Is that my face in the mirror?
BASED ON A TRUE STORY by Delphine de Vigan (Bloomsbury £12.99)
A HUGELY successful French female novelist — like the author herself — who is all but overwhelmed by her acclaim, finds herself becoming fixated on a woman she meets by accident, whom she calls L. The woman epitomises everything the novelist would like to be: sophisticated and impeccably dressed.
But L imperceptibly takes over the novelist’s life, even answering her emails when she suffers writer’s block.
This is a subtly told story of an obsessive female friendship that steadily consumes both of thewomen.
There is an added riddle, however. The novelist in the thriller is also called Delphine.
So is this a hyper-realist story based in truth or is it a work of pure fiction? We can’t be sure.
This is that rare beast — a fine thriller and a potential literary sensation. Patricia Highsmith would have been proud. Don’t miss it.
THE SURGEON’S CASE by E. G. Rodford (Titan Books £7.99)
THERE is also a literary mystery at the heart of this quirky tale about an Armenian private detective called George Kocharyan, who is working in Cambridge.
The PI is hired by a rich and flashy surgeon — who also happens to have a TV show — to find a Filipino maid who has apparently disappeared with his locked briefcase.
But nothing is quite as it seems. For a start, in the best Raymond Chandler tradition, the surgeon has a former beauty queen for a wife who has secrets of her own.
Add in a Turkish drug lord, the body of a girl in a pond in Grantchester and a sniffy female DI with whom Kocharyan has personal history and you have the ingredients of an intensely satisfying crime story. But the added mystery is the true identity of the author for E. G. Rodford is the pseudonym of an awardwinning author who is based in Cambridge.
Could this be a similar case to J. K. Rowling hiding behind her crime alter-ego Robert Galbraith?
QUICKSAND by Malin Persson Giolito (Simon & Schuster £12.99)
A SENSATION in its native Sweden, this is an English language debut for the former lawyer.
It is a coruscating portrait of a disturbed 18-year-old girl, Maja Norberg, who is charged with shooting dead her boyfriend and her female best friend in a schoolroom massacre in which her boyfriend killed the teacher and another student.
Remanded in custody for nine months, Norberg is standing trial, and her story unfolds in flashbacks.
The question is: why did she do it?
Was she mentally unstable or did her promiscuous lifestyle influence her actions?
Compelling and brutally candid, especially about modern adolescence, this is not a comfortable book, but the story is so superbly told that it lingers in the mind long after the jury’s verdict.