Will this sinister stalker turn violent?
THE BOOK OF YOU by Claire Kendal (Harper-Collins £12.99 £11.49)
THIS DARK, disturbing debut by an American-born but Britishbased creative writing teacher makes uncomfortable reading — especially if you are a man.
It tells the story of Clarissa from Bath who is being stalked by work colleague Rafe, and nothing she does will make him stop his unwanted attention.
He looms out of the blue wherever she goes and keeps telling her how much she misses him. Then she is selected for jury service in Bristol, and clings to the hope that in court, at least, she will be safe.
She isn’t. And as the case before her unfolds — involving both t he abduction and abuse of a woman — so the parallels with her own life become all too clear, along with a growing certainty about Rafe’s true intentions.
Both brutal and unbearably tense, it announces the arrival of a fierce new talent, a writer not afraid to grasp a woman’s fears in stark detail and to invoke nightmares.
THE WOLF IN WINTER by John Connolly (Hodder £14.99 £13.49)
THE TWELFTH in a series of superb novels built around the haunted private detective Charlie Parker, this thriller underlines just how fine a writer Connolly — who is still only 45 — has become.
His ability to convey menace sends chills down the spine and his characters are so dark — and yet so normal — that they linger in the mind for weeks.
This time, he has created an evil town called Prosperous in Maine on the Atlantic coast of the United States, based on a religious sect where the community keeps its own secrets, even if that includes killing anyone who threatens the descendants of the town’s original settlers — who all came from the North-East of England.
Parker tries to unravel the death of a young woman after being asked to do so by a now dead homeless man. Connolly’s matchless story-telling never lets the tension slacken for a moment, while Parker remains, as ever, in i mminent and present danger of his life, not least because he is always only too ready to die in the battle.
GALVESTON by Nic Pizzolatto (Sphere £7.99 £7.49)
WRITTEN by the creator of the atmospheric TV crime drama True Detective, we are in a world of sleazy bars and rundown motels along the U.S. south coast from Louisiana to Galveston, Texas, in the company of long-time bad boy Ray Cady, who has just been diagnosed with cancer in his lungs.
He is on the run from a killing that went wrong in New Orleans and you can almost smell the seashore driftwood, t he cigarette smoke and the stale beer, as he escapes with an 18year-old called Rocky and her infant ‘sister’ Tiffany.
This is a melancholy, evocative story of the impossibility of redemption and how the past always catches up with you; a sad elegy of what might have been in Cady’s life.
There are resonances of the great James Lee Burke in the elegance Pizzolatto brings to his heart-wrenching story that makes it unforgettable.