A mind of her own
Connelly’s new heroine is a strongminded cop with a senior in her sights.
Michael Connelly – one of the small band of crime writers who are both very good and very popular – has started a new series based on a new character. She’s Renée Ballard and she works the night shift for the Hollywood division of the LAPD, hence the title THE LATE SHOW (Allen & Unwin, $36). She files reports on incidents she attends and the day staff do the real investigation. After attending a mass shooting in a nightclub, the strong-minded Ballard, suspecting that the shooter was a cop, decides to follow up the case herself. Connelly again demonstrates his gift for clear characterisation and he is able to convey the tedium of police work – the routines, the paperwork, the deadbeats cops have to deal with – without being tedious himself. Still very good, very good indeed.
TROLL, by DB Thorne (Corvus, $32.99), is a timely reminder of the dangers of social media. Sophie Fortune has survived her troubled teenage years, during which she became alienated from her father, and works for a magazine in London. When a troll makes a vicious comment on her blog, she calls him a loser. A few months later, Sophie’s life is in ruins, as she stands accused of all sorts of things she has not done and everyone thinks she is a psycho bitch. She disappears, possibly kidnapped by the troll. Enter her neglectful father, known only as Fortune. Leaving his
Dubai bank in the middle of a crisis and slowed by lung cancer, Fortune sets out to rescue the daughter he should have loved better. Excellent writing marries a strong narrative with penetrating psychological insights.
Twelve-year-old Antoine accidentally kills a boy half his age, a neighbour in their French village. Panicking, he hides the small body in a cavity in the forest and waits in terror for his crime to be discovered. In Pierre Lemaitre’s THREE DAYS AND A LIFE (Maclehose
Press, $32.99), Antoine carries his ghastly secret through life knowing he cannot tell anyone, not even the woman he loves. Then comes the surprise twist that one expects in a good French crime novel, and an excellent twist it is too. Lemaitre avoids the gruesomeness that marked his earlier novels such as Irène and instead relies on a good story, interesting characters and the evocation of life in a small village. And that twist.
Henry Farrell is the only lawman in the small town of Wild Thyme, northern Pennsylvania. It should be a nice quiet place, but in FATEFUL MORNINGS, by Tom Bouman
(Faber, $32.99), the district is getting wilder because of an influx of heroin and meth. Burglaries are now common and a young woman is missing; Farrell suspects she has been murdered by her alcoholic boyfriend. Farrell, who smokes a little cannabis and is having an affair with a married woman, is a rough-edged hero and narrator, with his own rules of behaviour and grammar. This is a striking portrait of what happens to small-town America when big-town vices arrive.