Crime Fiction Author Guides
Discover the crime authors and novels that define a city, a setting, or a subgenre — from Las Vegas noir to small-town stalker thrillers. Curated recommendations from Phillip Strang, author of 150+ crime novels.
The best crime novels set in Adelaide prove that Australia’s most deceptively genteel city has always had a razor’s edge running just beneath its orderly surface — and these four books cut deep.
Adelaide has a reputation as the quiet achiever among Australian cities, all festivals and fine...
The best crime novels set in the Channel Islands prove that isolation is not peace — it is pressure, and pressure, applied long enough to small communities, produces murder.
The Channel Islands occupy a peculiar psychological space in British culture: close enough to France to feel foreign, governed...
The best crime novels set in the Hebrides don’t simply borrow scenery — they weaponise it, turning mist-choked sea lochs and tight-knit island communities into engines of dread as potent as any city alleyway.
Few landscapes on earth are as naturally suited to crime fiction as the Scottish islands....
The best crime novels set in Cumbria understand something essential: that the Lake District’s sublime beauty is not a backdrop — it is a conspirator, lending its mists, its isolation, and its ancient silences to every act of violence committed upon it.
Cumbria is one of Britain’s most visually...
The best crime novels set in Northumberland understand something that softer landscapes never could — that beauty this savage demands equally savage stories.
Northumberland is not a backdrop. It is a protagonist. Its Roman walls, its coal-dark coastline, its moors that swallow sound and its villages...
The Best Crime Novels Set in Hampshire prove that England’s south coast — all tidal mudflats, cathedral cities, and shuttered market towns — hides secrets as dark as anywhere the genre has ventured.
Hampshire is not a county that announces its menace. It offers picture-postcard villages, the sweeping...
The Best Crime Novels Set in Essex prove that Britain’s most stereotyped county conceals some of the darkest, most compelling crime fiction being written today.
Essex has long been dismissed as an easy punchline — reality television, flash cars, and mock-Tudor excess. But the best crime novels...
The Best Crime Novels Set in Kent prove that England’s so-called Garden of England has always grown something darker beneath those apple blossoms — murder, secrets, and the particular menace of communities that smile too readily at strangers.
Kent has a geography tailor-made for crime fiction:...
Sussex has always kept secrets well — and the best crime novels set in Sussex have spent decades prying them loose from behind the flint walls and salt-bitten hedgerows with ruthless, literary precision.
There is something about this county — the chalk downs dropping to the sea, the Georgian terraces...
Hull has always been too interesting, too scarred, and too alive with quiet menace to be ignored by crime fiction — and the best crime novels set in Hull prove exactly that.
There is something about Hull that refuses to be prettified. Perched on the eastern edge of England, its estuary winds and post-industrial...
The best crime novels set in Dundee prove that Scotland’s fourth city — raw, post-industrial, and stubbornly itself — is one of the most compelling backdrops in British crime fiction today.
Edinburgh gets the headlines and Glasgow gets the grit, but Dundee has quietly been building a case of its...
The best crime novels set in Inverness prove that the Highland capital is far more than a scenic gateway — it is a place where secrets calcify in the cold and violence is never far beneath the surface of civility.
Inverness occupies a peculiar position in British crime fiction. It is the urban heart...