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Crime fiction reflecting current preoccupations

15 August 2016

I have heard it said that, if you want to know the preoccupations of a particular period of the last century, you should read the contemporary crime fiction. The kind of crimes featured in those books reflect the anxieties of the time. So international terrorism - the horror of the atrocity which can strike anyone at any moment - will continue to feature in crime novels of the next five years. So will domestic violence - particularly against women - because that is a silent crime whose scale is only gradually becoming realised. And in a time when almost all of us have been close to having our online banking details accessed by fraudsters - if we haven't actually been victims - there's going to be a lot of crime fiction written about the perils of the internet, as confirmed by the Kobo independent research.


Simon Brett in Bookbrunch