufactured' in terms of the plotting, and it all seems a bit too neatly and novelistically constructed. Those are minor reservations however, and once you get past that, the courtroom drama that follows really takes on a momentum this makes this a hard book to put down. An initial difficulty, for me, is its choice of perspective. What we have are five different viewpoints, all of them men, all of them focussed on their experience with Katherine Cole, a young woman who has been arrested and accused of the murder of four extremely wealthy, important and influential men. Katherine was the only waitress working at their private members club when the men were served a poisoned bottle of brandy. Since Ka...

It's not a Man Bites Dog story, it's not even a Dog Bites Young Girl story, as Champ has an alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the alleged incident, but even if that were the case no-one, we are led to believe, would do what the Lamberts have done. But when a policeman comes knocking on the door of the Hayloft in Swaffham Tilney to say the Lambert’s Welsh Terrier has been accused of viciously biting, not just nipping, Tess Gavey, Champ’s owner Sally Lambert does what no one else would do. And evidently enlists the rest of the family. The title makes it sound a little more sinister doesn't it? Well, that kind of suspense is something that this author is a master - or mistress - of, and surreal suspense at that. It's all in the way you tell it and Sophie Hannah has you on tenterhooks from the start with her extraordinary and unusual opening. A policeman, the PC in question in the first paragraph, has been left what looks like a battered dug-up manuscript that detail...

John Ironmonger is a wonderful and unique writer. Let's just get that out of the way. In fact he has just got better with every book he has written (I haven't read The Coincidence Authority , but will have to remedy that; even though by my above assertion it's not going to be quite as good as later works, but it will still be brilliant I imagine). His second novel, after his debut The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder , was the wonderful The Whale and the End of the World (or Not Forgetting the Whale ), a quirky book with a serious message set in a little Cornish village during a worldwide pandemic; the novel a marvel of English character, wit, superstition and deeply felt humanity, features that took on an international flavour in The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild . Ironmonger, I'm very pleased to discover, has returned to St Piran with some quirky English characteristics for another timely work that encapsulates all the same qualities in order to approach another ...