Past Lying (Sphere, £22), the seventh book in Val McDermid’s DCI Karen Pirie series, is set amid the hushed uncertainty of Edinburgh during the first Covid lockdown. Pirie and her Historical Case Unit team are at loose ends without a case to work, until a National Library archivist calls: the estate of disgraced crime writer Jake Stein has donated his papers, including an unfinished novel that seems like a barely veiled account of the case of Lara Hardie, a missing university student. Pirie is initially sceptical that the manuscript will yield much more “than a couple of coincidences”, but it soon proves a thread worth following, opening into a complex plot of jealous writers, straying spouses and effective twists. This novel-within-a-novel conceit, used to lead the detectives to more concrete evidence, sharply delivers a suitably unsettled atmosphere.
Watching the team dissect the manuscript for clues is among the plot’s heartbeats, along with an affecting side plot about a Syrian refugee, but the detail with which McDermid captures the lockdown is equally compelling. The pervasive disorientation and fear that defined those early months of 2020 contribute much to atmosphere and plot alike: the manuscript, casework and historical moment all collide as – among the Zoom calls, binge viewing and household bubbles – characters experience significant loss, reconsidering their own personal and professional places in the world.
Set in 1930s London, Tom Mead’s The Murder Wheel (Head of Zeus, £20) is an affectionate tribute to the Golden Age locked-room mystery, with crimes taking place in a Ferris wheel carriage high above the ground, a trunk during a magic act in front of a full house and, for good measure, an actual locked room. This sequel to Death and the Conjuror (2022) reunites illusionist Joseph Spector with Detective George Flint, and introduces young Edmund Ibbs, an attorney and amateur magician, newly arrived in London and consistently underestimated by the cynics around him.
Mead’s skilled homage draws from early 20th century true-crime cases and classic genre motifs, all set against the charmed worlds of the fairground and theatre. Performance is at the heart of this mystery in more ways than one: Ibbs is acutely aware of the “veneer of civility” he encounters in London, and determines to break through it to solve the crimes at hand. Watching him work through this contributes to the novel’s well-paced action. Spector, meanwhile, is less strictly wedded to law and order than traditional Golden Age protagonists – “I’m sure you are well aware that the British justice system is ultimately impervious to logic,” he says at one point – a shift that gives Mead’s work a more contemporary air. This satisfying novel also benefits from a rich array of secondary characters, drawn with empathy and wit, and a satisfying conclusion that finds Ibbs on the verge of a romantic life in his adopted city.
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Jessica Knoll’s sharply written Bright Young Women (Pan Macmillan, £16.99) is a complex novel of a lifetime’s grief and rage. After a visceral opening, this book paces itself slowly, but maintains an insistent pulse of unease across several timeframes, with a keen eye for both the barely veiled brutalities of gender roles and the overlap between the murderous and the mundane. The main narrator Pamela is the head of her sorority in 1978 when an intruder kills her best friend and another sorority sister, gravely injuring three more women. Named only once in passing, the killer is referred to throughout as The Defendant, a way to reject the image of a handsome, intelligent man that he fostered and that the media perpetuated: “The man was no diabolical genius. He was your run-of-the-mill incel whom I caught picking his nose in the courtroom. More than once.”
In keeping with this rejection, Bright Young Women focuses not on the attacks so much as on the psychological violence inflicted in their wake, by a sea of authority figures who don’t want to “take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute horror show”. Full of vividly drawn characters, particularly Pamela, this is a smart, searching novel, less a mystery of what happened than an indictment of how it was able to keep happening.
Daniel Sweren-Becker’s Kill Show (Hodder, £9.99) makes what might seem an overly familiar premise into something thoroughly engaging. Written as an oral history of a controversial true crime TV show about a missing teenager, it cleverly introduces competing narratives from a wide cast of characters, avoiding the disjointedness that can suck the air out of real oral histories.
Set in a Washington, DC exurb, Kill Show explores the disappearance of teenager Sara Parcell, the community’s search for her and the aftermath once she is found dead. Even when the suspects are at first the usual ones, Sweren-Becker gives the characters distinct voices with depth and personality (though most share some need to be the hero of the story or to exorcise their own grudges; this is not a book that will leave you feeling better about humanity). Without an all-knowing narrator to guide the reader, Kill Show instead juxtaposes these voices to sustain the tension around who’s responsible – ethically, practically, legally – for Sara’s death.
There’s real humour along the way, both scathing and light, but when the reveal comes it is plausible, surprising and deeply sad. Not every voice is equally persuasive; the sociologist and the pop culture critic both, perhaps intentionally, pale next to the voices of the other participants. Even so, when it is immersed in the main characters – which is, fortunately, most of the time – Kill Show is a vibrant, craftily entertaining novel.
Jordan Harper’s third novel, Everybody Knows (Faber, £8.99), is a glittering razor of a story, merging the claustrophobic intensity of classic noir fiction with the sprawling paranoia of conspiracy thrillers. Publicist Mae Pruett works for one of LA’s dirtiest PR firms, while her ex, fixer Chris Tamburro, a disgraced former cop, is the guy “you call while the body cools”. These grippingly flawed characters are matched with damaged people in a damaged city where “Nobody talks. But everybody whispers.”
Mae and Chris stumble on to a case that begins with the murder of Mae’s mentor but quickly sprawls to include a malignant multibillionaire (is there any other kind?), a pedophilic producer of tween cable shows, a pregnant 14-year-old, corrupt developers and a white nationalist burning down the city’s homeless encampments. Holding all these strands together is The Beast, Mae and Chris’s name for the web of sly publicists, tame journalists and dirty cops who keep Hollywood’s lights on, a web so dense that it’s all unspoken: “You just do what you’re supposed to do. You don’t have to be told. Cover-ups happen in glances and silences.” Looking for a way out of this world, Mae and Chris try to find some qualified redemption as the plot moves to its suitably tangled conclusion. An excellent novel full of grace notes, Everybody Knows sings through Harper’s ear for his characters, for their hard-won empathy, for all the small, neon-lit details and asides.
