-
4 days ago | 
thetimes.com | Victoria Segal |Jake Helm |John Dugdale |Helen Stewart
-
Nov 29, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | James Owen |John Dugdale
The thriller world has been rejuvenated recently by the arrival of two former intelligence operatives who are bringing fresh insights into how spies operate on the ground in the 2020s. David McCloskey and IS (Ilana) Berry lead the pack of our best thrillers of the year. But maybe you want lighter fare? What about a Miss Marple-style whodunnit mixed with scabrous social satire? “Think Jilly Cooper meets noir,” our critic says. Intriguing.
-
Nov 9, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | John Dugdale
After the international espionage of his Paul Samson series, it’s as if Henry Porter is testing himself here: can he write something equally enthralling set in dull old Britain — even in Milton Keynes? Slim Parsons, an MI5 officer in semi-disgrace, is sent there to go undercover on Middle Kingdom, an investigative website. Her paranoid bosses view its reporting of government corruption and waste as a threat and want an excuse to shut it down.
-
Oct 30, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Tim Glanfield |Jake Helm |Victoria Segal |John Dugdale
You may use BBC iPlayer to stream the news or to catch up on Eastenders and Doctor Who, but it is well worth exploring the breadth of the streaming service’s catalogue. BBC iPlayer is home to recent headline-grabbing dramas likeIndustry and Showtrial, as well as older favourites like Life on Mars and Spooks.
-
Oct 12, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | John Dugdale
Shane Collins will soon retire from the CIA and as his last posting is Manama, Bahrain, it’ll be more like coming in from the heat than the cold of Berlin. Jaded and boozy but seemingly astute, Collins spends his days shuttling between the slums (where he meets his mole, Rashid) and the affluent zones where Americans work and live. Initially the veteran shows up his callow young bosses in their expat bubble as complacently ignorant of Manama’s potential for revolution.
-
Oct 1, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Tim Glanfield |Jake Helm |Victoria Segal |John Dugdale
There are so many streaming services these days competing for our business that it is sometimes easy to forget what a goldmine of television is available on BBC iPlayer at no extra cost. Although once a relatively short-term repository of the latest broadcast shows for catch-up, the streaming service has over the past few years grown into a seriously impressive archive of the best of the BBC past and present.
-
Aug 10, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | John Dugdale
After a woman is murdered in her Manhattan apartment, an anonymous phone tip leads to John Jackson’s arrest.
-
Jul 13, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | John Dugdale
Vanessa and Kate work in Monaco for a British law firm whose chief client is a Belarusian plutocrat; through money-laundering, authorising illicit transactions and using offshore accounts, they protect his loot at a time when oligarchs are getting sanctioned, driven on by the pair’s increasingly manic boss, Rob (a semi-comical fugitive straight from an 1980s Martin Amis novel).
-
Jun 8, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | John Dugdale
We meet Judy in a present-day prologue, when she’s about to be arrested in France on suspicion of two murders 20 years apart. Subsequent chapters trace her career as a lifelong grifter and thief — seducing her future husband, a rich widower, in 1980s Cape Cod, and stealing jewellery as a guest of friends in the 1990s and 2000s — and are interwoven with the same holidays or parties viewed from the perspective of her daughter, Francesca.
-
May 7, 2024 | 
thetimes.co.uk | John Dugdale
Abir Mukherjee’s remarkable first thriller — a departure from his award-winning Wyndham and Banerjee crime series — follows a terrorist crisis during a US presidential election campaign. Opening with a suicide bomber killing 65 people in a Los Angeles mall, it climaxes with a threat to both candidates and their supporters at final rallies in Florida.
