Who stole Annie’s childhood?
THE TAKING OF ANNIE THORNE by C.J. Tudor (Michael Joseph £12.99, 352 pp)
THIS second novel from the author of last year’s wildly successful The Chalk Man confirms Tudor as Britain’s female Stephen King.
There is a creeping dread on every page and, as you start a new chapter, a dark shadow over your shoulder.
Joseph Thorne, a teacher, returns to his childhood home in a Nottinghamshire village, spurred on by getting to the bottom of what happened to his eight-year-old sister, Annie, who once disappeared from her bed for 48 hours only to return a different person.
Joseph was once a member of the village gang of rebellious youths, some of whom still live there.
He gets a job at his old school and moves into a nearby cottage, where a mother killed her son then took her own life. Haunting enough on its own — but then old enmities surface and Thorne is attacked.
Tudor’s punk prose style and her great eye for menace make this a book no one should read at night.
KILL (REDACTED) by Anthony Good (Atlantic £14.99, 416 pp)
A POWERFUL examination of grief and its ability to gnaw away at the soul lies at the heart of this first novel from a former winner of a Man Booker Scholarship.
Michael is a former head teacher whose wife is killed in a terrorist suicide bomb attack on the London Underground, leaving him with their teenage daughter, Amy, and a horrifying mixture of guilt and rage.
It’s partly told in conversations with his therapist, who tries to persuade him to confront the issues that are consuming him.
But she fails. Michael is determined to exact revenge — not on the terrorists, but on the politician who laid the ground work for their crimes with his cynical foreign policy. The parallel is clear enough — though the name of the politician is redacted.
Michael buys a gun and plans an assassination, setting out the case for murder in his diary. Along the way, he asks where moral justice lies.
Provocative and compelling, it is a spectacular debut.
NIGHT by Bernard Minier (Mulholland £14.99, 384 pp)
THE latest instalment in Minier’s depiction of the hunt for the wickedly clever European serial killer Julian Hirtmann opens with the grisly discovery of a woman’s mutilated body on a church altar in the north of Norway.
A female detective picks up the case, which leads her to an offshore oil rig and the discovery that one of the workers there is the killer.
He escapes, but she finds photographs of Commandant Martin Servaz of the Toulouse police, who has been searching for Hirtmann for years.
The two detectives team up, using the only clue they have — a photograph of a young boy in an Austrian village with the name ‘Gustav’ written on the back.
Both become obsessed with the task, only to find themselves ensnared like Agent Starling in The Silence Of The Lambs, always two steps behind a serial killer who toys with them exactly as Hannibal Lecter did with Starling.
Minier’s killer is every bit as compelling.