DIG INTO MYSTERIES FOR YOUR FINAL BEACH READS
Four new mystery novels: competitive gymnastics from the author of The Fever, debuts set in the Manhattan art scene and a rural English town, and a favorite detective returning to pursue an arsonist. Reviewer Charles Finch is on the case.
YOU WILL KNOW ME By Megan Abbott Little, Brown, 352 pp.
Some writers range restlessly across themes; some bear deeper and deeper into the heart of what obsesses them. Abbott is one of those: our laureate of female adolescence, examining it from a slightly different angle in each of her loose, slashing, impressionistic, unnerving novels. Her latest, You Will Know Me ( out of four), is set in the world of gymnastics, when a good-looking young man in the orbit of an Olympic hopeful is killed in a hit-and-run. The suspects — various parents, coaches, athletes, boosters — are part of a community that would have called itself close but is slowly suffused by dread and suspicion, like the high school in Abbott’s
The Fever or the cheerleading squad in Dare Me. As its solutions are revealed, though, You Will Know Me proves tighter and more satisfying than those predecessors — Abbott’s finest novel thus far, a dark inquest into the pressures to which American society subjects its girls.
SOHO SINS By Richard Vine Hard Case Crime, 382 pp.
“Every marriage is a mystery, especially to its victims.” That wisecrack comes early in Soho Sins ( a melancholy midcentury throwback, and encapsulates both its plot lines and its knowing tone. Jack Wyeth, an art dealer, learns with horror that a friend and client has been murdered; her husband confesses, but given his recent mental decline, that’s less decisive than it might appear. Richard Vine’s debut is peppered with references to contemporary art, but its heart lies with Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, their insouciant women, arch dialogue, tough-egg investigators, and most tellingly, in the book’s solution, a certain tinge of their archaic psychosexual hysteria. Yet it’s more than pastiche: Vine writes strikingly well at moments, and his narrative is intricate but nicely readable.
Soho Sins is thus the perfect emblem of the excellence of its publisher, Hard Case Crime, which has carved out a leading place in the recent hardboiled revival.
LIAR LIAR By M.J. Arlidge NAL, 464 pp.
Anglophiles tend to -phile a certain strain of Anglo life, which often takes place on the grounds of a castle. (I’m raising my own hand here.) M.J. Arlidge’s fastpaced novels are set in a different and perhaps more realistic version of the country, however. Their hero is Helen Grace, a masochistic but brilliant and tenacious police inspector in Southampton. In Liar Liar ( she takes to the trail of an arsonist who has set six different catastrophic fires over two days. Is the motive financial? Sexual? Arlidge works in brisk, short chapters, and populates them with appealing workingclass characters from both the constabulary and the victims it’s assisting. This is an addictive installment in a reliably strong series — think James Patterson or Patricia Cornwell, with a (not-so-posh) British accent.
UNDER THE HARROW By Flynn Berry Penguin, 219 pp.
The voice of a first novel can often exceed its craftsmanship. So it goes for Under the Harrow ( a slender tale full of polished, watchful prose, with an interesting kind of icy desperation in its bones. Its narrator is a young Englishwoman named Nora who finds her sister murdered. After the funeral she decides to linger in the town where it happened, observing the police, evaluating their suspects and researching a sexual assault she believes may be connected to the fatal attack. Author Flynn Berry is engaged here with the linked subjects of women, violence and memory in a fashion reminiscent of A.S.A. Harrison or Paula Hawkins. But her themes would be better served with a less halting plot, and one less restricted to Nora’s experiences — none of the police or suspects emerge in full relief, and there’s too little narrative tension to sustain the book’s stylishness. Still, a writer to watch.