CRIME AND THRILLERS
JACK THE RIPPER: CASE CLOSED by Gyles Brandreth
(Corsair £18.99) The twist in this latest instalment of Brandreth’s vastly enjoyable series, featuring Oscar Wilde and a cast of real historical characters, is the recruiting of Wilde’s friend Dr Arthur Conan Doyle to help solve one of Britain’s most compelling mysteries — who was Jack the Ripper?
since Melville Macnaghten, chief constable of the Metropolitan Police’s CiD, was a neighbour of Wilde’s in Tite street, Chelsea, the book creates a perfectly believable narrative of Wilde’s being invited to look at the Ripper case. The cast of players includes novelist James Barrie and Alice in Wonderland creator Lewis Carroll.
Demonstrating once again Brandreth’s assured touch for Victorian time and place, it is a delight, concluding with an interesting suggestion of who the
Ripper might have been.
THE DRY by Jane Harper
(Abacus £7.99) This superb debut from a Britishborn, Australiabased journalist grips like a vice from the first paragraph to the last, atmospherically evoking the isolated town of Kiewarra, outside Melbourne, which has been rocked by a horrific murder/ suicide in the midst of a ferocious drought. Karen hadler and her six-year-old son Billy appear to have been shot by husband and father Luke, before he turned the gun on himself. Officer Aaron Falk, an expert in fraud and tax evasion rather than oldfashioned police work, grew up in the town and returns for the funeral, but is drawn into investigating the deaths. Told with heartbreaking precision and extraordinary emotional power, it reveals the prejudices, secrets and lies of smalltown life against the background of emotions inflamed by heat and a crime that remains a mystery to anyone who knew Luke.
MATCH UP edited by Lee Child
(Sphere £12.99) A PERFECT book for the sun lounger: 22 of the world’s finest crime and thriller novelists have come together to write 11 new short stories using their best known characters — a sequel to the chart-topping collection Face Off three years ago.
This time, each author combination is a male and female one, and the results are a delicious confection of hard-boiled, fast-moving stories with an emotional heart.
Val McDermid’s Tony hill combines with Peter James’s Roy Grace in an elegant, if gruesome, tale about the lengths foot fetishists may go to in order to fulfil their fantasies, while Lee Child’s Jack Reacher teams up with Kathy Reichs’s forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan to challenge the charge that she killed an investigative reporter.
Both are worth the price of admission alone, but so are many of the others.
EXILE by James Swallow
(Zaffre £12.99) A SECOND outing for Britain’s answer to Jason Bourne, the nowdisgraced Mi6 field operative Marc Dane, this is the follow- up to swallow’s best-selling Nomad. it’s a doorstop of a book in true Tom Clancy tradition, with plenty of talk of guns and armaments, lashings of treachery and exotic locations — though the hero is not as likeable, or as smart, as Jack Ryan.
The characters include a pair of vicious serbian brothers who sell arms, a disgraced Russian general who offers them a portable nuclear bomb, a brutal somalian pirate who steals it and the shadowy Rubicon organisation in Monte Carlo, run by a mysterious billionaire.
Our hero is the only person who can see the danger the world is facing. inevitably, a race against time develops. Fast-moving and fun, if a bit too long.