January has been a good month for first novels. Adorah Nworah’s debut, House Woman (Borough Press, £16.99), is a slow-burn domestic suspense thriller set largely in a Nigerian expat household outside Houston. When successful son Nna returns to Houston to visit his mother ,Agbala, and father, Eke, he finds Ikemefuna, a stranger, waiting in the kitchen. Their arranged marriage is news to him, but not entirely unwelcome.
Soon, though, hidden layers bleed through: Ikemefuna is imprisoned in the home by Agbala and Eke, who destroyed her passport and cell phone as soon as she arrived. She knows their brutality but Nna, their princeling, is slower to catch on, telling himself she’s “just another fresh-off-the-boat Nigerian trying to capitalise off her trauma. She was addicted to victimhood.”
As the story accelerates towards its tragic climax, dangerous undercurrents swirl, while Ikemefuna grows increasingly desperate to escape – “Her freedom depended on a man’s whims. The alternative was forced motherhood” – and Agbala’s self-proclaimed (and self-serving) role as a priestess of the Igbo goddess Ala becomes clearer.
Nworah is a gifted writer, skilled at quickly sketching acute insights about secondary characters, their communities, and the dangerous ambivalences of black and immigrant life in the United States. There is little resolution here for the characters’ suffering or the structural forces at play: Nworah doesn’t offer an easy redemptive arc, nor one that surrenders the characters’ complexities in the service of hasty closure. It’s an impressive and moving first novel.
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Another promising debut, Jahmal Mayfield’s Smoke Kings (Melville House, £17.99), tells an insistently complicated story. When Joshua’s brother Darius, a black teenager, is killed by a group of racist white boys, all of whom get off without consequence, Joshua – alongside his cousin Nate and their friends Isiah and Rachel – is “unable to stomach another Twitter hashtag, another candlelight vigil, another graffiti memorial”. Instead, they trace the descendants of people who lynched and violated black Americans, forcing those who have continued their families’ ways to pay reparations, which the friends redistribute to the victims’ descendants.
Already bowing under their disagreements about how far to go, the quartet’s plan takes a catastrophic turn when they belatedly discover that one of their targets was the brother of a white nationalist cult leader. The plot accelerates, shifting from the initial pointed framing of the racial and historical contexts toward increasingly fierce action. Throughout, Mayfield’s central four characters remain richly conflicted, with their own unsettled relationships, committed to the idea of justice for Darius and the many others who have been denied it, but with growing doubts about the path they’ve chosen.
Appropriately, the book’s ending doesn’t pretend to resolve these complexities: Mayfield’s not a writer interested in making things seem simpler than they are, and that is essential to the power of this memorable novel.
Oskar Jensen’s Helle & Death (Viper, £16.99), a locked-room mystery that gleefully winks to its form, is set in an old Northumberland country mansion, replete with a mysterious housekeeper and a wealthy host with questionable motives. Disliked even by his friends, Anthony – who, as a “white, male, well-off Oxford undergraduate” had already cast “himself as the plucky underdog struggling against the system” – has gathered seven old university friends together for a reunion on the heels of selling his wildly successful tech start-up.
On their first night together one of the party dies, an apparent suicide. Art historian Helle (who, conveniently, is reviewing a book about Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps’s painting The Suicide) raises suspicions that all is not as it seems. Drawing on the methods of Golden Age detective fiction, their friend Sara’s academic speciality, the group is soon “in danger ... of turning a PhD in literary criticism into something objectively useful”. In attempting to solve the mystery, all while isolated by a blizzard that has severed the phone lines, they reconsider their complicated student relationships and examine their post-Oxford lives.
Between swearing in Danish and unleashing a hornet’s nest of suspicion, Helle is an awkward and earnest amateur detective. Full of sharp turns, the plot is equally engaging, reminiscent of the Glass Onion films, and drawing from the many mysteries it name-checks. This craftily entertaining novel’s surprising conclusion fits comfortably in that lineage.
Rosemary Hennigan’s psychological thriller The Favourite (Orion, £14.99) deftly examines the tangled intersections of justice and revenge. Jessica Mooney has left Dublin for a year of study at an elite law school in Philadelphia with the sole intent of becoming Prof Jay Crane’s favoured student and exposing his crimes: two years earlier, as a visiting professor at Trinity, Crane taught her sister Audrey, after which she suddenly dropped out of school to backpack across Central America, where she died in a bus crash. When Jessica learns that Audrey had told a friend Crane raped her, and that her last text to Crane read “You know what you did”, she becomes convinced he caused Audrey’s death. Knowing the law is tilted against rape victims, Jessica sets out to “create the evidence myself” by becoming Crane’s next favourite, sure he’ll replicate his sins: “I would make justice for Audrey, or have my revenge.”
What follows is an intricate dance between ambitious students and tenured faculty, set against the 2016 US elections and the rising Me Too movement. Amid such complexity, The Favourite benefits from its commitment to the central characters’ uncertainties: “I could tell you a simple story,” Jessica concludes, “one where Crane is a villain and I am a hero,” but “do we need our stories of heroes and villains, of angels and demons? Do we need good on one side, evil on the other? Clear motives. Unimpeachable character. Or does the world need to know the ugly truth of how everything occurred?”
The plotting of CS Robertson’s The Trials of Marjorie Crowe (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) is as well-paced as the daily walks that Marjorie has taken for 25 years, at precisely the same times and along precisely the same path through the small Scottish town of Kilgoyne. She acknowledges that the town “has never been able to work me out, and I’ve never thought to make it any easier for them”. Although they know nothing of her past and little about how she occupies herself, they do know they can set their watches by her.
Then, one April morning, everything changes: Marjorie sees a boy hanging from a tree and returns home in mute shock, telling no one. When his body is discovered and the community learns she didn’t report it, Marjorie is no longer just the village eccentric: she’s now the outcast, the witch, at best an unreliable witness and at worst the killer. After more village youths go missing and are found dead, Marjorie – for whom “there’s no supernatural. It’s all natural” – determines to find the necessary clues in Kilgoyne’s hidden history.
A dance between the present and the past plays out as she unravels the secrets of that history. Time here evokes pain as much as healing, and Robertson illuminates the depths of both through these sensitively written characters, interwoven with historical accounts of other Scottish women condemned as witches and “consumed in a blaze of patriarchal hate”, all without sacrificing any of this superb novel’s meticulously crafted mystery.
