Buried secrets of lives on the edge
There is murder most horrid in Jon Coates’s pick of the latest compelling thrillers
DARK SACRED NIGHT ★★★★★ by Michael Connelly Orion, £20
DURING a nightshift Detective Renée Ballard returns to Hollywood police station in the early hours to find a man rifling through files in a cabinet.
This intruder turns out to be legendary LAPD detective Harry Bosch who is working a cold case that has got under his skin.
Ballard kicks him out of the station but she is intrigued. She tries to work out what he is investigating. When she discovers it is the death of 15-year-old Daisy Clayton, a runaway who was murdered, she gets officially assigned to the case and offers to join forces with Bosch.
This case is personal for Harry. He crossed paths with the victim’s devastated mother on a previous assignment so he will take any help he can get to bring the killer to justice.
Despite being wary of Bosch, the fiery Ballard quickly develops respect for his relentless determination. And she relishes hunting for a serial killer after being sidelined on the graveyard shift for accusing her former boss of improper conduct.
Dark Sacred Night sees Ballard, introduced in standalone novel The Late Show last year, enter the world of Connelly’s long-running Bosch series for the first time in a complex and gripping tale.
Bosch prowls Los Angeles at night, looking for a killer he desperately wants to suffer as the victim’s mother has. But the once morally incorruptible detective teeters on the edge of crossing a line and will need his new partner’s strong moral compass to stop him getting lost in the dark.
Connelly has few equals as a storyteller and weaves a taut, sombre tale with a fitting ending that offers hope for Bosch.
It will be a joy to see Bosch and Ballard’s partnership develop into America’s finest modern crime series.
ABSOLUTE PROOF HHHH by Peter James Pan Macmillan, £20
WHEN investigative journalist Ross Hunter gets a phone call from a stranger who claims to have absolute proof of God’s existence, he is sceptical but intrigued.
War veteran and retired academic Harry Cook tells him he went to a medium to try to contact his recently deceased wife but instead spoke to a representative of the Almighty.
This voice from Heaven gave him three compass co-ordinates to help him prove that God exists: one for the Holy Grail; another for the remains of Jesus Christ; and a third for the location of the Second Coming.
As Ross investigates the first clue at an historic site in Glastonbury, he starts to realise that not everyone wants this information shared with the rest of the world, while others want to profit from it.
Ross is attacked, followed and receives death threats but he cannot give up on what could be the story of a lifetime. So he follows the other clues to Egypt and Los Angeles, pursued by a TV evangelist and a shady pharmaceutical company.
With a world-changing discovery within his grasp, he must stay alive long enough to complete his mission.
This standalone thriller was inspired by a real phone call made to author Peter James 29 years ago, planting a seed that has become his most ambitious book to date.
Fast-paced and highly enjoyable, Absolute Proof has enough twists to keep the reader gripped for its 550 pages as well as making you think about some of the big questions of existence as you race to a surprising, satisfying ending.
PARIS IN THE DARK HHHH by Robert Olen Butler No Exit Press, £11.99
WITH the First World War raging across Europe in the autumn of 1915, US President Woodrow Wilson has kept Americans out of the trenches. But this has not stopped brave young men and women from the States crossing the Atlantic to volunteer at the front as ambulance drivers. Christopher Marlowe Cobb, known as Kit, is a newspaper reporter from Chicago who doubles as an undercover agent for the US government.
When he is sent to Paris to write about the American ambulance drivers, he looks forward to putting his spy persona aside for a while, especially after meeting striking American nurse Louise Pickering.
But then a series of bombs explode at night in Paris to terrorise civilians. So Kit’s intelligence handler James Polk Trask gives him a new mission to find and eliminate the culprit before French morale is badly damaged.
Juggling two personas and a new relationship, Kit must go to the Western Front then back to the French capital to prevent a monstrosity with global implications.
The fourth instalment in the Kit Cobb series plunges the reader into war-torn Paris at a time when the French authorities feared suburban refugee camps provided cover for German agitators.
Pulitzer Prize winner Olen Butler uses this social tinder box to create a riveting thriller with impressively well-developed characters and such rich historical detail that is hard to put down. It builds to a finale with a suitably big bang.