Read This: Books under the Radar is a weekly post written by a guest author – often a friend of mine, someone I’ve met on my writerly travels, or an author I admire – who recommends three books they think deserve more recognition. If you’re interested in buying any of the books, please click on the covers and give these hidden gems some love. You can see the full list of books which have been selected, as well as the author’s latest book on Bookshop.org, where you can have a browse and buy any that take your fancy. Happy reading!

Read This: Jo Furniss

Jo wrote me a lovely comment on one of my Read This: Books Under the Radar posts on Instagram, and as simple as that, I invited her on. Here’s what she has to say about herself:

After spending a decade as a broadcast journalist for the BBC, Jo gave up the glamour of night shifts to become a freelance writer and expatriate, living in Singapore, Switzerland and Cameroon.

Jo’s latest novel, Dead Mile, is a murder mystery set in a traffic jam on a gridlocked motorway. A twist on the classic locked-room mystery, it has been described as a “literary joyride” with a “deeply human protagonist in an all-too-relatable setting”.

Her debut, a survival thriller called All the Little Children, was an Amazon Charts bestseller. Jo lives on the south coast of England. http://www.jofurniss.com/
https://www.instagram.com/jofurnissauthor/
https://www.facebook.com/JoFurnissAuthor

White City by Dominic Nolan 

In White City, the most brazen heist in history sends shockwaves through 1950’s London – and tears apart the lives of two families.

Dominic Nolan is a writers’ writer; well respected by fellow crime authors, but richly deserving of a wider readership who enjoy great stories told with literary mastery. His deep research and obvious fondness for the time and place of his novel results in a complex fictional world, imagined with sometimes brutal perceptiveness, and peopled with characters who rise from the page.

White City feels like a return to a golden age of hard-boiled crime — a worthy successor to the likes of James Ellroy — but it benefits from a softer core, a kind-heartedness that will make you fall in love, laugh and cry. Crime is rarely this compassionate

Gallows Wood by Louisa Scarr

The first in a new police procedural series that features dog handler PC Lucy Halliday and her spaniel Moss. Louisa Scarr brings something new to the genre by allowing space in her novels for the detectives to be fully human, exploring their back stories, their inter-relationships, their love lives. She’s especially good at sexual tension! All this and the fascinating work of Moss, the cadaver dog.

It’s always a joy to discover a new series and the next PC Halliday book is coming soon — called Memorial Park, and featuring a new police dog with a different specialism — so you won’t have to wait long for another installment.

Edith’s Diary by Patricia Highsmith

Of course, the author of the Talented Mr Ripley needs no introduction… but many readers don’t venture beyond the novels that feature her most famous creation, literature’s best-loved and most-loathed psychopath.

In Edith’s Diary, Highsmith writes in a lower gear. You can almost hear her literary engine growling. The bleak story stalks along with the menace of a kerb crawler, a masterpiece of suspense. But it is also deeply humane – perhaps a surprise from a writer known to be a terrible misanthrope.

Edith is a middle-aged Pennsylvanian housewife stuck in a loveless marriage with a son who has gone off the rails, and an elderly relative dumped in her care. She copes with the misogynistic injustices of her half-life by writing a fantastical version of her own story in a diary. It is a cry for help that no-one will ever hear.

Edith’s Diary is an intimate depiction of a complex woman’s inner life and it left me FURIOUS for days. So maybe the book does reflect that darkest side of Highsmith after all — whereas as a more simple psychological thriller might serve up justice or catharsis, she doesn’t give a fig about making the reader feel better.  

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You might not know that Louisa Scarr is aka Sam Holland, an author I interviewed about her writing process for Winchester Books Festival earlier this year – and I can tell you her writing process is very interesting! But, I haven’t read any of her novels writing as Louisa Scarr, so I’m very interested in this one. And I have also loved The Talented Mr Ripley, but as Jo intimates, it is the only Highsmith I’ve read… now to put that right. Any of these three that catch your eye? And if you’d like to be told about future Read This recommendations, you can follow me on Instagram, or subscribe to my newsletter.

More Read This: Books Under the Radar

Lou Morrish author of Women of War
Francesca Ramsay author of Pinch Me
Sarah Leipciger author of Moon Road
Tim Chapman university librarian
Juliet West author of The Faithful
Lindsay Hunter author of Hot Springs Drive
Gina Chung author of Sea Change
Susmita Bhattacharya author of Table Manners
Vanessa Harbour author of Safe
Freya North author of The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne
Judith Heneghan author of Birdeye
Clare Mackintosh author of I Promise it won’t always Hurt like This
Barney Norris author of Undercurrent
Jo Leevers author of The Last Time I saw You
Alice Winn author of In Memmoriam
Anna Mazzola author of The House of Secrets
Alice Peterson author of The Saturday Place
Jenna Smith bookblogger
Lucy Atkins author of Windmill Hill
LV Matthews author of To Love a Liar
Ruth Thomas author of The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line