Secrets behind the cellar door
IN THE DARK by Cara Hunter (Penguin €9.99)
THIS second novel from the richly talented Hunter confirms the promise of her debut, Close To Home. She has a rare talent for creating suspense in deceptively simple stories.
Here a young woman and a small boy are found — by accident — locked in the basement of a house in north Oxford. She cannot speak and the child is traumatised.
The elderly and eccentric academic who owns the house insists he didn’t know they were there, and says he had nothing to do with their abduction. But who are they?
It takes lead detective DI Adam Fawley some time to gain the woman’s trust as he gently tries to find out what happened. Even then he is not a great deal wiser. Was the woman raped? Did she give birth in the cellar?
With its steely grip and compelling characters, the story reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock at his finest, where twist follows twist at a breathtaking pace.
THE WHITE DEVIL by Domenic Stansberry (W&N €12.60)
AN INTOXICATING, contemporary re-working of John Webster’s 17th-century Jacobean tragedy, in which Texan model and small-time actress Vittoria Paris is caught up in a double murder in Rome.
Her American husband dies mysteriously and so does the movie-star wife of an Italian senator, Paolo Orsini, who is her lover and protector.
Vittoria’s dangerous and obsessive brother Johnny is in Rome too, working for the senator and quietly manipulating her.
The tabloids have a field day with the murky implications of the two deaths, and so Vittoria and Paolo take refuge in the eternal city’s beautiful palazzos. From there they flee to Malibu in California. Then Vittoria disappears to South America, where eventually her past catches up with her.
Rome is brilliantly captured, as is Italian society, but it is the tragic heroine and her flawed brother that linger in the mind.
CARELESS LOVE by Peter Robinson (Hodder €28)
THIS is the 25th outing for DCI Alan Banks, Robinson’s all-toohuman copper.
The sometimes scratchy Banks, who left the Met to settle in Yorkshire years ago, has experienced many tribulations in that time, including the end of his marriage, but he remains an honourable man who fights for the underdog.
His dislike of extraordinary wealth is clear here, as he investigates the mysterious death of a man found in a gully in one of the Peak District’s beautiful valleys. He turns out to be a former private banker, who has amassed a fortune.
At the same time Banks is also looking into the case of a student found in an abandoned car, but she was not the driver and her dead body was apparently planted there. Could the cases be linked?
This is vintage Banks — a dogged search for truth which never once loses its grip on its hero’s intuition and charm.