Ashley Dyer's Blog, page 3

This Shelf Indulgence review focuses on a classic. Julia Almond, born to drab suburban life in Edwardian London, longs for more. Short-sighted and vain, she sees the world in an astigmatic blur, and yearns for the romantic fairy-tale she once glimpsed in a toy peepshow. We meet her at sixteen, an incurably romantic child-woman, careless of others, yet with a spirit and charm which is compelling.

The opening chapter reminded me of Katharine Mansfield, capturing the viva...

Although set in a time well before social media as we know it today, this Shelf Indulgence subject demonstrates the power of the media to taint and condemn in criminal investigations. It’s a fictional tale inspired by the notorious real-life story of Alice Crimmins, whose two children vanished from their locked bedroom in the NYC Queens rental apartment, in July 1965, and were later found dead. In a trial by media, their mother, an attractive and sexually active wo...

Why Be Happy . . . ? begins with a description of a mother: ‘A woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge.’ One of the many surprises of this book, reviewed at Shelf Indulgence, is that it is not crime fiction – nor even a novel – but a memoir.

The ‘woman’ is Constance Winterson, Jeanette’s adoptive mother, a monstrous depressive who terrorized her husband and daughter; a desperately lonely woman who adopted a baby because...

I recently spent a few pleasant evenings listening to the Radio 4 adaptation of The Maid, by Nita Prose, and it sent me looking for this Shelf Indulgence review of a crime novel published twenty years ago, which also features a central protagonist with Asperger’s. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery like no other. The detective and narrator is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger’s Syndrome; he knows a very great dea...

It’s not often a book keeps me up till after midnight; Good Me, Bad Me was one of the rare exceptions. It resulted in several late nights, in fact, as the story inched towards its awful conclusion. Here’s my Shelf Indulgence review.

The premise in itself is compelling: Annie, a serial killer’s daughter, reports her mother to the police. Desperate to save other children, she is equally desperate to save herself. But as the trial approaches, Annie, now in care under an assumed name and ...

In this Shelf Indulgence review, Lisa Gardner opens the action with Massachusetts State Trooper, Bobby Dodge, training his rifle sights on an armed man who is holding his own wife and child hostage. But when Bobby ‘takes a life to save two lives’, he finds himself alone – pitted against a powerful judge from a wealthy Bostonian family – for the dead man was Judge Gagnon’s son, and he is set on taking custody of his sickly grandson away from his daughter-in-law, C...

This book was a research project for my crime novel, Dead Man Walking, and was never intended to be a prospective Shelf Indulgence review target. But the content, and the way that the story is unfolded by these two German journalists reads like a heart-stopping financial thriller. A central plot element in Dead Man Walking relies on the courageous, mind-blowing work of Obermayer and Obermaier and the anonymous informant who blew the worldwide use and abuse of the shadow e...

Er foltert junge Mütter und tötet sie. Und er ist nicht allein …

Während eines Sabbaticals in St. Louis, Missouri, stößt DCI Kate Simms nicht nur überraschend auf ihren unliebsamen Ex- Mentor, Professor Nick Fennimore, sondern auch auf die Spur eines Serienkillers, der es auf junge Mütter und deren Kinder...

In this Shelf Indulgence, I focus on Mystic River – Dennis Lehane’s most compelling novel.  Lehane has it all: elegant prose and gripping action; he can create a memorable character with a few strokes of the pen; his dialogue can make you laugh out loud, or it can flood you with emotion that grabs you by the throat and will not let go.

With Mystic River Lehane is at the height of his powers. He understands what violence does to victims and those who investigate it; he has the s...

Today’s Shelf Indulgence subject is truly extraordinary. Allan Ropper is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Credited with founding the field of neurological intensive care, he knows a thing or two about the brain. Taking the form of a series of case studies, it provides fascinating insights into a neurologist’s work and the often bewildering behaviours caused by the malfunctioning brain.

His style is straight-talking and sometimes wise-cracking – you won’t find the...