EDGE-OF-YOUR-SEAT READS…
THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW BY AJ FINN
Anna can’t leave her house, so she spends her time watching her neighbours through the zoom lens on her camera, drinking a lot of Pinot Noir and taking medication for the agoraphobia that keeps her inside. So when she sees one of her neighbours being murdered and contacts the police, she’s understandably not the most credible witness. Beautifully written, with a great twist in the tale… I’m a bit tired of the unreliable female protagonist, but The Woman in The
Window is so skilled I was happy to be taken down that road again.
ICE STATION ZEBRA BY ALISTAIR MACLEAN
An oldie but a goodie: Maclean’s spy thrillers are littered with bodies and mostly set in bleak Arctic wastelands, nuclear submarines and the Barents Sea. And this book put me right in the eye of the snowstorm: I could feel the polar icicles piercing my skin and actually
was the solitary bead of sweat slowly forming on the captain’s brow as he fought to save his sub and crew from drifting under the ice cap forever. I love the protagonist Neil Carpenter – a man who knows what’s what and has a sense of humour, not to mention a secret or two of his own. I gasped at the reveal. (My brother insists he saw it coming – pfft… sibling rivalry.) Sameena Amien
THE SEVEN DEATHS OF EVELYN HARDCASTLE BY STUART TURTON
An assortment of mismatched guests have been invited to a party to celebrate the return of Evelyn Hardcastle, daughter of the isolated country estate where the celebration is to be held. It turns out that all the same guests were at a party there 19 years previously, when Evelyn’s brother was murdered. This time it’s Evelyn’s turn – but the day keeps being replayed for Aiden, one of the guests, until he finds out who killed her. The twist is that he keeps coming back in the body of a different guest, and the longer it takes him to solve the murder, the weaker his own character becomes. Complicated, but very compelling.
THE WORD IS MURDER BY ANTHONY HOROWITZ
When a woman is murdered on the same day that she visits a funeral parlour to plan her own funeral, Detective Daniel Hawthorne has an idea: this could be a good plot for a book. So he calls on a writer he once worked with on a TV show, Anthony Horowitz. That’s right: the author makes the unusual choice of casting himself in his own murder mystery.
At first, ‘book’ Anthony is reluctant. He isn’t convinced that the surly ex-cop would make a very good protagonist, and Hawthorne isn’t keen on letting Anthony ‘colour in’ the story as he sees fit. But eventually he agrees – good murder plots are hard to think of, and he’s all but running out of ideas. The story is sprinkled with details from ‘real’ Anthony’s life, to the point where I went, ‘Hang on, is this a true story?’ and stopped reading in order to Google whether or not I was still reading fiction. I was. Hey, they always say, ‘Write what you know’ – it worked out really well in this case.