This Month

We're leaving no stone unturned in our search for top-shelf whodunits this month. We do things in style with a John Banville interview about writing hardboiled fiction under his Benjamin Black nom-de-plume. We also chat with publisher Johnny Temple about the vision behind Akashic's City Noir series. Meanwhile, we found time to vet some books for you this month — rising star Tana French offers a crisp literary thriller, Tom Rob Smith creates an atmospheric Stalin-era page-turner, and Mohammed Hanif reimagines a famous assassination. For those who like mysteries that don't involve a corpse, there's a more genteel forgery-whodunit surrounding the world's most expensive bottle of wine.