Without peer
Based on the Lord Lucan mystery, A Double Life is one of the best thrillers of the year.
ADOUBLE LIFE (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $34.99), by Flynn Berry, is a quite brilliant reimagining of the everintriguing case of Lord Lucan, who disappeared after murdering his children’s nanny, whom he had mistaken for his intended target: his estranged wife. Like Lucan, Claire’s father came from an aristocratic background. Claire grew up visiting grand estates where the rich and entitled partied. She loved her father, many people did – he had immense charm – and Claire suspects that his rich friends helped him flee the UK. Now an adult, she no longer lives a privileged life. She lives in a crappy flat. Her much-loved brother is a drug addict. Her mother, badly injured in the aftermath of the murder of the nanny, died young and broken. She wants to find her father; she wants him to pay. She rebefriends her old childhood friend, Alice, whose parents were the last people to see her father alive. She is certain they helped him escape. That they were complicit in his crime, and go on living their lovely lives, is what drives Claire to infiltrate those lives and search for the clues that will lead her to her father. Sparsely told, psychologically complicated and clever, this story of revenge is one of the best thrillers of the year so far.
THE SUNDAY GIRL ( Simon & Schuster, $29),
by Pip Drysdale, is a dating revenge novel with chills aplenty. When Taylor is dumped by the swine Angus, who claimed he wanted them to marry and have a family, she decides she’ll ruin his life. She plots a series of revenge tricks – using
The Art of War as her self-help guide. She books prostitutes on his company credit card, engineers a slow-dripping leak in his apartment and sends his neighbour sexy underwear. She is plainly an amateur. The rat comes back, she takes him in and the real game of cat-chasing-rat-chasing-cat begins. The game gets very nasty (a little too graphically nasty for my tender taste) and the battle becomes a full-blown war. The grenades are well planted, which is to say that this is a well plotted, crisply paced first novel, but it lacks nuance. Angus is so utterly vile that you wish he’d been finished off in the first quarter of the book. He lacks the creepy charm of the really successful fictional villain of
Berry’s book.
Who doesn’t love Jane Tennison? We do. We have once again binge-watched the entire Prime Suspect series starring Helen Mirren. We then attempted, and failed, to watch the newest Prime Suspect in which a young Tennison has just joined the force. It was unwatchable. The point of Tennison is all those years of bitter experience, of career success against the odds and the personal failures – the failed relationships, the abortion, the hard drinking. All are etched in Mirren’s face. Put out to grass, she walks into an empty life, failing even to turn up to her farewell do. Leave her there. In
MURDER MILE (Zaffre, $36.99), by Lynda La Plante, it is 1979 and Tennison is a newly promoted detective-sergeant in Peckham, a rough place at a rough time in London’s history. There are strikes and the rubbish is piling up on the streets. The place stinks and so does the book. The characters, including Tennison, are cut-outs, the dialogue clangs and the writing is clumsy and dull. La Plante may have created Tennison but Mirren inhabited her.
She loved her father, many people did, and Claire suspects that his rich friends helped him flee the country.