Saturday Selection

I seem to be one of the few people who haven’t got round yet to reading Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The Christmas break, and a bit of concentrated reading in between eating and drinking too much, can’t come too soon! Meanwhile, I’ve just received an advance copy of the follow-up, The Girl Who Played With Fire. It’s published by Maclehose Press on 8 January, and it looks good.

Helen Black is a childcare lawyer, and that is, I know, a rewarding but often difficult job. She has, however, managed to find the time to write a couple of crime novels, and the new one, A Place of Safety, is published by Avon on 22 December as a paperback original. The word ‘gritty’ appears in the first line of the press release, and the subject matter isn’t comfortable – an alleged rape of a young refugee.

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn, is published by Macmillan, but not until 9 March. However, it looks as though this one will be getting a big push on the publicity front. There’s an admiring quote from a very distinguished Macmillan author, Minette Walters, and the publishers describe Nunn as ‘a major new talent in global crime fiction’. Quite a claim. The book is set in South Africa in 1952 and ‘explores a divided society through the frame of a classic murder mystery’. One to keep an eye on.