Killer plots for all thriller fans
Dramatic new novels with deadly plotlines
WATCHING YOU HHHH by Lisa Jewell Century, £12.99
IALWAYS drop everything to read a new Lisa Jewell novel and life was put on hold while I zipped through nearly 500 pages of Watching You, a thriller about people in a fictional Bristol suburb who are watching one another’s every move.
Joey has left behind her Ibizan party lifestyle to start a more grown-up life in Melville Heights, Bristol, with new husband Alfie. But as they have no money, they are forced to share a room in her brother Jack’s house and Joey takes a hellish job at the local soft play centre.
In the grey British winter, her new marriage quickly loses its lustre. She finds herself increasingly obsessed with neighbour Tom Fitzwilliam, the handsome, charming and revered new headmaster of a local comprehensive.
Schoolgirl Jenna is also watching Mr Fitzwilliam closely, anxious that he is grooming her dozy friend Beth.
Jenna’s mother Frankie is watching Tom too. She and Jenna recognise him from a family holiday in the Lake District years ago where a distressed woman attacked him and repeatedly demanded: “How can you live with yourself?”
Frankie knows that Tom is hiding a dark secret. But as paranoia takes over, she finds it impossible to be taken seriously.
Tom’s teenage son Freddie is a peeping Tom, watching local schoolgirls through his binoculars and compiling creepy dossiers about their every move. But he too remembers the incident in the Lake District.
And when he gets to know Jenna, he decides it is time to expose the skeletons in his father’s closet.
So whose blood-spattered body is found in the opening pages? Who is in danger and why?
Jewell writes wonderfully engaging characters who weave plausibly tangled webs and the whodunnit was largely incidental until the closing pages.
She masterfully draws all her threads together, throwing in some cunning twists for good measure. In places the prose felt rushed but the occasional plot point that stretched credulity was easily ignored and the pace never faltered. The countdown is on for the next Lisa Jewell novel. CHARLOTTE HEATHCOTE
SINS AS SCARLET HHHH by Nicolas Obregon Michael Joseph, £12.99
AFTER leaving Tokyo Police, Inspector Kosuke Iwata has started a new life working as a private detective in Los Angeles.
He spends his days spying on unfaithful spouses and his nights with an unavailable woman but he is haunted by the death of his wife and daughter in Japan. His purposeless existence changes when Meredith Nichol, the transgender sister of his wife, is found strangled on a railway track behind LA’s notorious Skid Row.
Iwata uses his police and FBI
contacts to investigate the murder for his mother-in-law, uncovering a trail of bodies that leads to a dark underworld of corruption and murder stretching from the City of Angels to Mexico’s borderlands.
Iwata knows that he is risking his life by pursuing Meredith’s killer so he follows the river of sin to Mexico in a desperate bid to come to terms with his own past as well as solving the mystery of her death.
The follow-up to brilliant debut novel Blue Light Yokohama, set in Tokyo, this is an astute police procedural that lays bare the exploitation of desperate people illegally crossing Mexico’s border and heading for Los Angeles.
By switching between LA, Mexico and Tokyo, Obregon constructs mysteries in both Iwata’s present and past that are cleverly interwoven in a truly heart-rending climax.
Both harrowing and gripping, Sins As Scarlet delivers on the rich promise of the debut and deserves to develop into a long-running series. JON COATES
SKYJACK ★★★★ by KJ Howe Headline, £8.99
WHEN a business jet is hijacked by its captain over the Libyan desert, passenger Thea Paris works with its second officer to try to regain control.
As an international kidnap specialist, she is an experienced negotiator in hostage release.
But in this case the stakes are higher as Thea is escorting two former child soldiers from Africa to a new life in London.
Then the passenger jet lands at a remote airfield in the desert and is surrounded by an armed militia. The hostage negotiator is forcibly removed from the two orphaned boys and the other passengers.
The arrival of her tactical team allows Thea to regroup and embark upon a desperate search for the hostages that will take them across Europe. On the way Thea uncovers a plot involving the Sicilian Mafia and secret societies set up after the Second World War.
The sequel to last year’s debut The Freedom Broker is an adrenalinecharged thrill ride packed with action, intrigue and betrayal while its clever plotting seamlessly brings its three storylines together for a frantic finale.
American author Howe has clearly carried out intensive research into global kidnap negotiation for a novel that feels impressively authentic. JON COATES