Genre: Thrillers

By Jeremy Jehu Published: 6:30AM GMT 03 March 2010

The Shakespeare Curse

by J L Carrell

Genre - Historical Thrillers, examination Thrillers: examination Citizen by Charlie Brooks: examination Genre: chronological thrillers The 50 most appropriate games of 2008

498pp, Sphere, �6.99 (pbk)

Kate Stanley, the favourite of J L Carrells The Shakespeare Secret, was the well read love kid of Trevor Nunn and Lara Croft, a erudite theatre executive with a sideline in cold and damp movement heroics. That book valid one of the some-more successful attempts to make a high IQ in to a counterpart of The Da Vinci Code; Carrell, a Harvard academic, cheerfully balances acres of aspiring grant and a extravagantly involved tract opposite incessant mayhem and the physique equate of a small war. All of that creates this sequel, that finds Kate fighting various evildoers for an early breeze of Macbeth with wicked powers, a acquire second assisting of delectable hokum that you dont feel thankful to censor on the train.

Bequest

by AK Shevchenko

346pp, Headline, �19.99

Ukrainian fable has it that the Bank of England owes the nation �300 billion in seductiveness on an 18th-century Cossack bullion deposit. In 2001, Kate, a London counsel with Ukrainian roots, is seduced in to the poke for the blank will critical to authenticating the economy-busting claim. When her customer and partner is murdered not by the afterwards chancellor Gordon Brown, but by a brooding KGB archivist with a sequence killers skills and his own bulletin Kate pursues the box with suicidal zeal. Told in together time and in a staid unreal character somewhat marred by a parsimonious proceed to parcelling out information, A K Shevchenkos impediment thriller is a timely (given the new election) window on Russias centuries-old termination of the Ukrainian inhabitant spirit.

The Levels

by Sean Cregan

313pp, Headline, �19.99

The publishers of Sean Cregan aka John Rickardss initial stand-alone thriller competence find that drifting wrapping costs sales. Given that he is a Briton and his general US city is called Newport, the content wholly fails to diffuse the sense that he has set a fondly crafted relic to American medieval pap in Gwent. In fact, the environment a failing in duty city-within-a-city housing plan assigned by a untamed underclass in that an ex-spy, a tainted womanlike patrolman and a drug-addicted teenage murderer quarrel to tarry is quintessentially American. Cregan writes breathlessly grand pap with genuine brio but his environment and set pieces are so patently constructed that you find yourself inventory a litany of the classical movies that desirous them.

The Spire

by Richard North Patterson

371pp, Macmillan, �12.99

Richard North Patterson is a important counsel incited important writer but fans of his Nineties novels couldnt assistance suspecting that he indeed hankered after a third career as a shrink. After a decade of essay thrillers with broader domestic horizons, he has revisited that early character of storytelling so minutely focused on his characters mental container that they set upon up an cognisance with the reader hardly equalled in bestselling fiction. This story of a abounding but lamentation counsel perplexing to rescue his old college whilst looking love and the resolution to a 16-year-old murder, is a happy lapse to the cosily claustrophobic welcome of Pattersons well-heeled but condemned universe let down, alas, by a issue so jaw-droppingly viewable that youve long-since discharged it as a red herring.

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