Jane Casey continues her absorbing Maeve Kerrigan series with A Stranger in the Family (Hemlock, £16.99), a sharply crafted thriller in which the best intentions collide with their unintended consequences.
Maeve and her boss Josh Derwent respond to the apparent murder-suicide of Helena and Bruce Marshall, whose young daughter Rosalie went missing 16 years ago, but the case quickly turns into a double-murder investigation. Certain the deaths are connected to Rosalie’s unsolved disappearance, Maeve and Josh reopen her case. A series of compelling revelations soon confirms a connection, but one that raises more questions than it answers.
All the while, Casey moves agilely between these investigations and scenes from the Marshalls’ status-conscious past (one son is still “all floppy hair and privilege in a blazer and chinos”), giving as much weight to character as to plot. Crucially, few characters get a clean balance sheet from Casey, something that nicely complicates her readers’ – and her detectives’ – investment in the cases.
Simmering behind the well-constructed plot lines is Maeve’s ambivalent relationship to Josh, whose role in her life has long occupied readers: always her boss, but also, variously, her “friend, landlord, colleague, bad boy, worst nightmare, almost-lover”. In more detail than ever, these two address both the dangers and the potential joy of peeling back the strictly professional facades they’ve maintained for years.
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For all of these reasons, the Kerrigan series remains among the most satisfying reading experiences anywhere in crime fiction.
Thomas Mullen’s The Rumor Game (Abacus, £21.99) takes place in Boston over several months in 1943, during the last weeks before the Allied invasion of Italy. Mullen introduces his two protagonists separately: crusading journalist Anne Lemire, who “chased lies down to their dirty origins”, is reporting on an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, and FBI agent Devon Mulvey is fighting local Axis-friendly propaganda. Only in the second act do their investigations converge on a murder case, before growing to include stolen weapons, counterfeit ration coupons and fifth-column efforts to blame Jews for the war.
For both Anne and Devon, this is all deeply personal: a dedicated anti-fascist, Anne’s life changed as a teenager when her family was hounded from their Catholic neighbourhood after her Jewish ancestry was revealed, while Devon discovers how deeply everything they’re investigating touches on his prominent and staunchly Irish Catholic family.
Busy though this may sound, Mullen – the author of the acclaimed Darktown series, centred on the first black cops in post-second World War Atlanta – excels at pulling us gradually into these complexities, never letting the plot’s various lines grow tangled even as his protagonists navigate a complicated world of conflicting allegiances. This strength lets The Rumor Game tell its story well even as it grapples with precisely the kind of contexts that continue to haunt the political present, not only in the US.
Eve Kellman’s debut, How to Kill a Guy in Ten Ways (Avon, £8.99), memorably introduces her narrator Millie Masters: “The first man I ever killed was my father ... All you need to know about that, is that a) it was sort of an accident and b) he deserved it.” But, “really, this isn’t about him, it’s about me. And a few things I have done recently that may be considered ‘wrong’ and ‘illegal’ and the rest.”
Her days spent at an unsatisfying retail job, Millie’s real life happens in the evenings, when she runs a vigilante phone line/car service for women out on the town who need help with threatening men. This righteous work takes a violent turn when she accidentally kills a man who’s drugged a young woman. Millie’s initial horror, though, is quickly replaced with pride that she’s taken a bad one off the board.
Millie’s slide into serial killing is offset by pub scenes with her friends and a love interest; the effect is not wholly unlike if Patricia Highsmith had written Bridget Jones’s Diary (“I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the funeral of a man you’ve murdered, but if not, I suggest giving it a try”). At its best, these juxtaposed tones lend a darkly satirical edge to Millie’s voice, which is this novel’s pulse. It’s a lot to balance, but Kellman mostly carries it off with an abundance of energy.
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Dervla McTiernan’s What Happened to Nina? (HarperCollins, £16.99) takes place on what may seem familiar territory when Nina disappears from a hiking vacation with her boyfriend Simon, who returns alone. The core of who did what to whom is quickly clear, but McTiernan quietly shifts our attention to the complex stories that follow any act of violence.
Set in small-town Vermont, this novel makes much of the local class divide: where Nina’s parents, Leanne and Andy, run an inn and a landscaping business, Simon’s parents are rich enough that his mother, Jamie, has secretly set aside nearly $2 million, her backup plan for when she’s inevitably traded in for a younger model. As Nina’s absence stretches on, suspicions of foul play grow, fed by the mistrust and contempt these families have for each other.
Alternating between different perspectives – particularly Leanne’s, Andy’s and Jamie’s – the novel follows several tracks: the search for Nina, the Jordans “wrapping their boy up in lawyers and money”, and a social media frenzy, complete with false paedophilia charges and a misogynistic turn against the victim. Deftly aware of genre trends, McTiernan brings real craft to her characters. What Happened to Nina? is – like its protagonists, for all their faults – smart enough to realise that “we didn’t live in a world where bad people paid for what they did”, at least not often enough.
In the compelling Day One (Hemlock, £16.99), Abigail Dean exhumes the resentments at the root of conspiracy theories to mesmerising effect. When a shooter attacks a primary school assembly in the Lake District town of Stonesmere, killing 10 students and a teacher, the suffering is only beginning. As the town grieves, the story is seized on by conspiracy theorists such as Trent Casey, a lonely, disappointed young man.
Trent and his crowd consider the media narrative too tidy to be plausible. A teacher’s body found protecting a student? That’s because “everybody loves a hero”. The mourning families aren’t “what grief looks like”? They must be “crisis actors”. In a deeply disturbing process, such claims are amplified by Ray Cleave, a virulent radio presence who exploits his broken, wounded followers. Meanwhile, amid this paranoid frenzy, Marty Ward – whose mother died in the shooting – is forced to work very publicly through the loss and her complicated guilt, for she has her own secrets about that violent day, secrets that spin far out of her control.
Marty and Trent are surrounded with a deep cast of vivid secondary characters among the deluded and the grieving alike, all established with small, telling details. As the chapters shift between these perspectives, Dean unpacks their battered lives, what they’ve lost and, for some, their regrets about what came before. Full of secrets and crimes, Day One is a psychological thriller, but one as attentive to public assaults as it is to intimate violations. This is an often moving novel, able to convey great weight with a sparing touch.
