Trial by psycho
An Irishman and an ex-conman are the best thing to happen to American legal fiction in years.
Belfast lawyer Steve Cavanagh offers readers a unique legal thriller in THIRTEEN (Orion, $32.99). It’s a book with a compulsive hook: a serial killer inveigles himself onto the New York jury for a high-profile celebrity murder trial. But why? Conman-turned-lawyer Eddie Flynn is staring into the abyss of a defence counsel’s nightmare: a client he thinks is innocent looks overwhelmingly guilty.
The district attorney and others are salivating at the prospect of picking the bones of Hollywood star Robert Solomon, on trial for the brutal murder of his wife.
Cavanagh leads readers on a merry dance, intercutting Flynn’s viewpoint with that of the psychopath on the jury. It’s a chess match Flynn doesn’t even know he’s playing, as he battles tough odds in court and tries not to stumble further in his personal life. Propulsive, clever, and delivering much more than its highconcept premise, Thirteen is compelling evidence that Cavanagh and Flynn are the best tandem to hit the courtroom crime scene since Michael Connelly introduced The Lincoln Lawyer’s Mickey Haller to the world more than a decade ago.
A notorious serial killer also plays a role in
French author Johana Gustawsson’s sophomore novel KEEPER (Orenda
Books, $21.99), but in this case it’s a long-dead, true-life psychopath. Canadian profiler Emily Roy and French writer Alexis Castells are faced with a disturbing new case spanning borders and decades. A famous actress is abducted in London, an echo of the Tower Hamlets murders from a decade before. A mutilated body is discovered in a Swedish forest, with identical wounds to the Tower Hamlets victims. As Roy and Castells are tangled in the modern investigation, which tears open old wounds, Gustawsson also takes readers back to a time when Jack the Ripper terrified London. No genteel British nostalgia, but a sordid world of grimy horrors and a hardscrabble fight to survive on fluid-stained streets. Keeper unfurls effortlessly through the leaps about in time, place, and point of view, ratcheting tension rather than losing the reader. Gustawsson is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, elegantly luring readers with flowing prose peppered with humour, so you don’t fully comprehend until later the terribly dark places she has led you to.
Like Cavanagh, another foreign author setting page-whirring crime tales in New York City is Auckland’s own Ben Sanders. His sixth novel, THE STAKES
(Allen & Unwin, $32.99), is a hardboiled standalone centred on NYPD robbery detective Miles Keller. Forget clear-cut heroes and villains – Sanders gives us a grimy world of moneyed crime bosses, violent thugs and bent cops. We meet Keller as he’s preparing to rip off a corrupt lawyer handling the payoff for a contract killing. He’s already under investigation for killing a hitman who was stalking an informant, and life gets even more tangled when Nina Stone reappears. She’s a heist pro and the estranged wife of an LA crime boss, a femme fatale with a capital F with chaos in her wake, but she makes Keller an offer that’s tough to refuse. A symphony of action and violence ensues. Sanders delivers some fascinating characters and a slick and cinematic story that’s muscular in its energy but pared to the bone in its prose.
The prose is peppered with humour, so you don’t realise until later the dark places she has led you to.