Stalker’s revenge for a stolen life

DEAR MR M by Herman Koch (Picador £14.99)

THIS is a riveting but disturbing literary thriller from the richly talented Dutch author who sprang to prominence with his gripping The Dinner in 2009, which sold 2.5 million copies and is soon to be a major film starring Richard Gere.

Here, the narrator is stalking a once-famous writer, Mr M, for reasons not entirely clear as the story opens.

A neighbour, he watches every movement the author, his wife and their young daughter make. But why is he so interested? Gradually the truth emerges.

It transpires that Mr M’s most successful novel told the story of a young couple who murdered one of their teachers. And he based that book on the true story of the watching narrator, who, years earlier, together with his then teenage girlfriend, did a similar deed.

The watcher feels Mr M stole an element of his life, and is intent on revenge. Delicately told, in spare, haunting prose, there are echoes of Stephen King’s Misery, but this is even more subtle, with a denouement to send shivers down the spine.

NOTHING SHORT OF DYING by Erik Storey (Simon & Schuster £12.99)

CLYDE BARR — remember the name, because he could just become as famous as Lee Child’s anti-hero Jack Reacher.

This remarkably accomplished debut from a former ranch hand, wilderness guide and hunter who has roamed the badlands of the American West, introduces Barr, a lone wolf hero with an appetite for righting wrongs without turning to the legal authorities for help.

Barr has been a mercenary in Africa, and has recently spent time in a Mexican jail, when he decides to retire to the Yukon and live in solitude. But then he gets a call from his sister Jen, saying that he has to rescue her or she’ll be killed.

So begins an odyssey across America in pursuit of his sister’s kidnapper. Along the way Barr acquires a feisty female accomplice, Allie, who stays around as the body count mounts and the suspense intensifies.

Utterly compelling from the first page, this novel was rejected more than 50 times before it finally found a publisher. For my money, it will become a worldwide sensation.

OUT OF BOUNDS by Val McDermid (Little Brown £18.99)

WHAT superlatives are there left to describe the phenomenon that is the multi award-winning McDermid?

To millions of fans around the world she is, quite simply, the queen of the psychological thriller. This is her 30th since her debut in 1987, and it underscores just what a formidable talent she has become.

Here she opens with a teenage joyrider who crashes a car and ends up in a coma.

A DNA test reveals a connection to a rape and murder committed 22 years earlier.

Meanwhile, DCI Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit — a woman so troubled by the murders she deals with that she suffers from insomnia and tramps the streets of Edinburgh each night — finds herself caught up in a mystery with its roots in a terrorist bombing two decades ago. Told with McDermid’s legendary verve and eye for detail, it grabs the reader by the throat and never lets go.