Dangerous game of true or false
FIRST LIE WINS by Ashley Elston
(Headline €16.99, 384pp) THIS strikingly ingenious debut thriller from the American young-adult author Elston has already attracted attention, with a streaming TV series in preparation. It fully deserves the acclaim.
The heroine is a young woman apparently called Evie Porter — but that isn’t her real name. In fact, she’s been tempted into assuming a whole string of false identities by a mysterious handler called Mr Smith, who asks her to learn everything she can about the people he directs her towards.
His purpose is to destroy or discredit them. But Evie is not only resourceful — she’s also determined to claim her life back and expose Mr Smith.
It proves no easy task, for he tracks her every move. Incredible twist follows elegant turn as the story unfolds, with a superb cliff-hanger and a great denouement.
ARGYLLE by Elly Conway (Bantam €15.99, 384pp)
BRITISH film director and producer Matthew Vaughn is convinced this story, written while Conway was working as a waitress in a late-night diner in New York, is the start of the best spy franchise since Ian Fleming’s James Bond. To prove it he has already turned it into a movie that opens next month.
The protagonist is young, idiosyncratic Aubrey Argylle, who is recruited by the CIA to work with a select group of other misfits to solve some of the world’s trickiest problems.
The action never lets up for a moment, jumping from a train roaring across the Steppes of Russia to a CIA plane brought down in the wilderness of the ‘golden triangle’ in South-East Asia and a hoard of Nazi gold hidden in the mountains of Poland. So far, so Fleming, but, sadly, Argylle lacks the insouciance or the charm of Bond. Plus, he is saddled with a team of belligerent outcasts.
The storytelling is entertaining enough, but the plot feels forced and overblown — give me Mick Herron’s spies, the Slow Horses, any day.
HOUSE WOMAN by Adorah Nworah (Borough Press €23.79, 288pp)
A YOUNG Nigerian woman is put on a plane in Lagos to meet her new husband in Houston, Texas, in a marriage arranged by her parents with their former next-door neighbours. But the woman, Ikemefuna, has other ideas about her future.
So begins this haunting debut from the young Nigerian short story writer Nworah. The woman’s intended husband, Nna, does not realise that his parents have selected her as a wife for him, nor that they are effectively keeping her prisoner in their house in the suburbs.
He also does not realise that all they need from Ikemefuna is for her to bear him a son — after which she will become surplus to their requirements.
The moment she becomes pregnant the story develops into a neo-gothic thriller, complete with a magnificently horrifying villain in the shape of Nna’s overbearing mother Agbala. As the plot unfolds it reveals that Nna is not an utter fool and that Ikemefuna is certainly a woman to be reckoned with — complete with a vicious sting in the tail.