February Fiction

A tale of intrigue and deception is our pick for February’s page-turner

Whatever Gets You Through the Night by Charlie Higson (Little, Brown, £14.99)

Since his Nineties TV triumph as the co-creator of The Fast Show, Charlie Higson has been best known for his thrillers aimed at younger readers. Particularly successful—and rightly so—was a series featuring James Bond as an Eton schoolboy already saving the world on a regular basis.

In his first adult thriller for 11 years (and just his second in the last 25), Higson throws in plenty of old-school nods to 007: among them a car chase, a boat chase and a villain with a mountaintop lair. But he also combines them with such up-todate concerns as internet conspiracy theories and the sexual grooming of adolescent girls.

The setting is pre-pandemic Corfu where sinister billionaire Julian Hepworth is using that lair of his as a girls-only tennis school/breeding ground for sexual exploitation. So can the slightly enigmatic good guy Mcintyre and his tough-but-sexy sidekick Aimee penetrate Hepworth’s supposedly impenetrable security and rescue the captives?

But, as it transpires, all this is just for starters in a novel packed with several subplots, a large and varied cast of supporting characters and thoughts on everything from the Greek debt crisis to the distorting effects of social media (one of the book’s intriguing ideas is that people like Hepworth deliberately spread conspiracy theories in order to

James Walton is a book reviewer and broadcaster, and has written and presented 17 series of the BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff