Pile by the Bed reviews The Flower Girls by Alice Clark-Platts

Pile by the Bed reviews The Silent Patient, the debut psychological thriller from Alex Michalides

Pile by the Bed reviews Shadow Captain the second book in Alastair Reynolds’ space pirate Revenger series

Pile by the Bed reviews the Golden State by Ben H Winters – a dystopia with noir crime undertones.

Pile by the Bed reviews Foe by Iain Reid

Pile by the Bed reviews Twisted, the new stand alone thriller by Steve Cavanagh

Pile by the Bed reviews Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

Pile by the Bed reviews Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

Pile by the Bed reviews Cedar Valley by Holly Throsby

Pile by the Bed reviews Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson

Pile by the Bed reviews Gone by Midnight by Candice Fox, Conkaffey and Pharrell #3

Pile by the Bed reviews Wrecked by Joe Ide, IQ #3

Pile by the Bed reviews The Promised Land by Barry Maitland, Brock and Kolla #12

Pile by the Bed reviews Flight Risk by Michael McGuire

Pile by the Bed reviews Someone Like Me by M R Carey

Pile By the Bed’s Top 5 crime fiction books for 2018 with 5 honourable mentions

Pile by the Bed reviews Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch, Book 7 of the Rivers of London Series

Pile by the Bed Top 5 Science Fiction picks (and 3 honourable mentions) for 2018

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s best selling crime novelists. He has won and been nominated for a number of Japanese and international crime awards, has a number of long running series and a number of books turned into films. His latest book to be translated into English (by translator Giles Murray), Newcomer, shows again why that is the case. Helpfully, Newcomer opens with a cast of characters. Most of the list are associated with one of a number of shops – a rice cracker shop, a Japanese restaurant, a china shop and so on. And the action for the most part happens in and around these shops clustered in the central Tokyo suburb of Nihonbashi. A woman has been murdered, she was a newcomer to the area. The murder is being investigated by the Tokyo Metropolitan police homicide division with the help of newly transferred local detective Kaga, a regular from Higashino’s fiction. Kaga, himself new to the area, works the case by chasing down connections with each of the shops listed in front of the book, at the same time dipping into the lives of the people who work in them. And each shop hides not only a…

John Grisham’s first book A Time to Kill was set in the fictional town of Clanton in the Mississippi region of Ford County. He has returned to Ford County a few times in his career and in The Reckoning he is back again. This is Clanton in 1946, just after the end of the Second World War, still surviving on cotton and low paid labour. When the book opens Pete Banning is preparing to commit an act which will reverberate through that small community for years to come. Pete Banning, latest in a long line of cotton farmers in Clanton, returned from the war a changed man. He had been missing presumed dead, his family having been notified of his death three years earlier. His experiences in the war, which he refuses to share but which are detailed later in the book, shaped him and his outlook on life. When the book opens, Pete plans and carries out a murder. He walks into the Methodist church, kills the preacher Dexter Bell, and essentially admits to the crime but refuses to explain why he did it. The crime splits the small community, many of whom revered Pete as a decorated serviceman….