Barry Forshaw

Barry Forshaw and Adam LeBor select their best mid-year reads

Plus Karin Slaughter, Vaseem Khan, Alex North, SJ Parris and Taku Ashibe — it’s a bumper crop

Plus the latest Anthony Horowitz mystery; paranoia in revolutionary Kyiv; and a Hamptons holiday gone horribly wrong

From innocent to guilty, Los Angeles to Oxford, stories of guns, gangs, missing children — and the theft of rare eggs

Barry Forshaw and Adam LeBor select their must-read titles

Rebus is behind bars, Scarpetta is back. Plus murder mysteries in South Africa, France and Georgian London

The latest novels from Attica Locke, Linwood Barclay, Simon Mason and more

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…

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…

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…