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The Stranger Diaries By Elly Griffiths HMH, 352 pages, $25
If you’re expecting another book in the English novelist Elly Griffiths’ brilliant series featuring Ruth Galloway, this is not the book for you in the sense that Ruth makes no appearances in the story. But it’s also exactly for you in the sense that it’s as expert and quirky as any Galloway book.
The story, set among the students and staff of a country comprehensive school, is reasonably conventional in its murders, but almost entirely original in everything else. An English teacher is stabbed to death. The murders take on a weird Gothic element of mystery when an ancient horror novel emerges as an influence on some of the school’s teachers and students.
Sorting through all of this — and much more when the murders don’t stop at one — is DS Harbinder Kaur. Sikh, lesbian and caustic, Kaur comes across as a completely original character, as nervy and dauntless as Ruth Galloway.
Beautiful Bad By Annie Ward HarperCollins, 370 pages, $24.99
Readers need to be off-the-charts clever to figure out who’s going to kill whom in this disturbing first novel by the American writer Annie Ward. That’s especially true when nothing close to murder occurs until it seems time for the curtain to ring down on the entire narrative.
The two featured characters are Ian, a British soldier who draws freelance guerrilla assignments in the world’s cruellest danger zones, and Maddie, a travel writer whose search for material often takes her criss-crossing into Ian’s territory. For all the possibilities of physical danger that the venues open up, the book’s tension is almost exclusively of the psychological kind.
By alternating narrators and tossing a couple of other dangerously spooky characters into the mix, the book keeps its readers eternally off balance, not a pleasant sensation but one that feels oddly just right for this strange novel.
Run Away By Harlan Coben Grand Central, 372 pages, $38
Simon Green has it all. In no particular order, the list includes a grand apartment on Manhattan’s Central Park West, a big bucks position as an investment adviser, an adoring wife who is a top-tier pediatrician, and three beautiful kids.
A charmed life for Simon? Not quite. It happens that the oldest child in the family, a university-age daughter, has become addicted to hard drugs under the sway of a fiendish dealer and has vanished from Simon’s world. Simon, great dad that he is, makes it his mission to find her.
This is a typical Harlan Coben narrative buildup, nothing wildly original, but as in countless smoothly stylish earlier novels, Coben serves up characters and plot turns that are startlingly inventive. All of this keeps the book springing fast ones on the reader down to the last word. Actually, the last three words.
ABeautiful Corpse By Christi Daugherty Minotaur, 336 pages, $34.99
Harper McClain grew up with murder. When she was 12, she discovered the body of her mother, who had been shot to death. The murder was never solved.
Now, years later, Harper is a newspaper reporter in her hometown of Savannah, Ga. She covers — what else — the crime beat. Harper belongs to the aggressive school of journalism, an attitude that, as we learn in Christi Daugherty’s first novel, can be counted on to rile Savannah’s entire police department.
All of this means that when someone guns down a young woman who is a law student by day and a bartender by night, Harper’s hard-nosed journalistic style gets her in tense trouble with several random suspects as well as with every cop whose path Harper crosses. Still, on the way to solving the murder, Harper emerges as a singularly nervy civilian investigator.