Gripping thrillers you won’t want to put down

New murder mysteries and thrillers guaranteed to send a shiver down your spine, reviewed by Jake Kerridge

Black 13 ***** by Adam Hamdy (Macmillan, £14.99)

Adam Hamdy proved in his Pendulum thriller trilogy that he has an outstanding ability to invent life-threatening situations for his characters – and an even more striking ability to devise plausible ways of getting them out unscathed.

This first volume in his new series follows much the same formula, with disgraced ex-mi6 officer Scott Pearce finding himself in hot water more often than a rubber duck. The tale begins with Pearce investigating the suspiciously convenient suicide of an old friend, a private investigator who was looking into the activities of a sinister exclusive bank.

With the help of ex-colleague Leila, a Syrian refugee turned secret service computer expert, Pearce finds himself having to forget everything he knows about espionage and discover new ways of tackling the shadowy villains of the 21st century who can control the way millions of people think with the click of a mouse.

There is a lot of information and intelligent speculation about the way the modern world works and who is in charge but, even so, Adam Hamdy never allows the pace to flag.

For all its impressive engagement with a newfangled world, this is at heart a gloriously old-fashioned Boy’s Own page-turner.

Haven’t They Grown ***** by Sophie Hannah (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)

Sophie Hannah’s mysteries don’t just intrigue her readers, they make us positively desperate to find out how on earth what happened did happen. Her novels should come with a detachable final chapter, to be locked away so those of us who don’t have iron self-discipline can’t peep ahead.

How about this for a set-up? Haven’t They Grown, her 22nd novel, begins with Beth Leeson deciding on a whim to take a gander at the house belonging to her estranged friend Flora, whom she hasn’t seen for 12 years.

But she comes across something very strange indeed. Flora’s two children don’t seem to have grown any older in the dozen years since she last saw them. They are still little older than toddlers, when they should be teenagers.

Beth becomes ever more obsessive in her determination to get to the bottom of this bizarre mystery, enduring a fair few hair’s-breadth escapes as she follows the trail of clues to Florida. I haven’t read a mystery novel in ages that seems so truly in love with the art of detection.

Hannah is one of our most courageous crime writers, a literary high-wire artist who sets herself the toughest of challenges in inventing seemingly inexplicable mysteries that she must create plausible solutions for.

Although in some of her books she teeters rather too much (and occasionally falls flat on her face), here she pulls it off beautifully.

Sophie Hannah has written a short story for S Magazine (p77).

A Silent

Death **** by Peter May (Riverrun, £20)

Peter May’s 26th novel features an odd pairing of detectives who make chalk and cheese seem compatible – passionate but downtrodden police officer Cristina Sanchez Pradell and the brilliant but socially inept Glaswegian investigator John Mackenzie.

They are forced to work together in southern Spain and Gibraltar as they attempt to track down expat gangster Jack Cleland, who blames Cristina for his girlfriend’s death.

A moving sub-plot features Cristina’s aunt, Ana, who suffers from Usher syndrome, a condition that has made her lose both her sight and her hearing. Ana’s life is heartbreakingly difficult enough, but she finds herself in even more trouble when Cleland targets her.

This is Peter May doing what he does best, combining a finely paced plot with a superb evocation of place – his scorching Spain is as brilliantly evoked as the chilly northern Scotland of his best-known books.

The Other

People **** by CJ Tudor (Michael Joseph, £12.99)

CJ Tudor is considered Britain’s closest equivalent to Stephen King and at her best her books have the US writer’s ability to simultaneously make you unable to stop reading while wishing you could bury the book somewhere deep underground where it can’t frighten you any more.

Her third novel begins with Gabe Forman discovering that his wife and five-year-old daughter

Izzy have been murdered. But various factors have persuaded Gabe that Izzy is not dead and

he devotes years to searching for traces of her, travelling up and down England in his camper van.

Eventually, he encounters a shadowy organisation known as “the other people” which helps victims of crime who, like himself, have nowhere else to turn. but at an alarming cost.

Meanwhile, a mysterious parallel storyline about a seven-year-old girl who has strange – but significant – psychic visions ramps up the book’s creepiness quotient.

This novel represents a real leap in ambition on the part of CJ Tudor and although some of the risks she takes don’t quite work, the main storyline of The Other People remains compelling and haunting. Mr Nobody *** by Catherine Steadman

(Simon & Schuster, £12.99)

Actress and writer Catherine Steadman follows up her hit debut Something In The Water with this story of an unidentifiable man washed up on a Norfolk beach with a head injury, having lost his memory and the ability to speak.

It’s a case too juicy for rising neuropsychiatrist Emma Lewis to resist, even though treating “Mr Nobody” means returning to the home town in Norfolk that she fled many years ago after an undisclosed traumatic event. Chillingly, although her patient can recall nothing about his own life, he seems to know something about Emma and the secrets she has suppressed for many years. And why, if nobody knows who he is, do the authorities insist on keeping his treatment secret?

Catherine Steadman provides a great deal of fascinating insight into amnesia and fugue states without too much info dumping. If at first the characterisations don’t seem strong enough to justify the slow-burn pace, her ingenious way with a twist provides compensation once the pace picks up.

Six Wicked Reasons **** by Jo Spain (Quercus,

£16.99)

This whodunnit from the rising star of Irish crime fiction has a murder victim so horrible that most readers will want the killer to be identified as quickly as possible and given a medal. Widower Frazer Lattimer, a manipulative narcissist (his good point), throws a party onboard a yacht to celebrate the return of his long-vanished son Adam – and ends up going overboard.

Adam and his five siblings have their own motives for doing their father in and it’s up to Spain’s slightly underwhelming detective Rob Downes to uncover them.

This novel reminded me of Agatha Christie at her best, as well as some modern imitations, such as the excellent recent film whodunnit Knives Out.

Spain has the Christie-esque ability to explore the poisonous dynamics of a dysfunctional family in a mercilessly unsentimental way that makes for truly wicked fun but with a salutary undertow of genuinely affecting sadness.

Who Did

You Tell? **** by Lesley Kara (Bantam, £12.99)

Lesley kara scored a deserved hit with her debut novel The Rumour, about secrets in the small coastal town of Flinstead-on-sea (one trusts any resemblance to Frintonon-sea, where the writer lives, is purely coincidental). Now, her second novel returns to Flinstead but with a new set of characters.

To aid her recovery, Astrid, a 32-year-old alcoholic fresh out of rehab, has moved back in with her mother. but is the claustrophobia of small-town life making Astrid paranoid or does somebody know about the dark deeds in her past?

Lesley kara does an excellent job of making readers’ heads spin as we are forced constantly to change our minds about who is ally and who enemy.

but the novel is perhaps most memorable as an unflinching portrayal, honest but hopeful, of a battle to overcome addiction.