A travel, lifestyle and reviews blog by Dave Lancaster

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

A fractured woman finds strength via sin in Dennis Lehane’s riveting Since We Fell

With Since We Fell, Lehane is really going the extra mile, swapping his labyrinthine ensembles for a probing look at one woman’s determination to combat increasingly crippling emotions

The Judge and His Hangman: When the reader becomes a pawn in a crime writer’s wicked game

The Judge and His Hangman could be devoured in a single sitting, its haunting contents continuing to unspool for days after the backcover folds over.

A desert trip to cherish: Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand is an oasis of literary ideas

As if Graham Greene took The Comedians and got Hunter S Thompson to take it out the brain-boiling wilderness for a spot of fear and loathing.

The Executioner Weeps: A heady tale of memory loss and dread by Frederic Dard

Reading The Executioner Weeps is reminder of how direct and well-paced a crime novel can be.

A great Japanese novella blossoms: Exploring Spring Garden

Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden is quietly a great many things, but primarily it appears to be a meditation of seasonality. Buildings are constructed in the spring, flourish in the summer, recede in the autumn and are knocked down in the winter to be rebuilt in the spring again. Their inhabitants follow a similar cycle. They…