? UNDER THE LAMPLIGHT-

This round up of the latest in crime and mystery thrillers from the Financial Timesis bound to keep you company at night as the days get shorter and shorter.

Robert Galbraith’s (J.K Rowling’s crime-novel pseudonym) The Running Grave, is the seventh and longest volume in her Strike series so far, giving Proust’s brick of a book a run for its money. The 1k-page thriller brings back Cormoran Strike and Robin Elacott as they take on a religious cult in the Norfolk countryside.

The dean of crime / legal thrillers, John Grisham, is back with a sequel to The Firm.The Exchange, set 15 years after the first novel, sees Mitchell McDeere getting involved in an international incident when a senior partner’s daughter is kidnapped while he is on an assignment in Rome. Did we mention that the novel is set in the 2000s, that Ghaddafi is involved, and that there are no courtroom scenes? Well, now you know.

Gothic + crime = A great read. Palace of the Shadows by Ray Celestin brings us to the English countryside, again. This novel deliberates the precepts of beauty as a misunderstood artist is assigned to design a wing for a house that is steeped in stories of madness and death.

Other special mentions go to M.R MacKenzie, the legendary Scottish author who squeezed out a fourth volume, Women Who Kill, featuring criminology lecturer Anna Scavolini, who investigates a woman who slaughtered her entire family.

Lilja Sigurðardóttir’s latest novel, White as Snow, takes place in the freezing plains of Iceland with a chilling crime to boot: A container filled with dead women is discovered on the coast.

To warmer climes, Shot with Crimson by Nicola Upson is set in Hollywood and on Alfred Hitchcock’s set of Rebecca, where a murder takes place. Upson’s focus on real life characters, such as Hitchcock, his family, and actors such as Laurence Olivier.

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