WHICH ONE WILL JINGLE YOUR BELLS?

CRIME & THRILLERS GEOFFREY WANSELL and CARLA McKAY CROSS THE LINE by James Patterson (Century £20)

ONE of the reasons Patterson is the world’s biggest-selling thriller writer is that he has an uncanny knack for tapping into the Zeitgeist. Here, in the 24th novel featuring profiler and detective Alex Cross, he pits his hero against a Washington DC vigilante group determined to ‘drain the swamp’ of political corruption and drugs, and prepared to use extreme violence in pursuit of their aims.

The scent of the Trump campaign for the Presidency seeps from every page, although, of course, the vigilante group are vicious criminals — regardless of their much-lauded patriotism — and must be defeated.

Told at Patterson’s customary breathtaking pace, it is so compulsive you will have finished it by the end of Boxing Day. GW

CONCLAVE by Robert Harris (Hutchinson £20)

THIS was the thriller of the year for me, with a plot so serpentine and sinuous that I could not bear to put it down.

Set in the Vatican, it centres on the election of a new Pope and the 118 cardinals entitled to vote behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel.

As the possible victors ebb and flow during the elaborate voting progress, so the delicate characterisations of the principal players are ever more elegantly drawn out. There are moments when you are almost tempted to think this must be reality rather than fiction.

That has been Harris’s hallmark since his stunning debut with Fatherland in 1992. This is every bit as good, with two superb twists, both of which underline his exceptional talent. GW

THE TRESPASSER by Tana French (Hodder £16.99)

MY FAVOURITE crime title this year proves just how gifted French is. She creates sublime, heart-stopping stories, with a heroine to treasure in Detective Antoinette Conway of the Dublin Murder Squad. Conway has become the squad’s pariah, subjected to juvenile pranks and vile harassment in an effort to drive her out.

The attempts fail, and then she picks up what looks like a routine murder when a beautiful young woman is found dead beside a table set for a romantic dinner for two.

It looks like an open and shut case — the boyfriend must have done it. But Conway is not so sure, and doggedly pursues her investigation, revealing a far darker truth with far-reaching consequences. GW

LIE WITH ME by Sabine Durrant (Mulholland £16.99)

CASUAL liar and social parasite Paul Morris has lived off his friends for years, getting by on his good looks and dubious charm.

When an old friend introduces him to Alice, a vulnerable young widow with money, Morris seizes the chance to secure an invite to her holiday home in Greece.

Once there, things go deliciously awry. Alice is strangely preoccupied, her friends are unimpressed by Paul, and, worse, suspicion falls on him over an old case involving a missing girl.

What Paul doesn’t know is that while he may have an agenda, others do, too. A stunning tale of deceit, betrayal and entrapment. CM

THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR by Shari Lapena (Bantam Press £12.99)

WHEN her babysitter cancels at the last moment, Anne wants to back out of dinner with the couple next door to stay with six-month-old Cora.

Husband Marco, however, persuades her to go by promising frequent check-ups and bringing the baby monitor. What could possibly go wrong?

Dinner for Anne is torture, as she watches the ghastly wife’s drunken advances towards her not unwilling husband. Finally, they go home to find their front door open and the baby gone.

Told in a realistic and un-hysterical way, the twists and turns are all the more shocking — the best white-knuckle ride of the year. CM LITERARY JOHN HARDING, STEPHANIE CROSS and CLAIRE ALLFREE

ALL THAT MAN IS by David Szalay (Cape £14.99)

DeserveDly shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, szalay’s collection of nine virtually unconnected stories somehow manages to read like a novel.

The unifying force is the theme of what it means to be a man in the 21st century, whether you are a twentysomething French loser alone in a hell-hole Cyprus tourist resort, a ruined russian oligarch on the verge of suicide, or a Hungarian former soldier who finds himself falling in love with the prostitute he is paid to mind on a visit to london.

What these very different tales also have in common is their ability to seize you by the heart strings and not let go.

Funny, sad, terrifying, all life is here. In the end what we are left with is the terrible reality of the human condition, which is that nothing lasts — neither the individual nor the particular world into which he or she is born. A compelling masterpiece. JH

HAG-SEED by Margaret Atwood (Hogarth £16.99)

HogArTH’s idea of having shakespeare’s plays rewritten by well-known novelists has mainly proved a bit of a damp squib, with Anne Tyler’s retelling of The Taming of The shrew an entertaining if not exactly profound exception.

Until, that is, they let Margaret Atwood loose on The Tempest.

In her reworking, ousted theatre director Felix, famous for his innovative productions, gravitates towards putting on an annual shakespeare production performed by prison inmates.

Deciding The Tempest will be his swansong, Felix plots to combine a lifetime ambition to stage the play with a plan to avenge himself upon his enemies.

What’s impressive here is not just 77-year-old Atwood’s undimmed brilliance but the sheer effort she puts into the project, immersing herself in shakespeare’s original so that the novel becomes not simply an absorbing read but also an erudite examination and explanation of the play’s themes.

Not to be missed. JH

THE LESSER BOHEMIANS By Eimear McBride (Faber £16.99)

THIs might not be a million miles removed from McBride’s debut, A girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, but in view of its magnificence that scarcely matters.

At its tormented heart is eily, Irish-born and an innocent of 18 when she arrives in Nineties london for drama school.

Her feet have barely touched the boards before she meets an older actor and the two embark on a torrid, mutually-lacerating affair that spans the whole of this three-act novel, one whose ups and downs unashamedly put the reader through the wringer (though not without reward).

As has been pointed out, McBride’s headlong Joycean style is suited to descriptions of sex, of which this book has plenty. But it also makes for a portrait of london that’s as vivid and intoxicating as the city itself, overwhelming in its assault on the senses.

DAYS WITHOUT END Sebastian Barry (Faber £17.99)

yes, this Costa prize nominee is a full-throttle, rifles-blazing, goresteeped, Civil War-era Western.

But it’s also perhaps the sweetest, most tender (and unexpected) romance of the year.

our hero is Thomas McNulty who, having fled the Irish famine, finds himself in the mid-west scarcely better off: when he meets his brother-in-arms John Cole he has only a wheat sack to cover his modesty. What to do? Don a dress and rustle up a drag act, of course. But even after the men enlist (ending up, by virtue of a number of fateful twists, adopting a native American daughter), McNulty finds life in women’s clothes preferable.

A book that’s backdrop is often one of terrible natural beauty, it doesn’t flinch from man’s inhumanity to man.

But Barry’s real daring lies in his celebration of small happinesses and long love — you’ll be weeping buckets by the end, I promise. SC

TRANSIT by Rachel Cusk (Cape £16.99)

For the past few years it’s been the women who have been producing the most stylistically interesting and inventive new fiction, be it elena Ferrante, eimear McBride or the heartsoaringly playful Ali smith.

And then there is rachel Cusk, much maligned in some quarters for daring to write the truth, as she saw it, about motherhood and marriage in her two memoirs, but to my mind one of our most original novelists.

This is a sequel of sorts to its predecessor outline and is narrated by the same woman, Faye, mother to two boys, estranged from her partner and in the middle of a tricky refurb job on a newly bought london flat.

It consists simply of a series of encounters, with builders, ex-boyfriends and fellow writers. yet beneath its pellucid surface, themes of displacement and the desire for transformation and authenticity rumble like small earthquakes.

It’s also gruesomely funny. How it escaped the attention of this year’s Man Booker prize judges is beyond me. CA

COVE by Cynan Jones (Granta £9.99)

I’ll be popping this very short book into several stockings this Christmas: it’s one of the most haunting novels I’ve read in years.

A man takes to the sea in a kayak to scatter his father’s ashes and perhaps catch a fish or two. Then lightning strikes the boat, and when the man comes to, his arm is badly injured, his memory is shot and he has no obvious way of getting back to shore.

Jones’s exquisitely turned sentences — more poetry than prose — force the reader to slow right down, confronting us with every tiny sinew of the man’s determined efforts to survive.

Jones is an uncompromising writer and the situation his protagonist faces is dire. yet this is also a breathtaking novel, alert to the ineffable mystery of man’s aloneness in the natural world, but also sure-footed on the emotional ties that bind. CA