Not working addresses that dilemma of graduates everywhere: Having studied for years in the hope of achieving fulfilment and satisfaction in your working life what do you do when you reach the end of your 20s to find it all just a bit so so? Is it churlish and ungrateful to expect a bit more and actually go looking for it? After all, Claire Flannery would appear to be on the pig’s back from many readers’ (including this one’s) point of view; she has a “good”, reasonably well-paid job in “creative communications” and a trainee brain surgeon boyfriend with a near-saintly disposition, with whom

These are the first 2 in this new(ish) crime series from ex-Guardian columnist, Susie Steiner. As is my wont I managed to read the second one first (I’d taken it on holidays so couldn’t get my hands on the first one to read them in sequence), but once I figured out who was who – it took a few chapters – I tore through Persons unknown and couldn’t wait to start Missing presumed the minute I got home.

Sorry, that introduction was as clear as mud – to clarify: The central character is DI Manon Bradshaw, whom we find at the beginning of the second book working cold cases for Cambridgeshire Police

I’m a bit at a loss how to describe this hugely entertaining book, a collection of biographies of 5 well-known personages of the Victorian era, filtered through various body parts. For example we have Lady Flora’s belly, George Eliot’s hand, Charles Darwin’s beard, and so on. Sounds bonkers but this, the book’s USP, allows Hughes to bring us closer than your average biographer to her subjects, much like celeb magazines do nowadays.

Hughes says she longs to know what people in the 19th century were actually “like”, that though we are told about their “battles, their big love affairs and their

I thought I’d review a non-fiction book this week and, as true crime is my guilty pleasure, I’ve chosen this account of a little-known murder trial that took place in 19th century Tipperary to see how it compares with the flood of books that have appeared in recent years on more sensational murder cases (Catherine Nevin, the ScissorsSisters, etc. - I’ve devoured them all). Well-written and informative, this shines a light on the lives and attitudes of gentrified society in famine-era Ireland while reading like a true gothic mystery (shades of Edgar Allan Poe in more ways than one, as the Poe

An atmospheric setting, a compelling plot and dark characters.

I’m back in famine-era Ireland this week (or slightly after), this time fictionalised though based on true events. If you haven’t read Emma Donoghue’s latest I strongly advise that you don’t google it beforehand because if, like me, you’ve read nothing about the background to this story you’ll be properly gob-smacked by the mystery at its centre. 
7 or so years after the last potato blight devastated the area, word is spreading from a small-holding near Mullingar that 11 year-old Anna O’Donnell has been subsisting for months without food. Could she be a saint, a miracle, a true wonder? Before

If you’ve read any of Hannah’s other books you’ll know what to expect here; a well-setup premise, various intriguing and seemingly unrelated characters, red herrings (or are they?) abounding, and tangents going off in all directions. Sophie Hannah’s thrillers are busy, to say the least.

I have to be honest, having binge-read her earlier Culver Valley novels I stopped after about the fifth, feeling they weren’t good for my health – to me they’re the equivalent of bad TV – you just want to shout “You cannot be serious!” at the screen, sorry book, half-way through, such is your frustration at the

If you love Golden Age crime fiction then you will enjoy this entertaining foray into the early years of the Detection Club, which counted Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie as founding members. The author is not only a crime writer himself, but also the current president of the Detection Club, who has been delving into the annals of the crime writers extraordinaire. Having said that, it transpires that precious early records of the London based club disappeared during World War II (perhaps hardly surprising). Nevertheless, Edwards still has much material and has talked to relatives of

This gothic chiller, first published in 1942 was re-issued in 2015 by Tramp Press as part of its Recovered Voices Series. I have been meaning to read The Uninvited for a while and I am glad that I have finally got around to Macardle’s tale of mysterious goings-on in a beautiful old Devonshire house. She scores points (for me at least) for setting the story in an elegant, well-proportioned jewel of a house in a scenic coastal location, instead of the more predictable turreted, crumbling, gloomy pile in the middle of a desolate misty moor.

The story begins with siblings Roderick and Pamela

House MD is a comedy medical drama of exceptional originality. Stop right here if you think you're in for the usual ER patients, chatty nurses and dramatic doctors who care about every patient like their own children. No, House is a cynical, arrogant, pill-popping cripple and expert diagnostician with a love for puzzles and a talent for wreaking havoc, a tortured genius who refuses to take any case that doesn't spark his interest with unusual symptoms (such as luminous green urine or the sudden inability to form speech), cases no ordinary doctor can diagnose. House, along with his rotating