Crimes of the heart aren’t usually the stuff of crime fiction, but when a British prime minister is conducting an affair with a woman half his age and passing his lover secret documents as his country sleepwalks into war, the lines between immorality, illegality and treason can very quickly become blurred.
Opening in June 1914, Robert Harris’s Precipice (Hutchinson Heinemann, £16.99) revolves around Britain’s then prime minister Herbert Asquith and the aristocratic Venetia Stanley. Their torrid affair becomes a matter of national security when DS Paul Deemer, promoted from Special Branch to the newly established and ultra-secretive War Office department MO5(g), is ordered to investigate the possibility that a German spy is responsible for the top-secret telegrams and diplomatic communiqués that have been found littering the countryside outside London.
Deemer is one of the very few fictional characters in the novel; otherwise, Harris draws upon the historical facts and Asquith’s very many letters to Stanley (some of which are jaw-dropping in their recklessness and naivety) as he crafts an absorbing behind-the-scenes account of the headlong plunge into war, with Asquith’s judgement, personal and professional, being called into question by a spy-catching outfit he doesn’t even know exists.
Asquith and Stanley are sympathetically drawn and fully rounded characters, Winston Churchill is brutally skewered as a warmongering opportunist determined to force through his “hare-brained scheme” to attack the Dardanelles (“Haldane once complained that arguing with Winston was like trying to argue with a brass band”), and the caste-like hierarchy of London’s class system is subtly implicated in the slaughter to come. Easily on a par with Harris’s best historical fiction, Precipice is a sobering account of how the most banal of human failings and foibles can contribute to disaster on a global scale.
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Some readers like their crime fiction hard-boiled and realistic, others prefer a cosy and non-threatening read. Who better than the ceaselessly inventive Chris Brookmyre to blend the two? The Cracked Mirror (Abacus, £22) presents us with parallel mysteries, with the first, a bride’s apparent suicide at her wedding, being investigated by the octogenarian Scottish spinster and mystery-solver Penny Coyne; meanwhile, over in Hollywood, tough-talking LAPD detective Johnny Hawke is baffled by a successful screenwriter’s alleged suicide.
When their investigations collide, the odd couple realise that something very, very strange is going on ... Although littered with references to classic mystery fiction such as Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, the most pertinent allusion here is that of Dirk Gently, Douglas Adams’s metaphysical sleuth. As Penny and Johnny penetrate ever deeper into the murky world created by the company Diegesis, Brookmyre dips in and out of novels, films and video games to have a rollicking good time manipulating all manner of narrative. Brookmyre’s most ambitious novel to date – which is saying something – The Cracked Mirror is a tour de force of high-wire plate-spinning.
Interiors content creator Elle Littlewood takes on the refurbishment of the Château Mirabelle in Amanda Cassidy’s The Perfect Place (Canelo, £14.99). Although rundown, the chateau is “a property some would kill to own” – the question is whether Elle, who has escaped the horrors of her childhood by reinventing herself as a picture-perfect social media influencer, will resort to murder in order to preserve the illusion of her rags-to-riches tale.
The rural French setting is deliciously idyllic, and Cassidy gets under the skin of Elle’s plight as she persuasively conveys the gut-gnawing anxiety and paranoia that go hand in hand with Elle’s impostor syndrome. She may be vain, shallow and a slave to social media likes, but there’s a poignancy to her constant need for validation and her desire that the whole world buy into her meticulously curated self-mythologising.
As Elle deals with a number of issues, however, among them her conniving producer Sue Anderson, her feckless fiance Will Buchanan, and the chateau’s elderly owner Leonard, who refuses to conveniently die and pave the way for Elle’s fairy-tale wedding, the plot grows episodic, with Elle leaping from one motivation to another – each one less plausible than the last – to justify her increasingly desperate actions.
They said it couldn’t be done, but lo! the Brexit thriller is finally upon us, courtesy of Andy Bell’s Sovereign Territory (Biteback Publishing, £9.85). Opening in 2016 with the shocking announcement that the UK’s Brexit referendum has somehow supplied the result no one expected, and that none of the political elite actually wanted, the novel centres on Alan Jarvis, a special adviser in the hastily established Department for Exiting the European Union, the Labour MP Mitra Vakil, and Davey Martin, a Ukip apparatchik disillusioned with the funereal pace of the post-Brexit decoupling from Europe.
The story proceeds by way of the “impossible dream” of Brexit degenerating into something of a “festering, toxic onion”, a state of affairs that gives rise to a febrile atmosphere in which the usual standard of hate mail received by sitting MPs quickly descends into the naked racism and threats of violence and assassination that account for the novel’s thriller-ish aspects. It’s in its portrayal of Westminster’s politicking, petty grievances and score-settling, however, that Sovereign Territory really delivers. Brexit’s major players – Truss, Corbyn, Johnson et al – are given brief mentions along the way, but this is a novel rooted firmly in the back corridors and grassroots of British politics, with Bell – a high-profile UK political correspondent – revelling in the minutiae of political warfare red in tooth and claw.
A research trip to the Congo in 1960 offers a remarkable opportunity for travel writer Gabriel Dax in William Boyd’s Gabriel’s Moon (Viking, £20). An old college friend introduces Gabriel to Patrice Lumumba, the recently elected prime minister of the newly independent Republic of Congo, with Lumumba keen to have his fears of potential assassination put down on record. When Lumumba subsequently disappears, feared murdered, Gabriel is approached by Faith Brown, representing an off-the-books MI6 operation. Would Gabriel be interested in doing his country a very simple favour?
A cold-war variation on the classic John Buchan novel, in which a hapless civilian is embroiled in a labyrinthine plot, Gabriel’s Moon leans into our hero’s vocation as a travel writer to take the reader on a wild ride from London to southern Spain, Rome to Warsaw. Beautifully written – and particularly strong, as you might imagine, on vivid scene-setting – and deftly plotted, the novel delicately reworks the conventions (uranium and H-bombs, double agents and defections) of the cold-war spy thriller, such that even the most dedicated fan of the genre will find themselves as bewildered as Gabriel himself as our “reluctant spy” and “useful idiot” attempts to match wits with professional spies and ruthless killers.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
