The Ashes of London: The first book in the brilliant historical crime mystery series from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author: Book 1 (James Marwood & Cat Lovett)

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He reviews in several publications, in particular the Spectator [2] (whose crime fiction reviewer he was for ten years) and The Times.

The Monday Night Club discuss whether Jude Bellingham is England's best talent since Paul Gascoigne, after he was named best young player at Monday's Ballon d'Or ceremony. The cubicle where she tweezes, epilates and massages is a confessional where her clients reveal their secrets. Yet this smattering of commonplace knowledge can dull our appreciation of the scale and spectacle of the Great Fire and the devastation it wreaked. I'm pretty fussy about historical fiction: I've read too many rubbish stories where the author has become obsessed with telling me the history and forgetting to tell me a story. This is a major issue since they are meant to be a major character, going forward and yet - we're supposed to accept a person who killed two people as the sleuth or co-sleuth in future?

The paperback edition was made Waterstone's thriller of the month for two consecutive months through January and February 2017 and was the number one bestseller for eight weeks in The Times/Waterstones chart. I enjoyed the setting and voices of the two main characters, but the story itself was rather slow and seemed to be lacking in some important parts.

Paul’s in the fire, and then James accompanies his employer to visit her former home, to investigate the murder of one of the servants of the house, whose body was found in the burned out St Paul’s. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. There are a lot of historical novels set around this period but this is well written and worth a read.If it opens a little slowly, the pace soon picks as the reader is engaged by the copious detail which is Andrew Taylor’s hallmark. Even 6 years into the restoration the tensions and conflicts generated by the death of Charles I and the years of the commonwealth are still around. Now his reign is threatened by unrepentant republicans, the most radical being the Fifth Monarchists who want a Puritan theocracy with King Jesus as ruler. I felt the end was anti-climatic but that may just be my personal preference and always wanting a little more. Meantime Marwood has been extorted into working for Whitehall by a shadowy figure he knows as Williamson, a man who apparently has significant influence with the king, Privy Council, and Common Council.