About Crime Express

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Featured Titles

	The Okinawa Dragon by Monaghan, Nicola Henri wants the elusive Okinawa Dragon, a one-off card given to a Japanese businessman who refuses to sell. A plan is hatched... £4.99		The Quarry by Littleford, Clare A frightened phone call from her young daughter sends Jenny Carter into the darkness of Quarry Woods... £4.99

Crime Express - a new imprint from Five Leaves

Crime Express books are neatly produced A6 paperbacks with "French flaps" - long crime stories, short novellas - call them what you will - coming in around 100 pages.

Crime Express books are perfect for a train journey or a (very) long bath. The writers range from long established crime writers like Stephen Booth and John Harvey to writers from other genres, like Nicola Monaghan, trying crime fiction for the first time. The series is edited by David Belbin.

Future books to watch out for include hard-boiled Edinburgh and Newcastle crime by Allan Guthrie and Ray Banks; Lawrence Block on lust, and a non-fiction Crime Express special on the films of Raymond Chandler novels. Crime Express is a numbered, and eminently collectable series!

Here's what Mystery Scene in America said about the first three:

And now for something(s) completely different: Claws, Stephen Booth; The Mentalist, Rod Duncan; Trouble in Mind, John Harvey (all by Crime Express, an imprint of Five Leaves Press). Someone probably should have thought of this before—a series of flapped-paperback novellas roughly the size of postcards and not much heavier. At less than 100 pages per book, each is thin enough to slip into your pocket or purse.

The marketing geniuses at Crime Express deserve kudos for beginning this smart series with Stephen Booth’s extraordinary Claws, set on the Yorkshire moors. Someone has been collecting the nests and eggs of endangered raptors and selling them on a growing black market. As Derbyshire police detective DC Ben Cooper searches for the nest thief, he compares goshawks to humans: the goshawks come out on top. An evocative meditation on a vanishing world, Claws will send Booth fans rushing to reread his full- length novels.

Also worth checking out are Rod Duncan’s The Mentalist, starring a psychic who may or may not be a fraud, and who gets tangled up in crime when he predicts a death; and John Harvey’s Trouble in Mind, in which a professional soccer player-turned PI tracks down a soldier gone AWOL upon his return from Iraq. These three little books, all set in various areas of England, are the answer to a traveller’s dream. Portable, yet sturdy enough to survive a world of crowded airports.

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