Category: Crime Fiction

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog. The topic this week is Water (This can be covers with water on them, books with bodies of water in them, titles with bodies of water in them, etc.)

These are all books I’ve read. Some have the word Water in the title and all show scenes with bodies of water on their covers. And they are all crime fiction. It seems fictional murders at least often take place in or near water.

A Dark and Twisted Tide by Sharon Bolton – PC Lacey Flint is a police constable with the Metropolitan Police’s Marine Unit on the River Thames, living on a houseboat in Deptford Creek. Lacey loves swimming and is perfectly at home in water, so much so that she wild-swims in the Thames as often as tide and conditions allow, loving it so much that she feels she has become part of the river. It’s a multi-layered book, told from different characters’ perspectives, complex and chilling as it weaves its way through murders, people trafficking, and a mysterious character called ‘the swimmer’.

A Fear of Dark Water by Craig Russell – the sixth book in the Jan Fabel series, the head of Hamburg’s Murder Commission. A massive storm hits Hamburg, flooding the city, just as a major environmental summit is about to start.  A serial rapist and murderer is still at large in the city and when the flood waters recede a headless torso is found washed up. Initially it’s thought to be another victim of the killer, who had dumped his victims’ bodies in waterways around the city.

The Serpent Pool by Martin Edwards – the main characters are DCI Hannah Scarlet, in charge of the Cumbria’s Cold Case Team, her partner Marc Amos, a rare book dealer and Daniel Kind, a historian and the son of Hannah’s former boss, Ben Kind. Hannah is investigating the apparent suicide of Bethany Friend who had drowned 6 years earlier in the Serpent Pool, a lonely, isolated place below the Serpent Tower, a folly high on a ridge. The book begins with the death of George Saffell, one of Marc’s customers, stabbed and then burnt to death amidst his collection of rare and valuable books.The motive for his killing, the subsequent death of another of Marc’s customers, Stuart Wagg, and the connection with the cold case Hannah is investigating gradually become clear.

Dead Water by Ann Cleeves – the first book in her Shetland Quartet. Rhona Laing, the Fiscal, finds journalist Jerry Markham lying dead, drifting in a yoal, a traditional Shetland boat in Aith marina. Markham, a Shetlander visiting his parents, was apparently working on a story for a national newspaper – maybe about the development of renewable energy proposed for Shetland, or maybe his reason was more personal? Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez is not the man he once was, since the death of his fiancée and at first he takes a back seat in the investigations, led by Detective Inspector Willow Reeves (originally from the Hebrides) who is drafted in from the Inverness team to head up the investigation. But eventually his natural curiosity takes over and he decides to help the inquiry, and his knowledge of the local community is vital in catching the killer.

Murder in the Mill Race by E C R Lorac – Dr Raymond Ferens and his wife move to a practice at Milham in the Moor in North Devon. Everyone says that Sister Monica, warden of a children’s home, is a saint – but is she? A few months after the Ferens’ arrival her body is found drowned in the mill race. Chief Inspector Macdonald faces one of his most difficult cases in a village determined not to betray its dark secrets to a stranger.

Time is a Killer by Michel Bussi – Every summer Clotilde, her brother, Nicolas and her parents, Paul and Palma Idrissi visit Paul’s parents in Corsica. Twenty seven years earlier her parents and brother were killed in a car crash. Her grandparents are still alive but are reluctant to talk about the accident and the locals seem to resent her presence. She’d kept a diary, writing about her holiday, her family and friends, but had left it behind just before they all set off in the car and after the accident it had disappeared. As Clotilde delves into her memories she begins to realise that the past is not quite as she thought it was.

On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill, the 17th Dalziel and Pascoe novel, a complex book, that begins with a transcript written by Betsy Allgood, then aged seven, telling what had happened in the little village of Dendale in Yorkshire before the valley was flooded to provide a reservoir. That summer three little girls had gone missing. No bodies were ever found, and the best suspect, a strange lad named Benny Lightfoot, was held for a time, then released. Fifteen years later another little girl, Lorraine, also aged seven went out for a walk one morning with her dog before her parents got up and didn’t return home, reviving memories of the missing children from fifteen years earlier.

The Malice of Waves by Mark Douglas-Home, Cal McGill is an oceanographer, who works for environmental organisations tracking oil spills using wind speeds and data on ocean currents. Known as the Sea Detective he uses his expertise in tracking human bodies and sea-borne objects. So when the police investigations failed to discover what had happened to Max Wheeler who had disappeared from a remote Scottish island, his family asked Cal for his help. It is a fascinating book, not only an engrossing mystery, but also a study of the sea, of birds’ eggs (I had never heard of erythristic eggs before), of obsessions and of the way people cope, or don’t cope with grief.

The Lake District Murder by John Bude – a police procedural, showing in intricate detail how the detectives investigate a crime. In this case a body is discovered in a car outside a lonely garage on a little used road. At first it appears that Jack Clayton one of the garage owners had committed suicide, but there are a couple of clues pointing to murder and when Inspector Meredith discovers that Clayton was planning to marry and move abroad it turns into a murder investigation. This book really takes you back in time. It was first published in 1935, which means that police methods of investigations particularly in rural areas were very different. Inspector Meredith uses buses or trains or travels the local roads on a motor cycle with a side car and pops into the local post office to use the telephone. It’s a slow process.

Entry Island by Peter May, set in the present day Magdalen Islands, part of the province of Quebec, in the Gulf of St Lawrence, and in the nineteenth century on the Isle of Lewis at the time of the Highland Clearances.  It mixes together two stories and two genres, crime fiction and historical fiction. It has a strong sense of place in both locations and beautiful descriptions of the landscape. Detective Sime Mackenzie, based in Montreal is part of the team sent to Entry Island to investigate the death of the wealthy businessman, James Cowell found stabbed to death. His wife, Kirsty is the obvious suspect. Sime is suffering from insomnia, a situation made worse by the fact that his ex-wife is also on the investigating team.