Alice Feeney has done it again. Rock Paper Scissors is another compelling psychological thriller, packed with twists you won’t see coming. Told from multiple perspectives, the novel keeps readers guessing. Who is telling the truth? Who is unreliable? Or are they all a bit of both?
When a struggling couple takes a weekend trip to a remote, renovated chapel in the Scottish Highlands, in a last ditch attempt to save their marriage, they quickly realise they aren’t alone. Someone else is there with them. As tensions rise and secrets unravel, they must decide whether they can ... View Full Review
Beautiful Ugly is a gripping psychological thriller set on a remote Scottish island. The story follows Grady, a novelist struggling to write his second book after the mysterious disappearance of his wife a year earlier.
Haunted by her absence, he begins to see her everywhere, but are these visions real, or just fragments of his unravelling mind? As the lines between reality and hallucination blur, both Grady - and the reader - are drawn into a haunting, atmospheric mystery that keeps you questioning until the very last page. View Full Review
Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney is one of those rare thrillers that, the moment you finish, makes you want to shout “Nooo!” and immediately flip back to page one. You can’t quite believe you missed all the clues so cleverly planted along the way. What seemed like throwaway details suddenly reveal themselves as meticulously placed hints, each one building towards the brilliantly executed twist.
Throughout the story, I was convinced I’d cracked the case—only for my suspect to turn up dead a few pages later. Feeney keeps you constantly second-guessing, leading you ... View Full Review
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek paints a vivid and heartfelt portrait of 19-year-old Cussy Mary, a courageous young woman navigating life in 1930s Appalachian Kentucky. As if being a woman in a rugged, male-dominated world isn't challenging enough, Cussy also faces deep-seated prejudice due to her rare blue-tinged skin.
Determined to make a difference, she becomes a pack horse librarian, braving treacherous terrain and societal scorn to deliver books and promote literacy in her isolated community. While many come to appreciate her kindness and dedication, others—particularly certain men—resent her independence, putting her in constant danger.
... View Full Review
My Favourite Mistake is the latest eagerly awaited installment in Marian Keyes’ beloved Walsh family saga. This time, we’re reunited with Anna, the star of Anybody Out There as she navigates a fresh start in a small Irish town after leaving behind New York—and her partner, Angelo—post-lockdown. Reuniting with her old flatmate Brigit and her family, Anna finds herself caught up in two pressing dilemmas: uncovering who’s sabotaging Brigit’s new retreat business and tracking down some much-needed HRT.
Then there’s Narky Joey—the one that got ... View Full Review
Ashley Poston’s The Seven Year Slip is a heartfelt, whimsical tale of love, fate, and self-discovery. Clementine grew up enchanted by her late aunt’s stories about her magical apartment—one that occasionally transports its occupant seven years into the past. But there was one unbreakable rule: Don’t fall in love.
That rule proves easier said than done when Clementine unexpectedly finds herself sharing the space with a charming, passionate man who exists in a different time. As their lives intertwine across the years, she’s forced to confront her own ambitions, fears, ... View Full Review
We've all heard about the importance of gut health. Handfuls of brands talk about it all the time in their marketing and advertising. They promise their products are the answer to our problems. But do you know what, I was still unsure what gut health was all about. How I could really impact it, and why it's so important. But not any more.
This book takes you on a journey to really understand how the gut works, and how to extract every last morsel of nutrition from our food.
More than half of the cells in our body are non-human, ... View Full Review
Set in the fictional landscape of an English university, the story begins with the sudden disappearance of an enigmatic campus cat. This feline character has become an essential, if unofficial, part of the academic community, weaving its way into the routines and lives of staff and students alike. When the cat vanishes, it throws the campus into an amusing frenzy, prompting an investigation that unravels more than just the mystery of its whereabouts.
Woolf’s writing sparkles with humour, and you are swept along with her affectionate and authentic critique of academia. The vividly drawn characters each play their ... View Full Review
This was the big one for me – the proximate cause, the inciting event, the tipping point. I chose it at random in an airport bookstall in Miami. It turned out to be the twenty-first and last installment in the Travis McGee series, which ran from 1964 to 1985. McGee was a boat bum from Florida, taking his retirement in advance by working only when he had to, usually by retrieving stolen property from thieves and fraudsters. He was a big, scruffy, rawboned character. The series as a whole stands as one of the finest ever. It’s markedly ahead of ... View Full Review
Durand was an obscure French crime writer, but this novel – impeccably translated into English by J. Maxwell Brownjohn – hit me like a freight train. It’s fundamentally a chase thriller, in which the chaser is the Gestapo agent Laemmle, representing the might of Hitler’s Third Reich, and the chased is an eleven-year-old French boy named Thomas, the only living person who knows the long strings of numbers that can unlock his late great-grandfather’s bank accounts, which contain hundreds of millions that the Nazis want. Laemmle is a gourmet and an epicene, but cruel ... View Full Review
Smith was a fanatically dedicated fiction writer who honed his craft by running a 1960s pulp magazine in New York. The content was pacy, robust and manly short-story fiction. Smith commissioned work from writers such as Ted Irish, Dr Emile Korngold and Sol Roman – all of whom were himself, typing like mad under pseudonyms. But his aim was a big novel idea he had – a Soviet detective solving a sensitive crime in Moscow, thereby mining the exquisite difficulties faced by a diligent policeman working inside a rigidly bureaucratic and hostile structure. Smith saw his detective as a reluctant ... View Full Review
MacLean was a wildly successful Scottish thriller writer who dominated the adventure genre during the 1950s and 60s. He started with three novels set during the Second World War, and then came what I think of as ‘peak MacLean’ – a magnificent run of six novels from 1959 to 1966, from The Last Frontier (The Secret Ways in the US) to When Eight Bells Toll. All were set in contemporary times, but crucially with plot and character backstories firmly rooted in the recent wartime conflict. It was clear that wartime experience served as a permanent and automatic ... View Full Review
