A travel, lifestyle and reviews blog by Dave Lancaster

The espionage of innocence: Probing John Le Carre’s new novel A Legacy of Spies

Lies fill rooms like smoke, choking and confusing the inhabitants while the truth slips out unnoticed, its remnants pushed into tall corners by the spreading fumes until nothing is distinguishable from the dark.

An arresting new crime series sounds off with Emma Viskic’s novel Resurrection Bay

If you’re looking for one of the most promising debuts in Australian crime fiction take a trip to Resurrection Bay

All hail the new King of New York: Don Winslow’s The Force is the crime novel of the year

Winslow is out there prowling the streets of New York poking his nose in, inhaling the stench, digesting the smoke and oxygen in his lungs and breathing them out as junkie poetry.

Probing Friedrich Durrenmatt’s nightmare detective novel Suspicion

Durrenmatt often turns the detective genre on its head. Sometimes the crimes just don’t get solved.

A whisky flight: Exploring the ageing process at Glengoyne distillery

This boozy escape act is called the Angels’ Share.

The hardboiled Bond screenplay that never was… Donald E Westlake’s lost novel Forever and a Death lives another day

Reading Forever and a Death is satisfying on dual levels: it’s got thunder of the man behind the Parker novels honing his craft and also the breeze of a writer who is typing on a big budget for the fun of it