Alastair Mabbott

Four books in, a series like Douglas Skelton’s Company of Rogues should probably feel like its various plotlines are coming to a head, but A Thief’s Blood introduces a villain odious enough to kick Jonas Flynt’s inevitable confrontation with the shadowy Fellowship, and a reckoning with his nemesis Lord McCrieff, further down the road without leaving us feeling that the storyline is being unduly prolonged.

Matilda is, by all accounts, an utterly adorable young lady, “essentially a social butterfly and an incorrigible flirt”, who could charm the birds from the trees. That her personality shines so brightly from the pages of her mother Katy’s book, written with love and a hint of admiration, makes it a pleasure to read.

Only three years separated Bill Burnett’s 2019 dementia diagnosis from his death, and A Last Journey is, at least partly, a way for his widow, Ann, to preserve her memories of that harrowing time.

A prolific author of historical and crime fiction, Stirling-based Douglas Jackson produced the nine-volume Hero of Rome epic, which drew to a close in 2018.

Many times during That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz, Jack Paton will stop to ponder why country music means so much to him, and what makes a man living in windswept Shetland feel that it belongs to him just as much as to the people of Tennessee or Texas.

This debut novel is a coming-of-age story set in 1962 in the fictional Clydeside town of Havoc, based on the author’s childhood home of Dumbarton.

Angie Spoto unveiled her brand of gothic fantasy last year with The Grief Nurse, in which the members of a privileged family on a private island had their more painful emotions eased away by the psychic powers of an indentured servant class.

Review: A Case Of Matricide, Graeme Macrae Burnet. There’s no denying that Booker nominee and Saltire winner Graeme Macrae Burnet’s clever blend of crime and literary metafiction has been an artistic and critical triumph. His books engross as much as they tease, setting up questions about authorship and artifice, but never at the expense of a compelling narrative.

In creating Cal Lovett, featured here in his third novel, Aberdeen-born Heather Critchlow realised that the adventures of a true-crime podcaster could be just as compelling as those of a detective or a criminal lawyer.

Malone’s readers first met Annie Jackson last year in The Murmurs, a nifty supernatural thriller in which her unwanted ability to foresee people’s deaths enabled her to solve a series of murders and almost led to her own premature demise.