Thrillers to get your blood rushing in the winter cold
• Five suspense-ridden new novels will keep you rapt on frosty days
In wintry semilockdown, it’s hard to beat the comforts of a fireplace sofa and an electrifying thriller. (And, with alcohol restrictions over, a glass of something strong to steady the nerves.)
Here’s a selection of fresh, suspense-ridden novels guaranteed to give pause for thought long after steady breathing returns — with no spoilers to stifle the tension.
NORDIC NOIR
Named the best 2019 Nordic crime novel, in many respects After She’s Gone by Camilla Grebe (Zaffre, 2019) is typical Scandi-noir: police procedures, straightforward language and an atmospherically bleak, uncluttered setting that obscures deep societal fissures, including domestic and sexual brutality, racism and xenophobia.
Still, it’s scintillating, with enough red herrings to confuse, and frenzy to engross. What might be the motives for murder in a remote Swedish hamlet? From the perspective of a policewoman who grew up there, the case cuts too close to home. She is forced to meet her childhood demons and to face her own prejudices.
DARK RELIGION
Set in 1980s Dublin, staunch and stoic Catholic tones measure the pace and impregnate the complexity of A Famished Heart (Viper, 2020). Author Nicola White couldn’t have intended this, but there’ sa surreal, coincidental set-up in the opening scene: “I think they might have got isolated, socially,” observes detective novice Gina Considine of the two deceased.
Detective inspector Vincent Swan does his best to mentor her in unravelling the confounding mystery of the women’s apparent suicide by starvation. But they are stifled by obstinate superiors who want the case closed rapidly regardless of the closure of truth and justice. “They were lazy and incurious, would take the first plausible explanation and run with it, find the facts to fit the theory,” thinks Swan.
The Church, too, is cold and calculating, reflective of the onset of Ireland’s winter and the fractured city’s depression. Snippets of Ireland’s political turmoil during the Troubles, such as the 1981 IRA prisoner hunger strike led by Bobby Sands, add authenticity to a disquieting story of doctrine and despair.
CHILDREN IN PERIL
Early morning at an inclusive, liberal school in England’s Somerset countryside. The older teenagers are rehearsing Shakespeare, the juniors are making pottery; awfully normal days can be suddenly, incoherently shredded.
School shootings are a particular sort of horror, a visceral slash into parents’ hearts and a nightmare exemplar of sociopolitical failings. Rosamund Lupton’s Three Hours (Viking, 2020) wraps the all-too-frequent reallife scenario into a forensic, cinematic thriller that builds from a slow-burn start to a breathtaking crescendo.
To resist the apparently psychopathic perpetrators, heroism emerges in different shapes: lateral thinking by the police psychologist; resolute actions by timid teachers; a nonstop search-and-rescue operation by a newish pupil, 16year old Syrian refugee Rafi Bukhari, whose backstory adds unobvious complexities.
Three Hours recalls the 1999 Columbine school massacre in the US, and Norway’s 2011 right-wing terrorist attack, which left 77 people dead in a bombing and school campsite atrocity. Superbly, too, it threads the evil of Macbeth with parent perspectives so harrowingly portrayed in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.
LOST AMERICAN DREAM
Long Bright River by Liz Moore (Hutchinson, 2020) explores a different epidemic: the scourge of drugs. On the surface the novel is a typical tale of police force corruption, sexual predation and murder in innercity Philadelphia, where the cherished but crumbling landmarks symbolise the generations of scarring that drugs cause to families and communities.
The collateral damage is immense, as policewoman Michaela Fitzpatrick knows from tragic personal experience. Her sister is a casualty, like her parents before. But she refuses to give up on either her sibling or a troubling murder case that her superiors want to sweep away. The connections appal her, but compel her to keep digging despite intimidation by corrupt colleagues and physical threats from low-life thugs and a previous lover. Michaela must confront the morality of the thin blue line, and understand her part in perpetuating it.
Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Philadelphia seems to whisper hauntingly from each page. The result is a riveting but aching human drama, deeply unsettling yet faintly hopeful.
LOCAL LURE
A Poor Season for Whales by Michiel Heyns (Jonathan Ball, 2020) is an insidiously normal story, its fabric familiar to middle-class South Africans navigating the nuanced path bridging guilty privilege with safety and security.
Semiretired Margaret Crawley tries to control and limit the scope of interaction with 24-year-old Jimmy, a charming and charismatic interloper who rescues her dog from a cliffside ledge. Her initial appreciation inexorably reshapes into semistressed confusion as Jimmy inveigles his way into her life.
Disharmonious forces are at play, as odd as the lone whale that breaches, unseasonal, in midsummer Hermanus.
The dread lies in the dialogue: “Should I be grateful?” she asks Jimmy, referencing more than his rescue of her pet. His reply warns of menace: “Joseph Stalin said gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs. In other words, no.” Heyns’s language is eerily languid and ominously foreboding.
Margaret makes decisions that seem rational and palpably normal. Yet plausible situations take on disconcerting shapes, and her routine spins out of control.
We know where this leads — at least we believe we do — which makes for an intense psychological thriller, one that will help us to not think about viruses and involuntary seclusion, but that will definitely cause us to think twice before accepting help from a stranger.