Our Reviews

At firstCLUE, we only review books we love, or at least like a whole lot—and the reviews appear months in advance of publication.

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Recent Reviews

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by Henrietta Thornton

Let’s start by acknowledging that this book has been panned elsewhere—but that’s because it must be approached from the right angle. Readers expecting a …

by Danise Hoover

In a spectacular example of a post-war noir novel we have Billie Walker, a hardboiled PI following in her father’s tradition, with her specialty …

by Brian Kenney

A brilliant novel that at first seems to be a simple murder case but grows into an expansive investigation of the nature of crime …

by Henrietta Thornton

In the acknowledgments to this immersive debut, Walsh explains that she took a novel-writing course partly to convince herself not to write this series …

by Jeff Ayers

At 7:01 AM on an ordinary day, five people with significantly different backgrounds arrive at a London subway platform. One will die when the …

by Danise Hoover

The body of a young woman is found in the desert outside a nothing Texas town, stirring memories of the murder of the daughter …