Yorkshire copper DCI Jim Oldroyd gets caught up in the mystery of a body found down a well-known cave. There’s certainly no shortage of suspects as he tries to unravel a complex web of lies and distrust. The Body in the Dales, first published in 2017 as The Body in Jingling Pot, is a whodunit…
Scottish caves have turned up again in crime fiction … JD Kirk (a pen-name for writer Barry Hutchison) has written 21 novels featuring DCI Jack Logan, stationed in Inverness with a responsibility for the Northern Major Incident Team, which basically covers the whole Highland Region from Elgin right down to the island of Mull. I…
Alan Jeffreys heads over to the American mid-West for an enjoyable underground murder romp in company with an appropriately named main character. Crime fiction searches high and low for interesting murder locations, and Maidens of the Cave is no exception. After a suspicious death in an Indiana cave system, the FBI’s Illinois Forensics Branch in…
Caves turn up regularly in crime fiction, and this time it’s Scotland’s turn to see some speleological literary action. Karen Pirie, the main character in several books by Val McDermid, is a Detective Inspector in charge of investigating cold cases in Fife, eastern Scotland. In A Darker Domain, she is presented with a tempting scenario…
Following Alan Jefferys’ review of Concrete Evidence by Victor S Wigmore, Darkness Below heard from Jim Pennington who came across another novel by Wigmore. Jim now takes up the tale … Adventures Underground grabbed my attention in an Oxfam shop – it carried a politely salacious inscription: “To Marjorie, With many thanks for ‘services rendered’….
Alan Jeffreys recently came across a curious manuscript entitled Concrete Evidence, a speleo novel by Victor Stephen Wignore and reviews it here for Darkness Below. Squirrelled away amongst the papers of Eli Simpson and the now defunct British Speleological Association is a typed, carbon copy manuscript on quarto paper of a ‘thriller’ amounting to some…
A young woman is so savagely beaten that it’s impossible to work out her identity. Becca thinks she knows who the woman must be, but the police aren’t convinced by her claims. But someone is determined to silence her … Jared Godwin is addicted to caves and mines, as well as dark, secret places where…
Swildon’s Hole and a terminally bad experience in Sump 1 feature in our latest look at caving fiction. I’ve followed Damian Boyd’s West Country police series on and off over the years but managed to miss out on Death Sentence, which features caving as part of the plot, so I’m grateful to Bob Mehew for…
Kate Mosse is better known for Labyrinth and other books, but Alan Jeffreys recommends taking a look at her novella, The Cave, set in the Pyrenees Quick Reads, as outlined on the publisher’s promotional blurb, are ‘bite-sized books by bestselling writers … for people who want a short, fast-paced read.’ Novellas by authors as diverse…
As part of a new series on classic caving books, both fact and fiction, Linda Wilson reviews Styx, a 1982 adventure novel with a surprisingly up-to-date twist … Two Japanese geologists on a visit to the Yugoslavian karst stumble on the find of the century, a previously unknown cave containing a roof decorated with what…
TV archaeologist Nolan Moore is in search of a mysterious cavern in the Grand Canyon, discovered in 1909 by Kincaid, a man who returned with fabulous tales of an immense cave, decorated in places with what he described as hieroglyphs which hint at a more ancient occupation of the Americas than has always been believed….
Respectable patent lawyer Peter Hamilton is found dead at a spot known as The Devil’s Dice, a remote crag in the Peak District which houses a vast network of caves known as The Labyrinth, feared for their complexity and dark reputation. The caves, now gated, have long been known as a suicide spot. The legend…
Elly Griffith’s latest outing for Norfolk archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway, involves the chalk mines under Norwich, with which I have a certain amount of history even though I’ve never visited them. The combination of mining and archaeology promptly took The Chalk Pit to the top of the To Be Read pile. When a homeless woman…
Former doctor Hamish Wolfe is in prison, convicted of the murders of three young women and suspected of the murder of a fourth, and maybe more. The women all shared one characteristic. He is said to have preyed on overweight women and there are persistent rumours that this started as long ago as his days…
The mysterious and dangerous Le Guen’s Cave near Marseille claims another victim, an experienced diver who has been studying the Upper Palaeolithic paintings and engravings found ten years previously. The man gets into trouble resurfacing after a dive to a depth of 38 metres and has decompression problems. He’s not expected to survive for long….
DC Nick Belsey is driven down into the miles of abandoned tunnels under the streets of London in search for a missing woman. As it was his fault she was there in the first place, his job will be on the line if that embarrassing fact comes out. Detective Constable Nick Belsey isn’t exactly a…
DI Tony McLean struggles to find a link between a series of bizarre killings in Edinburgh. Prayer for the Dead, the fifth book in James Oswald’s series about Edinburgh detective, DI Tony McLean, a magnet both for trouble and weird happenings, gets off to a suitably creepy start beneath the streets and the tension continues…
Garrison in Southern Indiana is a town that’s harbouring quite a few secrets, as Mark Novak discovers to his cost when he’s sent to look into an exceedingly cold case. Mark Novak works as a private investigator for Innocence Inc., a firm that specialises in taking on death row cases on a pro bono basis…
