Barry Forshaw

Do people who have turned on JK Rowling because of her views on gender extend their disapproval to her pseudonymous work in crime? If so, they do both the author and themselves a disservice, as the novels of Robert Galbraith — Rowling’s criminous alter ego — are among the most distinctive and authoritative in the field. Even her admirers, however, often have one caveat about the Galbraith books, which we’ll get to later. The Running Grave (Sphere £25), the seventh in the series, has unconventio…

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane (Abacus) Lehane’s masterful latest, set in 1970s Boston, has two women linked by the fate of their children, set against the background of incendiary interracial conflict. Both will be changed irrevocably. Yet Lehane’s work is always about hope, however dark the scenarios; that quality shines through in this ambitious and multi-layered novel. Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter (HarperCollins) The always impressive Hunter challenges the reader to solve a brutal…

The first mystery to be confronted on picking up Holmes, Margaret and Poe (Century £20) by James Patterson and Brian Sitts is: why not “Holmes, Marple and Dupin”? A modern riff on the famous sleuths created by Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe, in the US the book’s title is Holmes, Marple and Poe. Are rights issues to blame? Or perhaps it was felt that Poe’s sleuth Auguste Dupin — the progenitor of all the detectives that followed him — is known only to cognoscenti these days. Thi…

How do you feel about authors playing metafictional games with the reader and inserting themselves — or a fictional version of themselves — into the story? If the idea appeals, you will almost certainly be in whodunnit heaven with Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz (Century, £22). As with previous books in the series, the crime writer once again collaborates with the fictional detective Daniel Hawthorne in a delirious concoction that transplants a Christie-style mystery into the present. When t…

Does it matter who actually wrote The Cuckoo (Hemlock, £22)? The name on the jacket is Camilla Läckberg — the crime queen who made her name with a superb series set in a Christie-style provincial village, Fjällbacka (her own hometown), and who’s now a celebrity of JK Rowling-style proportions in Sweden. A more recent series of blockbusters with a revenge theme was very different in style and more expansive in scope, so rumours of a ghostwriter persisted. The online journal Kvartal in September 2…

Southern Man by Greg Iles (Hemlock) Readers undaunted by the Proustian length of Iles’ sprawling epic will find crime writing of a rare order. Arson devastates the fiefdom of Natchez mayor Penn Cage as racial conflict grips the US — tensions exploited by an unscrupulous presidential hopeful. As much a trenchant state-of-the-nation novel as a mesmeric page-turner. Boys Who Hurt by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, translated by Victoria Cribb (Orenda) The latest in the Forbidden Iceland series both chills…

Now that unabashed sex scenes in both crime novels and Hollywood films are generally eschewed, Resolution (Cape, £20) is a bracing reminder that Irvine Welsh is more than happy to assault current shibboleths. His new crime novel liberally features unbuttoned eroticism, but then the Scottish writer has been a provocateur since Trainspotting’s heroin theme outraged Booker Prize judges back in 1993. This latest novel in his unsparing series featuring maverick ex-detective Ray Lennox could have bee…

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Barry Forshaw and Adam LeBor select their must-read titles