A thriller sadly comes true
CRIME GEOFFREY WANSELL
LOCKDOWN by Peter May (Riverrun £8.99, 416 pp)
WRITTEN 15 years ago, but unpublished because it was thought too unrealistic, May’s depiction of a London under siege from a powerful global virus now rings only too true.
The Prime Minister has just died of the virus in St Thomas’s hospital, the Army is on the streets to prevent people from moving freely, and there is a curfew in place.
Against this bleak background, the bones of a little girl are found in the foundations of a hospital being erected at speed to cope with the increased demands on the NHS.
DI Jack MacNeil, on his final day as a Met detective, is given the task of discovering what happened to the child.
He turns to his friend Amy for help. She constructs the face of the child from the skull, but there are sinister forces at work who do not want her identity revealed. Packed with detail, it makes uncomfortable, but gripping, reading.
BROKEN by Don Winslow (Harper-Collins £20, 352 pp)
THIS collection of six short novels by the inimitable Winslow — bestselling author of The Border — is one of the most entertaining in recent years.
It opens with the title story, about a radio dispatcher in the New Orleans Police department who is also the mother of two policemen sons. She sends officers to the murder of one of them, and then instructs her other son to avenge his death.
It is chilling and compelling. But so is Winslow’s homage to Elmore Leonard, when a serious young detective tries to rescue a runaway chimpanzee that has somehow armed itself with a revolver.
Told with wry panache, the officer becomes a TV celebrity, but also manages to solve the crime and get the girl.
Then there’s a high-class jewel thief in California who models himself on the late, great Steve McQueen, stealing up and down the Pacific Coast Highway.
Told with great style, this is one of my favourite books of the year.
THE MIST by Ragnar Jonasson (Michael Joseph £14.99, 320 pp)
THE third in a trilogy featuring the exquisitely drawn detective Hulda Hermannsdottir, whose life is etched with tragedy, this story revolves around murders at an isolated farmhouse in the far east of Iceland.
It is just before Christmas, and snow is falling relentlessly when a young girl on her gap year suddenly goes missing. Her family are mystified, utterly at a loss to explain why their dutiful daughter should disappear.
Meanwhile, at the farmhouse, Erla and Einar wait for the full force of the storm they know is coming, when there is a knock at the door.
A stranger is outside, begging for shelter — but how has he got there in this weather, and who is he?
The mystery begins to enshroud the house as completely as the snow itself.
This is Icelandic noir of the highest order, with Jonasson’s atmospheric sense of place, and his heroine’s unerring humanity shining from every page.