The mystery of the wild woods
FORCE OF NATURE by Jane Harper (Little, Brown £12.99) THIS second crime thriller from the British-born, but Australia-based, Harper is every bit as compelling as The Dry, her astonishingly assured debut.
Once again it features Melbourne police officer Aaron Falk, back on his more familiar beat solving white-collar crime.
He is pursuing an accountancy fraud when Alice, the whistleblower he has unearthed, disappears on a team-building exercise in the fictional densely wooded Giralang Ranges — the only one of five women on the trek not to have returned.
Is she still alive? Has she been killed by someone in the firm who is desperate to preserve their guilty secrets? Or has she fallen victim to the son of a serial killer who once stalked these ravines?
The plot unfolds with serpentine elegance as there is a race against time to find her. This confirms Harper’s place very close to the pinnacle of modern crime writing. Do not miss it.
GREEN SUN by Kent Anderson (Mulholland £14.99) MORE than 20 years ago, Anderson, a former U.S. Special Forces and Vietnam veteran, wrote Night Dogs, a piercing novel about an ordinary cop in Portland, Oregon.
His hero, Officer Hanson, feared nothing except his combat memories, and now, in this sequel, he’s moved from Portland to Oakland, California, as Anderson did himself.
Hanson is posted to the dark and dangerous East Oakland, a single white officer in a predominantly black area, where drugs and violence stalk the mean streets.
This is crime at its bleakest, with a hero determined to mete out his own form of justice.
Fearsomely authentic and moving, it paints a scary portrait of an officer’s life today. IN STRANGERS’ HOUSES by Elizabeth Mundy (Constable £7.99) THE heroine of this debut novel is a Hungarian immigrant, Lena Szarka, who works in fashionable North London, cleaning rich people’s houses. When her fellow cleaner, another Hungarian migrant named Timea, goes missing, Lena immediately suspects that one of their clients is to blame. They all seem to have secrets to hide.
At first, the police do not seem interested, so Lena starts to investigate herself. Then Timea’s body turns up and the case suddenly takes a darker turn.
Lena’s tenacity and common sense illuminate this engaging story by the granddaughter of a Hungarian immigrant to the U.S., who now works at a London investment bank.