Tales offer grist for the imagination
Mysteries up and down the East Coast: an unexpected Russian spy in D.C., drifters in Delaware, a magical survivor in the Adirondacks, and best friends in New York City bound by lies. Novelist Charles Finch takes you through some of the most intriguing suspense fiction of the season. Charles Finch is author of the Charles Lenox mystery series. The latest, The Woman in the Water, will be published this month. Sunburn By Laura Lippman William Morrow, 304 pp.
It was a little easier to keep secrets in 1995. When two good-looking strangers arrive separately in a tiny Delaware town that summer in Laura Lippman’s seductive and gripping new novel Sun
burn, everyone wonders who they are, but nobody can pop out a smartphone to check. That makes Sunburn something akin to a locked-room mystery: The book slowly metes out the truth of why Polly and Adam, the new arrivals, are lying low, as they circle each other and wonder the same. Lippman excels in the minutiae of trouble — insurance scams, sketchy arson investigations, getting paid in cash — and Sunburn, after a slow first 50 pages, is one of her most compulsive books, an atmospheric two-hander worthy of Raymond Chandler or Alfred Hitchcock.
Grist Mill Road By Christopher J. Yates Picador, 352 pp.
The list of authors whose books I read automatically is very short, and loses more names than it adds most years. Now the British writer Christopher J. Yates is on it, thanks to this truly superb second novel, a dark, roving psychological thriller as powerful as anything by Tana French. It takes place in 1982 and 2008: In the earlier timeline, two boys are responsible for a horrific incident, in which a girl named Hannah is tied to a tree and shot dozens of times with an air rifle, then left for dead. In the second, Hannah is married to one of them. That’s a hell of a setup. But Grist Mill
Road is irresistibly readable for the ways it pulls that initial incident in unexpected directions, rounding out the trio’s histories, reappraising their roles in their awful story. A one-dimensional New York cop and a slightly forced ending drag the book back just slightly, but make no mistake: Yates is the real deal.
The Storm King By Brendan Duffy Ballantine, 400 pp.
It’s always a good sign when a novelist is up to something weird. Brendan Duffy’s second book mingles horror, historical fiction, supernatural suspense and old-fashioned murder mystery, the rare phantasmagoria whose pieces click into a satisfying resolution. Set in the Adirondacks, it’s about Nate, the sole survivor of a childhood car crash. Far from home he’s assembled a happy life, career, wife, daughter, but when he returns for the funeral of a high school friend, all of his ghosts await him. The
Storm King could be a cleaner book — Duffy’s multiple plot lines sometimes get snarled, and his writing is full of bad habits. (“There was a menagerie of suffering in the cages of Nate’s soul.”) But this is a gutsy, intricate, evocative piece of mischief, much closer than anyone usually gets to that particular spell cast by Stephen King.
Need to Know By Karen Cleveland Ballantine, 304 pp.
There’s a threatening tone to the blurbs for Need to Know, which solemnly vow that you will not be able to stop reading it. Lee Child, for instance: “You’ll miss dinner, stay up far too late, and feel tired at work tomorrow.” Yikes! Well, its premise is smart —– Vivian Miller, a CIA analyst (as author Karen Cleveland once was), discovers that her boring old husband is a Russian agent. He swears she and their children have changed his priorities since he went undercover, and as proof persuades her to turn him in to save herself. Will she? Unfortunately, the question never seems urgent. Cleveland’s debut flows nicely and has one wicked, delightful twist, promising signs for her chances of a good career. But the work as a whole is an inexpert and implausible affair, weighed down by Vivian’s unintelligible choices and ridiculous escapes from notice. You’ll feel fine at work tomorrow.