THRILLERS OF THE MONTH

Smoke And Ashes Abir Mukherjee Harvill Secker €15.65

The terrific third instalment in Mukherkjee’s wonderfully rich and entertaining period crime series sees opium-addicted Calcutta police detective Sam Wyndham and his long-suffering Indian sergeant, ‘Surrender-Not’ Banerjee, trying to hold the line between the rival demands of the British Empire and Gandhi’s independence movement in 1921. No easy task in itself but all the harder when a killer is on the loose.

Take Me In Sabine Durrant Mulholland Books €15.65

Durrant’s last book, Lie With Me, was a very superior take on the psychological thriller. Take Me In is less successful but still highly entertaining. A smug middle-class couple have their apparently perfect lives turned inside out after a stranger saves their son from drowning. Read it for the smart dissection of modern life and love, not the rather dodgy plotting.

Firefly Henry Porter Quercus €18.10

Firefly is a worthy addition to Porter’s impressive canon of post-Cold War spy thrillers. At its heart is the relentlessly tense story of Naji, a brilliant young Syrian boy travelling alone through the Balkans, one step ahead of a gang of Isis killers desperate to recover the information he’s stolen from them.

It All Falls Down Sheena Kamal Zaffre €22.90

The second instalment in a thoroughly compelling new series, soaked in the diversity of today’s Vancouver. Heroine Nora Watts is a more plausible Canadian sister to Lisbeth Salander from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. She’s a detective whose investigations always seem to end up in her own troubled past. Her latest quest takes her to the broken city of Detroit in search of her lost father. A thoroughly dark and powerful read.