City seethes with corruption

THE GLASS KINGDOM by Lawrence Osborne (Hogarth €18.95)

REGULARLY described as ‘the new Graham Greene’, Osborne writes subtle, elegant and atmospheric thrillers.

Born in England but now living in Bangkok, he places his protagonist — 30-year-old American Sarah Mullins — in the Thai capital in a skyscraper known as The Kingdom, where she’s hiding after stealing $200,000 from the elderly female author she worked for in New York.

However, Bangkok is in a state of revolution, with young people demonstrating on the streets. She is befriended by the mysterious Mali, who has a string of Japanese admirers, and ushered into a twilight world of money-laundering.

But it is her maid Goi and janitor Pop who understand Sarah best, and delicately exploit her. The story may lack a fast, hard edge, but it is bewitching — though for me it has a touch more of Somerset Maugham than Greene.

THE DIRTY SOUTH by John Connolly (Hodder €25.95)

ANYONE who enjoys the exploits of the former New

York detective-turnedprivate-investigator Charlie Parker will be thrilled by this prequel to his stories.

It’s 1997, and Parker is in jail in Burdon County, Arkansas, after getting on the wrong side of local police chief Evander Griffin.

It transpires that a series of young black women are being slaughtered, but no one is anxious to point that out — this is the deep South, where white supremacy is ingrained in isolated communities.

Griffin realises that someone with experience of murder cases is in his cells, and recruits Parker to investigate the crimes. That means turning the spotlight on the most powerful family in the area, and revealing the corruption that engulfs them.

Beautifully told, this underlines the sheer brilliance of the character of Parker.

FINAL CUT by S.J. Watson (Doubleday €17.55)

WATSON’S debut, Before I Go To Sleep, was a worldwide bestseller, but his second was less successful. Now he returns to form with this story of Alex, an ambitious young documentary film-maker, who is struggling to repeat the success of her own debut. She hits on the idea of making a film about life in the small village of Blackwood Bay, on the north coast of England, getting the residents to film their own lives.

But there is a sinister edge: young girls have gone missing, and one has apparently committed suicide.

Slowly the village’s secrets, and Alex’s own, come to the surface, for she has history in Blackwood Bay which she is anxious to conceal.

Creepy and packed with suspense and menace, it draws the reader into a community that has more than its fair share of skeletons to hide.