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

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

Pile by the Bed reviews Cedar Valley by Holly Throsby

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’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

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….

The Kennedy assassination is the literary gift that keeps on giving. Authors like Don Delillo, James Ellroy, Norman Mailer, Tim Baker and Stephen King just to name a few have used the assassination as the jumping off point to tell bigger stories. Lou Berney goes the other way. In November Road, the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath is used to tell an intimate tale of love and loss, with plenty of blood and violence along the way. Frank Guidry is a hood with not a huge serving of morals. Based in New Orleans, he works for the Marcello crime organisation. When November Road opens he is selling out his friends and sleeping with a string of women. Then the Kennedy assassination happens and it turns out that he may have tangentially been involved, having a few days before organised for a car to be waiting at a particular spot in Dallas. This was the getaway car for the actual shooter and before long Guidry has been given the job to make that car disappear. Only he quickly realises that, as a loose end, once this is done he too will be made to disappear. While he does not know it…

Garry Disher’s Wyatt, master thief with a code, returned spectacularly in the eponymous reboot in 2010 which went on to win the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction. Kill Shot is now the third book in what is essentially a second series of Wyatt books (the first series coming out in the late 80s and early 90s) and it starts to provide a glimpse as to why Disher might have given the character an initial sabbatical. Kill Shot opens in Sydney. Wyatt has moved to the harbour city to carry out a series of jobs scoped by an old criminal mate called Kramer. Kramer is in prison but while on day release he passes information about potential jobs to Wyatt. When the book opens, Wyatt is in the process of stealing Ned Kelly memorabilia from an old collector, a job that goes off without a hitch. Wyatt keeps a cut for Kramer which he doles out to Kramer’s family. Unfortunately for Wyatt, that family includes waster son Josh who brags about the cash to an Afghanistan vet mate of his. At the same time, a dogged policeman has put some facts together and is also closing in on Wyatt. So…

Paraic O’Donnell’s debut novel The Maker of Swans was one of the standout fantasy novels of 2016. In a genre that often deals in warmed over tropes, The Maker of Swans was a work of beguiling originality. So the question was, how would O’Donnell follow this debut up. Much like another debutant of the previous year, Natasha Pulley, he does so with an emphatic change in direction which maintains the features that made his debut so enjoyable. The Maker of Swans was set in a more contemporary time but always had the feel of a more Victorian novel. The House on Vesper Sands is Victorian so allows O’Donnell more licence to lean into period flourishes (also drawing further comparisons with Pulley’s works which are both set in this era). In the cold open a seamstress, suffering from some undisclosed medical condition, who is brought to the house of Lord Strythe late at night to complete a secret commission commits suicide. The story proper opens with young Gideon Bliss coming down from Cambridge to see his uncle and failing to find him runs into a young woman from his past. At the same time, society reporter Octavia Hillingdon has happened on…

Award winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk follows up her first novel Flights (which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2018) with something completely different. While that book concerned itself with travel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is located in one small village in Poland near the border with the Czech Republic. The main character and narrator, an old woman named Mrs Duszejko, seems to have lived in that location her whole life and has a deep connection to the place and its wildlife. When the book opens Duszejko and her neighbour Oddball (she gives everyone nicknames, trusting them more than their real names) discover a third neighbour Bigfoot dead in his cabin. When they arrive there are deer outside his cabin and when they find that Bigfoot died by choking on a deer bone Duszejko comes up with a theory that he was killed by the deer as revenge for his hunting of them. Duszejko herself has been waging a campaign against the local hunters (a group which involves all of the high and mighty in the town) so this fits with her own view of the practice. Bigfoot is only the first death and…

Australian author Jock Serong never does the same thing twice. He has gone from corruption in sport in The Rules of Backyard Cricket to a political thriller in On the Java Ridge and now to historical investigation in Preservation. But in each case he shines a light on some aspect of Australian life or, in some respects the Australian condition. In Preservation, besides being a cracking tale of survival, betrayal and psychopathy, Serong explores the earliest days of the colony of Sydney. Preservation is based on a true story. In 1797, a boat called the Sydney Cove running rum into the fledgling colony of Sydney (rum being a currency at that time) from India, runs aground on a tiny island just north of Tasmania. A group of seventeen, including four Englishmen and thirteen Lascars, leave the rest of the survivors behind on the island to go for help. They founder off the coast of Victoria, make land and then proceed to walk the fifteen hundred kilometres to Sydney. Only three survived the walk. Serong builds his tale around these three but also their interrogator, Grayling and his wife, who has been struck down by a debilitating illness. It emerges early…

Much like the spy thrillers penned by former head of MI5 Stella Rimington, Italian author Gianrico Carofilgio brings a significant amount of authenticity to his crime novels. Carofiglio was an Italian senator but before that he was an anti-mafia prosecutor. He is best known for a crime series featuring lawyer Guido Guerrieri but in his new book The Cold Summer he comes even closer to home with a protagonist who is a police investigator and an investigation that takes place during an internal mafia war in the early 1990s. A war seems to have broken out in the Apulian mafia of the Bari area. Due to the codes of silence and honour the police are playing catch-up. But then a rumour gets around that the son of the mafia godfather Grimaldi has been kidnapped and everything heats up. The first third of the book deals with the police trying to get to the bottom of a kidnapping that no one will talk about and which has tragic results. The second third explores the mafia war in detail. One of the instigators  of that war hands himself in to the police to prove he had nothing to do with the kidnapping…

Jane Harper burst onto the crime scene with The Dry, a book set in a small Victorian rural community beset by drought. Her second book, Force of Nature returned with the character of Aaron Falk as investigator and while there are few easter egg connections to The Dry, her third book The Lost Man is a standalone mystery. In some ways it covers similar territory to The Dry – a rural community, an apparent or possible suicide and plenty of secrets – but shows a development in confidence and style. The book opens with the discovery of a body. Cameron Bright has been found, dead from dehydration, at the lonely single grave of a long forgotten stockman. It appears that he walked nine kilometres from his vehicle, became disoriented and never made it back. The place is outback Queensland, 1500 km west of Brisbane where pastoral properties are the size of, well, pick any smallish country in Europe. It is a large, empty landscape in which it is easy to go missing, cars are sporadic and people stay in touch by radio. And in summer the heat is relentless, unforgiving and potentially deadly. Cameron is the middle of three brothers…

The members of the Booker Prize Committee were very proud of themselves when they longlisted a crime novel for the 2018 Booker. With Peter Temple having won a Miles Franklin a few years back it feels like Australia might be a little ahead of the game in recognising that crime genre fiction can be (and often is) “literary” enough to be considered for these awards. Unfortunately Belinda Bauer’s Snap did not make the Booker shortlist, but hopefully this represents a chink in the armour. The book opens with a tragedy. It is 1998 and eleven year-old Jack and his two younger sisters have been left in a broken-down car by the side of the M5 while their mother goes to find a phone. Their mother never returns. Three years later the children are living on their own, their father having left them, all still traumatised in some way by the events of that day. Jack has become a thief to support his siblings and he always holds on to the idea that he can find his mother’s killer. At the same time, heavily pregnant Catherine scares off a burglar but returns to her bed to find a wicked looking knife…