Crime fiction with Mat Coward: October 6, 2026

Seven year old Sherlock, feminist crime fiction, Liverpudlian revenge-terror and a moral victory over murderous arithmetic

Music Review / 5 October 2026 Dancing in the aisles 5 October 2026 DAVID NICHOLSON, helped by SKYLAR and BEHATI, assess WNO’s Family concert

Ahead of this Sunday’s concert commemorating the Battle of Cable Street, Chris Searle speaks to trumpeter CLAUDE DEPPA, pioneer member of the Grand Union Orchestra

MICHAL BONCZA recommends an exhibition that does Rene Magritte quiet justice

WILL PODMORE welcomes a strategy that takes us well beyond Labour’s contradictory and limited ambitions for Britain’s future

SYLVIA HIKINS welcomes a science-based case for optimism, with positive examples of positive ecological adaptation

KATY HUDSON, a heartbroken young widow with several siblings to support, is desperate not to end up in service, at the start of The Last Telegram of Mrs Hudson by Mattea Orr (Head of Zeus, £10.99). Not only does she despise the parasitic class who are the main employers of servants, but she’s also aware that being deferential to posh twits is not one of her talents.

Needs must in hard times, however, and as it transpires being maid to Lady Holmes — a fellow widow, and mother to a precocious seven-year-old son, Sherlock — doesn’t involve much domestic work. Her ladyship has little interest in dresses or dinner parties, preferring footprints, clues and the unmasking of dangerous criminals.

This debut is an enjoyable and socially aware addition to that corner of the Holmes-by-other-hands genre which puts Conan Doyle’s lesser characters centre stage.

The Hard-Hearted Detective (Gatekeeper Press, £13.92) is the second novel in the new series by Liza Cody, the pioneer of feminist crime fiction in Britain. It’s narrated by ex-cop Hannah, now a south London short order cook, whose ambitions to become a full-time private investigator are hampered by the fact that her clients rarely pay and that her address is a van perma-parked in a cafe car park.

Short-tempered, grudge-bearing, self-destructive and incurably impetuous, she’d be her own worst enemy if it wasn’t for all the other eager applicants for that position, led by the local police.

In this instalment, Hannah deals with modern slavery, a flasher in the park, a very strange house-sitting assignment, and a dead body to which she has inconvenient links.

There aren’t many writers who understand the tricky and much-abused art of seriocomic writing as well as Cody does.

Latest in the long-running series featuring DI Ruth Hunter of North Wales Police, The Liverpool Killings by Simon McCleave (Canelo Crime, £9.99) finds Ruth and her team dealing with two revenge-related emergencies simultaneously. One of her officers has been kidnapped by a far-right terror gang, and another has discovered that a hit has been ordered on him by an organised crime group.

It’s a compelling read-in-one-go thriller which also finds time to create convincingly driven characters.

Undercover cop Travis has infiltrated one of Australia’s most powerful and ruthless corporations, in Full Circle by Chris Hammer (Wildfire, £20). When his cover is blown he barely escapes with his life. Having quit the police he gets a job as chauffeur for a man, Felix, who’s made his fortune co-ordinating shorting attacks on companies, using casino-like market manoeuvres to benefit from destroying his target’s share price. 

Felix lives by the motto that business is about “arithmetic, not morality,” and he is planning one final, unprecedentedly massive coup — against the firm in which Travis was recently embedded. And that’s when the murders start.

An epic tale of dynastic struggles and family secrets, this absorbing triumph of a novel shows that, in fact, everything comes down to morality — albeit of a somewhat malleable type.

Books / 17 September 2026 An introduction to Immanuel Kant 17 September 2026 GORDON PARSONS enjoys Kant’s ‘mind-boggling’ theory of human reality: that we create the reality we experience

Book Reviews / 1 September 2026 Crime fiction with Mat Coward: September 1, 2026 1 September 2026 A misfit couple unhappily ever after, a dead man walking, dodgy journos, and trench art trucking

Science Fiction and Fantasy / 11 August 2026 Science fiction and Fantasy with Mat Coward: August 11, 2026 11 August 2026 Monster profits on the Tube, paternal dilemmas for time travellers, and an alien abduction buddy saga

Crime fiction / 4 August 2026 Crime fiction with MAT COWARD August 4 2026 4 August 2026 Conman conned in a twisty thriller, blind trust tested to the limit, cunning murder methods, and tip-top police procedural