Proof that truth is as strange as fiction
Our selection of the best new thrillers promises murder, madness and mayhem
THE LONG DROP by Denise Mina Harvill Secker, £12.99
IN a novel based on a real-life murder case, William Watt’s family is murdered while he is away on a fishing trip. A Glaswegian businessman and a social climber, Watt is outraged to be arrested under suspicion of killing them.
Then notorious criminal Peter Manuel approaches Watt through his lawyer Laurence Dowdall. Manuel claims to have the answers Watt craves. He also says he can get hold of the gun used to murder Watt’s wife, sister-in-law and daughter. But he’s a famed liar, burglar and a rapist.
The men arrange to meet in a Glasgow bar on a wintry night in December 1957. They were spotted having a drink together on the night in question and award-winning author Denise Mina takes this fact as her jumping-off point, filling the gaps in the historical record by imagining the night they spent drinking together in bars and clubs across the city.
This is juxtaposed with entries from the real court hearings after Manuel was charged with the murder of Watt’s family and other crimes.
Mina gives the reader a nuanced look at the man behind the vile acts featured in the three-part ITV drama In Plain Sight last December, also exploring how Manuel, who believed he could still abandon his life of crime to become a writer, perceived himself.
The night Watt spends with Manuel is set against the backdrop of Glasgow in the 1950s, before its slums were cleared and when violence was a common theme in everyday life.
Truth may be stranger than fiction but Mina blends both together seamlessly in an absorbing account of the night. Not a single word is wasted in this beautifully written novel.
Unsettling, evocative and staggeringly good, it is possibly Mina’s finest achievement. JC
QUIETER THAN KILLING by Sarah Hilary
Headline, £16.99 THE fourth in Sarah Hilary’s DI Marnie Rome series sees Marnie and DS Noah Jake investigating a series of assaults on convicted criminals that may or may not be the work of a vigilante.
Then a child is kidnapped and no one reports it. Next the tenants in Marnie’s childhood home are brutally assaulted and the house ransacked. It starts to dawn on Marnie that all these crimes have a connection to her. But who is committing them and why?
This is a book about families and both Marnie and Noah are forced to confront some of the darker elements of their pasts. Noah must deal with a younger brother who has got himself in trouble, putting Noah at risk in the process. Meanwhile, Marnie’s investigations leave her with no choice but to pay a visit to her foster brother Stephen, long since imprisoned for the murder of Marnie’s parents.
Their relationship provides one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel as they are connected by an invisible thread that Marnie cannot break.
However, with Marnie and Noah under pressure professionally and personally, their relationship goes from strength to strength, allowing the reader to get to know them
both on a deeper level. Hilary writes with a menacing intensity that draws you into Marnie’s chilling world and shows how childhood abuse can warp a person’s character with repercussions that will last a lifetime.
This dark, atmospheric novel is layered with complexities, keeping the reader guessing throughout and its twist will undoubtedly take your breath away. You will finish the book desperate to read more. JM
DARK ASYLUM by ES Thomson Constable, £19.99
WHEN the principal physician to the insane at Angel Meadow Asylum in Victorian London is gruesomely murdered, the police immediately look to its inmates for the culprit.
Then the asylum’s apothecary Jem Flockhart sees how Dr Rutherford was killed. With his head bashed in, his ears cut off and his lips and eyes stitched closed, Jem knows the crime is an act of calculated retribution, not madness.
So with the help of close friend Will Quartermain, he launches an investigation. He must identify a determined killer lurking in the dark corridors of the grim asylum where many of the doctors are more insane than the poor patients.
Despite his eminence, Dr Rutherford was obsessed with phrenology, the study of the contours of the skull, and with using lobotomy to cut away the source of patients’ madness.
So there are many suspects who might have sought revenge, leaving Jem and Will delving into the hidden identities of the inmates before finding themselves caught in its web of dark secrets.
Jem also has a secret to protect. She is female but was raised as a boy by a father who became mentally ill and died in Angel Meadow Asylum. By passing as a man, she is able to work as a respected medical gentleman and herbalist at a time when the profession was closed to women. Following on from the events of acclaimed debut Beloved Poison, Dark Asylum vividly portrays the Gothic horror and questionable science of Victorian mental asylums in chilling detail.
Meticulously researched and masterfully plotted, E S Thomson has written a complex, harrowing and highly enjoyable tale. JC
SOMETIMES I LIE By Alice Feeney HQ, £7.99
RADIO producer Amber Reynolds is lying in a coma in a hospital bed, unable to remember how she got there.
Husband Paul and sister Claire visit her regularly and she can hear what they are saying at her bedside as she drifts in and out of consciousness. But her memory is shattered. Through flashbacks she tries to piece together the events that put her in a coma but she doesn’t know who to trust.
However, she can remember three important facts which she shares with the reader at the start of the novel: “I’m in a coma. My husband doesn’t love me any more. Sometimes I lie.”
The third point in particular is worth remembering throughout this debut psychological thriller by Alice Feeney, a former BBC News producer.
Sometimes I Lie starts slowly but once it grips it doesn’t let go through twist after twist that will leave you gasping until a shocking ending, although it has a slightly baffling final twist on the last page.
Clever, compelling and with an ingenious plot, Sometimes I Lie marks Feeney out as a name to remember. JC
THE RIVIERA EXPRESS by TP Fielden HQ, £12.99
YOU might expect a novel with Riviera in the title to be a whirl of cocktails and glamour on the Côte d’Azur. But the first book in T P Fielden’s Miss Dimont Mystery series is set in an English seaside town in the 1950s where The Riviera Express is a local newspaper rather than a luxury train.
Veteran reporter Miss Judy Dimont tries to inject Fleet Street professionalism into the office but is hampered by her cantankerous editor Rudyard Rhys. Then famous screen idol Gerald Hennessy is found dead on her patch. In a story with more twists than a Devon country lane, Miss Dimont uncovers murky secrets, revealing a sordid side to Gerald, and cracks soon appear in the townsfolk’s veneer of respectability.
The main suspects are theatre manager Arthur Shrimsley and Gerald’s wife Prudence and Miss Dimont proves to be a dogged detective. But it’s not all murder and mayhem as there is great comedy in Fielden’s characters.
This is a fabulously satisfying addition to the canon of vintage crime. No wonder the author has already been signed up to produce more adventures starring the indefatigable Miss Dimont. LH
HOFFER: AN AMORAL THRILLER by Tim Glencross John Murray, £16.99
WILLIAM HOFFER is a globetrotting fixer who is not fastidious about who he takes on as a client. Mexican drug cartels, Russian oligarchs, British bounders, they’re all the same to our anglicised anti-hero from the Midwest of the US who is feeling the pinch as the novel opens.
Things take a turn for the worse when his Mexican goddaughter is murdered in his London flat, a death which sets in train a sequence of events that embroil the super-smooth Hoffer in a series of scrapes. So far, so good.
The problem is that Hoffer is a man of the world and, boy, is he keen to let us know it. A cup of lapsang souchong “avoided brashness thanks to a sweet-ish after-note of menthol and roasted pecan”. A departing guest reminds him of “Caravaggio’s Virgin, holding the infant Christ as she stepped on a serpent”. Wear his knowledge lightly he does not.
And Hoffer’s relentless spouting of historical and cultural references, together with the constant highlighting of the exquisiteness of his manners, the sophistication of his analysis and the perspicacity of his judgments all begin to jar very early on.
A fan might compare Hoffer to Tom Ripley, the villainous con man in the Patricia Highsmith classic The Talented Mr Ripley. But if you ask me, he’s very much a cut-price version. DM