WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN
Odd Child Out By Gilly Macmillan Morrow, 405 pages, $19.99
Two 15-year-old schoolboys who are both ordinary and extraordinary hold the centre roles in this touching novel from the talented Gilly Macmillan. Abdi Mahad is a Somali refugee whose father can barely support his family driving a cab in Bristol, England.
Noah Sadler is the son of a highly regarded art photographer whose works include intimate pictures taken in ghastly Somali camps where Abdi’s family once lived. Abdi and Noah consider themselves best friends.
But it’s a friendship with a time limit; Noah suffers from terminal cancer. In the course of this simple and heartbreaking story, small pieces of tragedy enter into the plot before the fates of the two 15-yearolds are decided.
Fever By Deon Meyer Anansi, 538 pages, $22.95
The murder and sleuthing that qualify Fever as a crime novel take up comparatively little space in this 538-page book. That’s because the novel is mostly busy with the serious business of recording the salvation of a corner of the world in a postapocalyptic age.
The story begins from the premise that a fever has wiped out 95 per cent of the world’s population. In this mammoth void, an enterprising South African man named Willem Storm establishes a small community in his own country. All of this is presented at length by Deon Meyer, a writer who works on an epic scale, in episodes that offer a mix of the primitive and the gallantly enterprising.
Friends and Traitors By John Lawton Atlantic, 382 pages, $26
It was 1958 and Guy Burgess longed to go home to England. Seven years earlier, the rogue MI5 agent and English traitor defected to Russia. Now he ached for everything British, such as Ovaltine and HP Sauce. This is the eighth book in John Lawton’s intense but amusing series featuring the nervy Scotland Yard copper Freddie Troy. Troy has a history with Burgess. . In the new book, Burgess is the one we get a close look at when Troy is assigned to escort the traitor home — an adventure that turns a little bit screwball and more than a little bit treacherous.
The Deep Dark Descending By Allen Eskens Seventh Street, 272 pages, $17
It looks certain that Max Rupert is going to shove the wrong guy through the hole he’s cutting in a frozen Minnesota lake. Rupert is a bright and determined Minneapolis homicide detective. His sleuthing in a case that goes back five years tells him that the man he intends to drown is a murderer. Why has Rupert appointed himself executioner as well as sleuth? Because the victim in the murder was Rupert’s wife. Except this guy, as we readers know, isn’t the killer. Rupert needs to both deduce his wife’s real killer and find his own sense of honour before he drowns the wrong villain.