The 28 best thrillers and crime novels of 2018
Our critic rounds up the best crime fiction offerings of the year so far, from JK Rowling's new Strike mystery to a bestseller by South Korea's most popular crime writer
Good Samaritans by Will Carver (Orenda) ★★★★☆
Will Carver's invigoratingly nasty novel will make perfect reading at Christmas time, if you have spent a couple of hours watching Mary Poppins or It's a Wonderful Life and are finding that a surfeit of the milk of human kindness is making you nauseous. I read a lot of novels about homicidal mania and this one made most of the others seem as reassuringly cosy as my favourite slippers.
It centres on Seth, presented to us as a typical specimen of late-capitalist masculinity: the focus of his life is a pointless sales job, and his marriage has soured, with he and his wife barely able to stay in the same room as one another without the pabulum of reality television to distract them from their mutual indifference. When his wife goes to bed he rings random numbers from a database of customers he has stolen from work and asks anyone who picks up if they want to talk.
Most respond with a bunch of expletives, but Seth's proactive search for connection in an era of alienation does chime with some people. One night he finds himself talking to a young, vulnerable woman called Hadley, initiating a chain of events that sees even worse crimes committed than Seth's flagrant breaches of GDPR.
Much of the story is told by an omniscient third-person narrator prone to amusingly sardonic asides ("you can read in the newspapers or magazines about cancer and obesity and mosquito bites, but there is never any research carried out on how many deaths are caused by laziness and selfishness") and forever telling us that true love and altruism are chimeras.
It is a bleak vision of life: not the whole truth of it, thank God, but true enough to impart to the reader the thrill of genuine discomfort, presented with the chilly conviction of Simenon's most unflinching romans durs and just as horribly addictive.
Shell Game by Sara Paretsky (Hodder & Stoughton) ★★★★☆
Millions of people who have barely heard of radical feminist magazines such as Ms nevertheless read avidly about the impunity with which powerful men prey on women, or the damage done to America by Late Capitalism, in Sara Paretsky's novels about the kick-ass private eye Vic "VI" Warshawski.
Readers come for Paretsky's funny, gripping storytelling, and even those who would not say that they are staying for the politics find it worth their while to tolerate them. The chief attraction is the appealingly tough but just acceptably vulnerable V I. (Not even somebody giving a robust defence of supply-side economics could make Vic angrier than she is with herself whenever she accidentally shows feminine weakness.)
This, the 19th novel in the series, sees Warshawski investigating two cases close to home: a murder that sees her old pal Lotty Herschel's great-nephew in the frame; and the disappearance of the estranged, wrong-side-of-the-tracks niece of her slimy lawyer ex, Dick. The inhumanity of the US immigration service and the disastrous consequences for Syria of the invasion of Iraq play a role as the two plots unravel and converge.
At times, the lack of nuance in Paretsky's politics can be rather oppressive, but perhaps she feels that to write novels less journalistically engaged would be to fiddle while Rome burns. Paretsky would not be so popular, however, if, unlike some harder-boiled writers, she was not so good at celebrating the things that make life worth living: friendship, love, dogs, food, and the precarious survival of honour and decency.
Anybody who shares her world view even partially must cling to her books like a comfort blanket, with their reassuring insistence that somebody as capable as V I is out there fighting, even sometimes winning, the good fight.
To order Shell Game for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
The Syndicate by Guy Bolton (Point Blank) ★★★★☆
Guy Bolton's debut novel, The Pictures (2017), came out not long after the Coen Brothers' film Hail, Caesar!, and could be described as its evil twin. Both featured a Hollywood fixer trying to solve a mystery while making sure the outcome would not blot the studio's reputation, but where the movie played the idea for laughs, Bolton proffered jet-black noir as the best way to write about a town that made Sodom and Gomorrah look like the Orkney Islands.
One of the startling things The Pictures made clear was how much the mob used to rule the roost during the golden age of Hollywood. Perhaps you needed to swell the coffers with dirty money to make movies as good as Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz. One regrets that the mob moved on to other interests; it's the pictures that got small.
Now Bolton has written a sequel, The Syndicate, which opens in 1947 with his reluctantly decent fixer, Jonathan Craine, having happily escaped the Dream Factory and living a quiet life on a farm with his young son. But then mobsters turn up on a mission to coerce him into investigating the murder of the celebrity gangster Bugsy Siegel – a real-life, unsolved crime that Bolton has co-opted for his story. Craine finds himself back in Tinseltown, and when he's not bumping into Bogey and Judy, Gable and Mitchum, he's trading insults with a gorilla-like mob babysitter named Abe.
Bolton's excellent novels are not just skilful evocations of the era but have a genuine darkness at their heart; there is more to them than the ersatz feeling of some other modern-day takes on Forties noir, which feel too much like the author is simply regurgitating The Black Dahlia. Bolton manages to convey something of the redemptive magic of the movie business, despite the misery he shows it to have entailed.
To order The Syndicate for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Tombland by CJ Sansom (Mantle) ★★★★☆
Matthew Shardlake, CJ Sansom's hunchbacked lawyer-cum-sleuth, seems to have been present at every major event during the reign of Henry VIII bar the conception of Elizabeth I. He has survived going down with the Mary Rose and managed to keep his head attached to his shoulders despite his habit of making eyes at Catherine Parr, Henry's last queen.
Tombland, the seventh novel in the series, opens in 1549, with both Catherine and her mountainous husband dead. The 11-year-old Edward VI is on the throne but power lies with the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset. (At one point there is a joke about his family seat, Wolf Hall, presumably in sly homage to Sansom's only rival for the title of our best living evoker of Tudor times.)
In between witnessing such skilfully realised set pieces as Thomas Cranmer's first reading from the Book of Common Prayer at St Paul's Cathedral, Shardlake is given a mission by the 15-year-old Lady Elizabeth, the future queen; he is to go to Norfolk and investigate the murder of one of her Boleyn relatives. The whodunit part of the story takes a back seat, however, once Shardlake gets caught up in Kett's Rebellion, a revolt against the enclosure of land.
The comparisons that have been made with Hilary Mantel or The Name of the Rose oversell the levels of depth and originality in Sansom's books, and linguistic anachronisms pop up slightly too frequently, but there is no doubt that he has the rare knack of bringing the past to life in three dimensions. This is a very long book and a grim one too, depicting life in filthy old Tudor England as a less sanitary version of the tyrannical, capricious regimes we associate with the mid-20th century. But the honest Shardlake shines like a beacon amid the muck, making the book ultimately more of a heart-warmer than a blood-chiller.
To order Tombland for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne ★★★★☆
Ian Rankin's Rebus is ageing and ailing along with his readers, but in the old days, when crime writers felt no need to reflect reality so scrupulously, our heroes stayed forever in their prime. There is room, therefore, for today's novelists to speculate about the great detectives in their dotage; and so, after the superannuated Sherlock of Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind (filmed as Mr Holmes), we now have Lawrence Osborne imagining Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe in 1988, coming out of retirement for one last job at the age of 72.
There is fun to be had from the incongruity of Marlowe observing the era of Reagan and "the strange music of Tina Turner", although he is more comfortable cracking gags about Rita Hayworth, even though nobody gets them anymore.
The plot has him haring around Mexico investigating an insurance scam with murder at its heart; despite all those years of being blackjacked every 10 minutes, his brain still works well, and his gammy foot gives him the excuse to carry a swordstick. In fact, I believe in him as Marlowe more easily than I believe in him as an old man.
Other writers, notably John Banville, have done a better job of apeing the style and structure of Chandler's original books, but I liked the less ostentatious narrative voice of this Marlowe, too old now to care about impressing the reader with turkey-cock prose. Now that he knows the Big Sleep cannot be far away, he has lost some of his world-weariness, and pleasingly resembles Elliott Gould's laid-back interpretation of the character in the 1973 film of The Long Goodbye.
This is the best Marlowe novel I have read apart from the master's own works, and the least slavishly Chandler-esque, which is perhaps why it's the only one I can imagine Chandler liking. And Gould to star in the movie, please.
Only to Sleep is published by Hogarth at £12.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Lethal White by Robert Galbraith ★★★☆☆
A teenage boy I know, on receipt of a Harry Potter novel longer than Anna Karenina, finished the thing within 24 hours. I had high hopes that the fourth instalment in JK Rowling’s pseudonymous Cormoran Strike series would justify its presumptuous length - a whopping 650 pages - by being similarly irresistible; the previous, generally excellent, books have shown that Rowling can write gripping fiction for adults too.
As it turns out, the novel is slightly disappointing. It begins where the last book (and the television series Strike) left off, with one-legged private detective Strike arriving at his sidekick Robin’s wedding to awful accountant Matthew. Strike and Robin all but declare their love for one another, but a year swiftly passes, Robin remains with Matthew, and she and Strike are barely on speakers.
Rowling/Galbraith does a brilliant, toe-curling job of portraying the misery of Robin’s marriage, and Matthew, although as objectionable as ever, is a bit more subtly drawn, with the author seeming not quite so determined to steer her readers’ sympathies away from him. Strike remains a compelling hero, with a peculiar charm all his own.
The problem is that the various cases that Strike and Robin are investigating, one of which sees Robin going undercover at the House of Commons, are not quite interesting enough to sustain a volume so much longer than the average whodunnit.
The writing seems sloppier than in previous volumes, too, with a surprisingly large number of laboured, pleonastic sentences; all the adverbs scrupulously edited out of the other new novels of the season seem to have been offered safe refuge in this one.
There is a great deal to enjoy and admire here, but it does seem as if the busy cultural icon JK Rowling has taken the Pascal’s letter approach and written a long book because she didn’t have time to write a short one.
Take Nothing With You is published by Sphere at £20. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry (Canongate) ★★★★☆
Christopher Brookmyre, the Jonathan Swift of modern crime fiction, is married to consultant anaesthetist Dr Marisa Haetzman. Alarmingly, he claims that his portrayals of the arrogance and incompetence rife in the medical profession are not the satirical exaggerations they seem, but tales from the horse's mouth. Haetzman receives equal billing as co-author for Brookmyre's new book, albeit on the inside back flap; the cover carries the pseudonym "Ambrose Parry". Set in 1847, this change in direction for Brookmyre has been inspired by Dr Haetzman's research into Sir James Young Simpson, the pioneering Edinburgh anaesthetist.
The book interpolates two fictional characters into Dr Simpson's real-life household: Will Raven, a young medic with a heart of gold but a face mangled by a bruising encounter with moneylenders and a mind tormented by his past; and Sarah Fisher, a housemaid of prodigious but wasted intelligence. Together the pair investigate the reasons for a spike in the number of deaths in childbirth afflicting women in the less salubrious parts of Edinburgh.
This is an excellent historical thriller, with delicious flashes of Brookmyre's salty humour (a doctor - and I suspect many of us are familiar with the type – is described as being "set upon an ostensibly humanitarian undertaking and yet giving off as much warmth as a dying penguin's last fart") but not at the expense of a solid evocation of its setting. A sense that it could have been a little tighter is made up for by an authentically Victorian richness of character and incident, and the often squirm-inducing medical detail is fascinating.
With so many real people as prominent characters (including that stalwart of Radio 4 crime drama, detective James McLevy), an afterword separating fact from fiction would be welcome in the next volume of what promises to be an extremely moreish series.
To order The Way of All Flesh for £14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Transcription by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday) ★★★★☆
Atkinson's tenth novel, Transcription is inspired by two real-life figures. One was Joan Miller, an undercover agent for MI5 who infiltrated a group of British Fascist sympathisers known as "the Right Club" in the early years of the Second World War. The other was Eric Roberts, an apparently ordinary bank clerk who, under the name Jack King, posed as a Gestapo agent and became the harmless receptacle of information that treacherous Britons longing to be part of the Third Reich would otherwise have transmitted to Germany. His meetings with fifth columnists in his flat were recorded and typed up, and it was seeing these transcripts in the National Archives that fired Atkinson's imagination.
So Atkinson has taken as her heroine a typist with an abundance of personality. In 1940 Juliet Armstrong is 18 when she is recruited to a clerical job with MI5. Atkinson's version of Eric Roberts is an "unassuming, Pooterish figure" called Godfrey Toby. Juliet is soon promoted to the job of sitting in his flat in Dolphin Square and transcribing his conversations with the fifth columnists. Although she doesn't think much of her boss Perry's reasons for finding her invaluable – "No one makes as good a pot of tea as you do, Miss Armstrong" – she is eventually given a more exciting undercover role.
Atkinson alternates her account of Juliet's adventures in 1940 with another storyline, set 10 years later, when Juliet is working as a producer of children's radio programmes at the BBC, notably a series designed to teach children about figures from history called Can I Introduce You? (Atkinson's genius for titles clearly extends to pastiche, although I don't think the Auntie of 1950 would have permitted "Can" for "May".) These sections have much W1A-ish comedy, but the thrills are not over: Juliet is nursing more than one secret connected with her old life in MI5, and her life may be in danger again.
Atkinson's recent novels, Life After Life and A God in Ruins, also focused on the Second World War, but they were massive, chronologically complex books that made hay with notions of genre and reality. Transcription is something of a bagatelle in comparison, being relatively unambitious. Fiction is slightly too much in the service of fact here, too: in attempting to devise a plot that can encompass all the real-life stories she wants to tell, Atkinson leaves her workings too visible.
The rather patchy plot will be forgotten a few minutes after you've finished reading; what matters are the individual scenes and phrases that stay in the mind. If this is one of her minor works, how vehemently most novelists will wish to produce a masterpiece as good.
To order Transcription for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
The Division Bell Mystery by Ellen Wilkinson (British Library) ★★★★☆
Crime novels are often time capsules. In order to help readers swallow melodramatic and frequently implausible events, many crime writers expend a good deal of effort on grounding their stories in reality by describing the little mundanities of ordinary life.
This is certainly true of Ellen Wilkinson's only crime novel, The Division Bell Mystery, first published in 1936 and newly reissued. It aspires to be a carefully plotted whodunit with elements of the nail-biting thriller; but fans of the Golden Age of crime fiction will be able to name many authors who would have handled these elements better.
What makes the novel so readable is its depiction of life in the House of Commons on the eve of the Second World War. Since procedural changes in the mother of parliaments occur at a pace that makes continental drift look nippy, we may assume that it reflects much of what happens in the Commons in the 21st century - and I doubt that its portrayal of Parliament as comprising a few chancers, a few idealists and a lot of fallible folk muddling through is much out of date either.
Evoking a cash-strapped Britain struggling to recover from the Depression, the book begins with the Conservative home secretary meeting an American financier in the Commons. The ringing of the division bell summons him away to vote, and when he returns his guest has been shot dead. Young Parliamentary Private Secretary Robert West is the sleuth whose investigations may save the government from a scandal.
Wilkinson was one of the first female Labour MPs and, although her plot would not pass muster in an episode of Diagnosis: Murder, her affectionately satirical insider's view of the Commons goes some way to solving one of the biggest and most urgent of current mysteries: what on earth makes our politicians tick?
To order The Division Bell Mystery for £8.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
The Aladdin Trial by Abi Silver (Lightning Books) ★★★★☆
Every technological innovation has its drawbacks as well as its benefits. Sir Tim Berners-Lee certainly deserves the Order of Merit for inventing the World Wide Web; but it has proved such a mixed blessing that one can't help thinking he ought also to be put in a public stocks and pelted with rotten fruit one afternoon a month.
The danger of rushing to embrace technology is the major theme of the crime novels written by the British lawyer Abi Silver. Her first book, The Pinocchio Brief (2017), imagined the ever more likely scenario of a new type of lie detector being used during a murder trial, and in this sequel she examines technological developments in medicine.
The novel focuses on a hospital in which the use of robots in surgery is being trialled. Will it lead to hundreds of lives being saved or will our robot doctors have a whimsical tendency to start playing Jenga with our vital organs? The hospital staff are distracted from debating this issue when an elderly patient falls several storeys to her death.
One of the hospital cleaners, a Syrian refugee, is suspected of giving her a fatal shove and the media are soon confecting links between the suspect and terrorist organisations. Happily, the two splendid lawyers from The Pinocchio Brief, mildly rebarbative barrister Judith and committed solicitor Constance, are fighting his corner.
This is a sparklingly clever and entertaining mystery with a juicy helping of courtroom drama (presided over by a judge worthy of Rumpole); and although plenty of topical issues are explored, the characters are able to live and breathe. I must admit, though, that the notion that if I am wrongfully arrested I would need lawyers as compassionate, cunning and noble as Judith and Constance to save me worries me a lot more than the idea of a robot poking about in my insides.
To order The Aladdin Trial for £8.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
?Resin by Ane Riel (Doubleday) ★★★★☆
The first time I tried fl?deboller, the moreish marshmallow cakes made in Denmark, I ate so many that I haven't been able to face consuming them since. The same is true of Scandinavian crime novels. When the craze for Nordic noir broke, I devoured book after book, relishing how they were, in just the right ways, both like and unlike anglophone crime fiction. Now the thought of reading another book in which a murder leads to people philosophising gloomily in awful weather makes me feel queasy.
If you happen to feel the same way, you might want to try Resin by the Danish novelist Ane Riel. It centres on a dysfunctional family who are the sole occupants of one of those benighted, windswept islands on which, if Scandi crime writers are to be believed, murders rival thunderstorms in frequency. But despite this familiar set-up, the novel proves to be highly original, and had me feeling that thrilling sense of something new that came with my early experiences of Nordic noir. The book begins with Liv, a six-year-old girl, witnessing her father suffocating her grandmother to death. As Riel goes back in time to explain the origins of the murder, and then forward to its consequences, telling her story from several viewpoints, readers will find their sympathies batted like a shuttlecock between murderer and victim.
There is a fabular quality to the writing, well caught in Charlotte Barslund's outstandingly good translation, but the story never drifts free of reality thanks to the solidity with which setting and characters are depicted. And where much Nordic noir gives you nothing more to laugh at than the bitter irony of human beings believing that their hopes and ambitions might be fulfilled, this book has a few good jokes. It reminded me of Stephen King at his best: creepy as hell, but with compassion for every character, however misguided.
To order Resin for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Bad Blood by EO Chirovici (Profile) ★★★★☆
Many people read crime fiction for the joy of being foxed and flummoxed; they are not looking for the sort of stimulation they might get from reading Proust or George Eliot, but seeking the same sense of pleasurable bafflement with which they used to watch The Paul Daniels Magic Show. Many examples of the genre have seemed to have more in common with stage magic than literature: Agatha Christie was praised more frequently for her skill in prestidigitation than her prose.
EO Chirovici is one of those writers who are more interested in deceiving their readers' eyes than expanding their minds. His books are literary conjuring shows in which he tricks you into thinking the ball is under one cup when it turns out to be under another – only somehow the ball has become an egg and the cup has turned into a rabbit. What they lack in depth is made up for with dazzle.
Bad Blood begins with Dr James Cobb, an eminent American psychiatrist, receiving an offer he cannot refuse. A dying billionaire philanthropist wants Cobb to hypnotise him to resurrect suppressed memories of a night in Paris 40 years ago that ended with the death of a young woman. Cobb's well-remunerated efforts prove inconclusive but, with a dark past of his own that he wants to atone for, he becomes determined to assemble the truth from a barrage of contradictory witness statements.
Following last year's The Book of Mirrors, this is the second novel written in English by Chirovici, who has long been a bestselling writer in his native Romania. Like the previous book, this is a highly entertaining box of tricks that exploits human beings' capacity for deceiving themselves to deceive the reader. If crime novels as painstakingly constructed as this one are out of fashion these days, that is probably because few writers can do them as well as Chirovici can.
To order Bad Blood for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
The Martian Girl by Andrew Martin (Little, Brown) ★★★★☆
Andrew Martin's novels seem to be lying in wait for unwary readers to stub their toes. His best known, the "Steam Detective" series about an Edwardian railwayman-cum-sleuth called Jim Stringer, promise cosy nostalgia, but actually combine left-field imagination with an almost hallucinatory evocation of the long-distant past. His new standalone novel, The Martian Girl, is similarly difficult to pigeonhole.
Doubtless as a cunning way of currying favour with newspaper reviewers, Martin has made the heroine of his novel a freelance journalist struggling to make ends meet. Jean decides she will escape her current poverty by writing a book about a juicy historical mystery she has come across, the fate of Kate French, a late-Victorian music hall artiste known as "the Martian Girl", who could read minds, but came to a sticky end.
Kate's story is told through extracts from the narrative that Jean is writing, interspersed with Jean's present-day relationship with a disbarred barrister called Coates; she knows he is married but is unaware that he is slipping into a homicidal psychosis. Martin's depiction of his mentally unbalanced viewpoint ("Blood came slowly at first, then fast, like when you win a lot of money on a fruit machine, and it's embarrassing, and you're looking around, saying 'Sorry about this!' But at the same time you're very glad") is worthy of Simenon.
At times, it feels like a pastiche – the ghost of Patrick Hamilton, as well as that of Simenon, does not so much hover as clank loudly over its pages – and Martin is at pains to emphasise the artificiality of his dual narratives. The effect is theatrical in the sense that the reader is rarely allowed to forget that these people are just figures in a story (or a story within a story); but by some feat of authorial alchemy, I could not bring myself to stop reading until I found out what happened to them.
To order The Martian Girl for £12.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Take Me In by Sabine Durrant (Mulholland) ★★★★☆
Reading Sabine Durrant's psychological thrillers often prompts the thought that she must know a lot of the men I know. This is a tribute to her sharp-eyed skill as an observer of modern men and the rather uniform ways in which a large number of them behave badly. Her triumph in this field was her last novel, Lie With Me (2016), in which a middle-aged man-child's schemes for an easy life went disastrously and deliciously awry.
Her new novel centres on another typical specimen of 21st-century manhood, the guiltily unmasculine type who nods along with recognition when reading Robert Webb's How Not to Be a Boy and spends his time fretting over his lack of manliness compared with his father's generation. The book begins dramatically with PR consultant Marcus on a family holiday, trying and failing to save the small son whom he has neglectfully allowed to get into difficulties in the sea.
Instead the boy is rescued by a character who, if this were a Martin Amis novel, would be called Keith: a burly, tattooed, working-class man called Dave Jepsom, who subsequently uses his hero status to insinuate himself into the lives of Marcus and his wife Tessa. Cue class comedy as they haplessly attempt to get rid of him, but events take a darker turn once Dave realises they don't want to be friends.
Like most of the best domestic noir novels, Take Me In examines the effect of sensational events on a marriage that is already far from perfect. Durrant is superb on the way the frazzled professionals' relationships can fracture ("We had to address our problems at some point but it was just another thing, and I had enough things at work," Marcus observes). After the originality of Lie With Me, the plot seems rather generic, but the book is lifted above the ruck of domestic thrillers by the quality of Durrant's writing and characterisations.
To order Take Me In for £6.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Lullaby by Le?la Slimani (Faber) ★★★★☆
The French, having given the world the concept of the au pair, now seem intent on warning us of the dangers of letting a stranger loose on our children. Pierre Lemaitre's Blood Wedding featured a homicidal nanny not long ago, and now Le?la Slimani's Lullaby, which has won the Prix Goncourt, begins with the fatal stabbing of a baby boy and his toddler sister by their nanny, Louise, then rewinds to examine what might have driven her to it.
Of course, the psychotic nanny has been with us for a very long time, from The Turn of the Screw to The Hand that Rocks the Cradle; and I've often thought that Mary Poppins has the look of somebody who would be running wild with a shotgun if she didn't have the outlet of bursting into song. But Lullaby has a real piquancy, partly because it is inspired by a real case, the murder in 2012 of Lucia and Leo Krim (for which their nanny is still awaiting trial) and partly because it articulates so well the guilt felt by so many working mothers.
"We will, all of us, only be happy... when we don't need one another any more," thinks Myriam, the mother in Lullaby, as she looks at her children. Letting Louise into her home so she can pursue her career precipitates a nightmare; but Slimani writes just as compellingly and discomfitingly about the tedious, interminable anxiety dream that is normal parenthood.
As a chiller about a domestic servant filled with murderous rage towards her employers, this doesn't quite rank with Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone; Lullaby is told with a ruthlessly efficient intensity, where Rendell's book had room for quirks that made her characters, both killer and victims, seem more real. But this short sharp shock of a novel, very well translated by Sam Taylor, makes hay with the worst of worst-nightmare scenarios to agreeably disturbing effect.
To order Lullaby for £7.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
The Twentieth Day of January by Ted Allbeury (Mullholland) ★★★★☆
Ted Allbeury's thriller centres on a successful businessman in a miserable marriage who has ridden a tide of public cynicism against conventional politicians to become the Republican President of the United States, only to be accused of being a stooge whose election victory has been rigged from the Kremlin. A few times when reading the book, I came across digs at the current president that I fleetingly thought went too far in unsubtlety, before I recalled that the author has been dead for 13 years.
First published in 1980 and now reissued, The Twentieth Day of January opens with the MI6 spook James MacKay recognising the president-elect's press secretary as a former member of the French Communist Party. MacKay is soon working unofficially with his CIA buddy Peter Nolan on Operation 66 – so-called because there are 66 days between the election and the inauguration – to prove before the president-elect takes office that the Russians are pulling his strings: not easy, as the witnesses are being bumped off at an alarming rate.
Allbeury writes extremely well about his characters' doggedness in pursuing an investigation that, if successful, can only result in a further freezing of international relations and erosion of the American people's trust in the political system – "It was like working diligently to prove you had cancer." He is sharp, too, on how the American psyche makes them prone to acute nationwide existential angst – chiefly because they refuse to emulate good old British apathetic fudging.
Allbeury worked in British Intelligence before becoming an outstanding espionage novelist in late middle age. His novel has seeming prescience, but what actually makes it worth reading are the rounded characters and an ingenious plot that never breaks free of plausibility. The very things, in fact, that are missing from the saga of President Trump's victory.
To order The Twentieth Day of January for £8.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit (Orion) ★★★★★
A bald synopsis might make Fear sound like the sort of book that will appeal to those who own the Michael Winner box set, people who prefer their vicarious violence to be sweetened with a dollop of moral righteousness. It begins with a murder in Germany, a shooting carried out by a relative of Randolph Tiefenthaler, the impeccably decent man who lives in the flat above the victim. The narrative then leaps back in time and we see how the dead man harassed and spied on his upstairs neighbours, before repeatedly and baselessly reporting them to the police for abusing their children, with the law powerless to stop him.
In fact, Dirk Kurbjuweit, who is deputy editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, has produced a subtle and unsettling work, with a discomfiting moral ambiguity - which strikes me as very generous, since he actually lived through many of the events he describes. His family did suffer exactly the same torments from their downstairs neighbour as the family in the novel, although in real life the man was eventually committed rather than killed.
Kurbjuweit has revealed that the policeman who wordlessly pats his gun when Randolph asks for advice on how to deal with his neighbour is straight out of real life, and this is one of dozens of alarmingly plausible details that one doubts the most powerful imagination could have furnished. I wonder what his views are on Philip Roth's assertion that nothing that happens to a writer can be called bad because it can be used as material. His real achievement, however, is in the artful arrangement of his experiences as a basis for reflections – on free will, marriage, parenthood and how the middle classes "other" the poor and the damaged – that make the book as intellectually stimulating as it is gripping. Not one that Michael Winner would have wanted to film, after all.
To order Fear for £12.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr (Quercus) ★★★★☆
Any, if not most, fictional detectives keep on sleuthing past their best-before date. But when the novelist Philip Kerr died earlier this year at the age of 62, I suspect the spontaneous reaction of his readers around the world, even before we contemplated the awfulness of the tragedy, was to wish that Kerr's detective Bernie Gunther could have lived on long enough for us to get fed up of him. It would have taken a long time, I think.
Kerr's brilliance lay not in the originality of his style but in the choice of setting in which he deployed it. Gunther is a Berliner and his beat in the early novels was the Third Reich.
Greeks Bearing Gifts is the 13th in the series. It begins in 1957 with Gunther, sporting a new name and beard as he tries to escape his past, exiled from his beloved Berlin and working as a morgue attendant in Munich. A favour for a friend secures him a job in insurance and soon he is off to look into a dodgy claim in Greece, where the locals aren't feeling very gracious about Germany's miraculous economic recovery under Adenauer.
Inevitably, he spends his time being blackmailed by Athenian cops, bumping into elderly Nazi war criminals, and romancing a Greek beauty whose breasts move him to a series of disquisitions that Hugh Hefner might have thought a bit one-note. Some of the dialogue is exposition-heavy, but the book is tremendously entertaining, lighter than some of the other novels but sometimes able to make your stomach lurch with a sudden insight into the barbarity with which the Nazis treated the Greek Jews, and your blood boil with a hint at the collusion of European politicians in Germany's wriggling out of paying due reparations.
This is not the end of Bernie. Kerr managed to complete another Gunther novel during his final illness, and Tom Hanks has long been battling to bring the books to the big screen, so perhaps the novels will yet reach a much wider audience. We fans feel Kerr's death like a sucker punch; but Gunther has got out of trickier spots than this alive.
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Force of Nature by Jane Harper (Little, Brown) ★★★★☆
One reason for the increasing popularity of foreign crime fiction in this country may be that tales of murder and violence benefit from a physical backdrop more extreme than anything Britain has to offer. In Nordic noir, for instance, the icy Scandinavian settings are appropriate to the authors' chilling views on the iniquity of human beings. But in a thriller set here, the turbulent emotions that inspire a murder are not really mirrored by a bit of drizzle.
At the other end of the thermometer from the Scandi thrillers, Jane Harper's debut novel The Dry (2017) depicted the seething passions beneath the placid surface of a small town in the Australian outback as it baked under an interminable drought. The book has been a huge hit, and won the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger award.
In this sequel, Harper once again has humanity battling it out with nature to see who can be redder in tooth and claw. Aussie cop Aaron Falk – still recovering from the wounds he received in The Dry – has been investigating claims of money laundering at an accountancy firm with the covert help of one of its employees, Alice. He is summoned to the fictional Giralang Ranges near Melbourne when Alice vanishes while on a team-building exercise with four female colleagues.
With consummate skill, Harper alternates between Falk's investigation and an account of what happened to the five women on their hike, as they rapidly find that the natural world is out to get them and their relations with each other deteriorate. The possibility of a serial killer on the loose is perhaps one ingredient too many in the mix, and the book doesn't quite have the intensity of The Dry, but it's still one to devour. Harper has a fine gift for making her readers comfortable in inhospitable territory – psychological as well as physical.
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London Rules by Mick Herron (John Murray) ★★★★★
John le Carré's spy novels, for all their much-vaunted realism, are comforting fairytales in a way. His traitors and moles genuinely believe in a cause, however warped, and they devise plots so intricate as to be works of art. There is always a master spy on the right side to unravel them, at whatever personal cost.
Mick Herron's novels are set in a world of his own invention, focusing on Slough House, the building in which all the failed spies are sent to drown in paperwork. And yet his books present a secret world that seems more authentic and discomfiting than le Carré's because it resembles the world the rest of us work in, in which everyone is either promoted above or demoted below their competence; and although plots are rife, they are always half-baked, done on the back foot and designed with no more elevated end than covering the plotter's backside.
This fifth entry in the series once again sees the personnel of our secret services spending more time bullying, blackmailing and back-stabbing each other than dealing with terrorists, and it's left to the Slough House outcasts to uncover a plot to assassinate a populist politician. No British spy novelist has dramatised more effectively the view expressed by Alan Bennett: "The damage done out of conviction by self-confessed traitors like Burgess and Blunt does not compare with the far greater injuries done to this country by politicians and higher civil servants out of cowardice, self-advancement and a need to save their own skins."
To call Herron a one-off would be to ignore the still heavily apparent influence of Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe novels on his style. But as a master of wit, satire, insight and that very English trick of disguising heartfelt writing as detached irony before launching a surprise assault on the reader's emotions, he is difficult to overpraise.
To order London Rules for £12.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Righteous by Joe Ide (W&N) ★★★★★
The last thing we need, after Sherlock and Elementary and the rest, is yet another present-day update of Sherlock Holmes. At least, that is what I thought until I read Joe Ide's debut novel IQ last year, and after a few pages I realised that it is precisely what we need after all.
The hero of IQ was Isaiah Quintabe, a young African-American from a slummy LA neighbourhood, possessed of Holmesian ratiocinative powers which he harnesses to help his neighbours and limit the havoc caused by the local gangs. Isaiah returns in this sequel, which sees him investigating the long-ago death of his brother Marcus, the event that derailed his life and stopped him going to Harvard. He is also doing a favour for Marcus's one-time girlfriend, with whom he is in love, by trying to help her sister, a gambling addict whose risky scheme for settling her debts involves blackmailing a Triad gang.
From there the plot does not so much thicken as develop gigantism, as Ide throws more mysteries and competing gangs of villains into the mix with a profligate hand. Sherlock anoraks will have fun spotting the references but what really make it unmissable are the infectious zest with which Ide writes about unspeakable criminal behaviour and his skill as a choreographer of chaos. In other words, he is the first new crime writer I have read in ages who truly feels like an heir to Elmore Leonard.
Ide has a lovely line in offbeat but evocative descriptions ("Manzo backhanded her so hard her head did a Linda Blair") and characters such as the villainous money launderer who owns a walking stick topped with an enemy's tibia and has a passion for Taylors of Harrogate tea are truly memorable. A vein of angry political satire keeps the book the right side of frothy, but I'd say it's currently the most fun to be had between hard covers.
To order Righteous for £14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (Faber) ★★★★☆
The amateur detective whose meddling is enthusiastically welcomed by the police has always seemed a rather absurd figure in fiction, but Michelle McNamara really was one. For years she pored over unsolved murders in her blog True Crime Diary although, unlike Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, most of her sleuthing was stationary, with a laptop in bed.
The case that really obsessed her was that of the Golden State Killer, a ski mask-clad figure who broke into dozens of homes in well-to-do parts of California in the Seventies and Eighties, raping more than 50 women and murdering 12 people. McNamara would spend hours reading copies of old police reports (often somewhat dodgily obtained) or scanning school yearbooks to find somebody who might match descriptions of the killer.
This book about the case is the true-crime equivalent of one of those literary biographies, such as A J A Symons's The Quest for Corvo, in which the research process and the motivations of the biographer are as much the focus as the biographee. McNamara includes autobiographical interludes, explaining why identifying and investigating a suspect is like falling in love, and speculating on the ways in which her devotion to the mystery mirrors the obsessive nature of the killer. I would have welcomed even more of these to break up the occasionally monotonous catalogue of crimes.
She has a real gift for bringing alive the victims, witnesses and cops she writes about, largely avoiding the portentous style favoured in true crime narratives, and is totally unprurient. The killer remains unidentified, but how he would hate to be the subject of a book which, as a record of so many people's passionate pursuits of justice, leaves one believing in the innate goodness of humanity rather than otherwise. It is a worthy memorial to its brave, engaging author, who died in 2016 aged 46.
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Money in the Morgue by Stella Duffy (Collins Crime Club) ★★★★☆
Roderick Alleyn, like many quintessentially English characters in fiction, was created by an immigrant, the New Zealander Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982). The aristocratic Alleyn ought to be the least plausible of policemen, and yet over the 50 years Marsh wrote about him he became one of crime fiction's most impressive characters, inspiring almost as much devotion as Dorothy L Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey - and a lot less loathing among the less enamoured.
Most of the Alleyn novels were set in England, but during the Second World War Marsh sent him to New Zealand for a couple of cases. She abandoned one book, set over the course of one midsummer night at a remote New Zealand hospital, having written only a few chapters and a handful of notes (without revealing the resolution of the plot). Stella Duffy, another expat New Zealand crime writer resident in Britain, has now completed this unfinished novel.
The book begins with Alleyn sleuthing undercover at the hospital, disguised as "a writer... cut off from home by the war and struck down by the kind of nervous distress known only to the most modern of artists and then only those with a private income". If that was written by Duffy, she has done an excellent job of aping the agreeably gentle irony of Marsh's style.
Murder and mayhem ensue, but Alleyn wraps everything up neatly after a melodramatic denouement. Duffy's Alleyn has a slightly Wimsey-esque tendency to polysyllabic facetiousness, but she has captured his winning combination of outward suavity and inner self-doubt. If her book lacks the glimpses of the genuine wickedness and anguish occasionally found beneath the placid surface of Marsh's whodunits, it perfectly replicates her lightness of touch, and is one of the most successful resurrections of another author's character I've come across.
To order Money in the Morgue for £14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Chicago by David Mamet (Custom House) ★★★★☆
David Mamet confers on most of his characters, even the dull salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross, the witty hyper-eloquence of Wildean nobs. His work often calls to mind D H Lawrence's poem "When I Read Shakespeare": "How boring, how small Shakespeare's people are!/ Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar."
Mamet's latest project is a novel, his first for nearly 20 years, but he clearly does not believe that the threshold of tolerability for stylised dialogue is lower on the page than on the stage. A sentence and a half is the maximum length for which any character speaks like a human being. The book is ostensibly set in Twenties Chicago, but despite the presence of speakeasies, journalists with eyeshades, merciless gangsters and even less scrupulous molls, we are really in Mametland, where talking is more essential to life than breathing, and the reader is too busy listening to have time to take in the scenery.
I simpered with pleasure, and only partly the pleasure of familiarity, at the oblique comedy of Mamet's dialogue. ("What was that War about?" "They shot the Archduke Ferdinand. What would you do?") Perhaps, though, I enjoyed the more bravura passages because I have been schooled in how to hear Mamet dialogue through watching many movies; I suspect they would be even better appreciated if heard being declaimed by actors who have been directed by Mamet to within an inch of their lives.
The plot, which sees Chicago Tribune journalist Mike Hodge investigating the murder of two bootleggers, unfolds at a snail's pace; it's a MacGuffin, an excuse for the talk (which feels like it ought to be leaving deadlier wounds than the guns). The writing eventually loses some of its intensity as Mamet sweats to tie up his plot threads, but by then the reader may be glad of a rest. Chicago made me very tired and very happy.
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Snap by Belinda Bauer (Bantam) ★★★★★
Good crime novels convey something of the devastating effects of death. But great crime novels convey the texture of life too: what a strange, multifarious, intense thing it can be, and why it is so wicked to cause somebody to lose it. Belinda Bauer's fiction teems with life. She is a sensitive observer of ordinary people - the way they talk and behave - but she is also an ingenious creator, never afraid to improve on reality if a tweak might make it more colourful or interesting.
I thought her last novel, The Beautiful Dead, did not see her quite at her best; with most of her characters you can practically smell the blood, sweat and tears, but that book focused on a Hannibal Lecter-esque psychopath who had too much of a whiff of paper and ink. She is on absolutely cracking form in her latest novel, however, which concentrates more on the sort of people we all live near, caught up in bizarre circumstances.
The book has several plot lines. There is a 14-year-old boy whose mother has been murdered and father has disappeared, finding original ways to provide for his two younger sisters without letting the authorities know that they've been abandoned. There is an expectant mother who is being menaced by an intruder who leaves creepy messages around her house. And there's a pair of policemen who make all other chalk-and-cheese coppers look like soulmates, investigating a "Goldilocks" burglar who sleeps in his absent victims' beds.
Bauer, with all the zestful verve of a drunk running around the zoo and opening random cages, eventually arranges for her disparate cast members to collide with each other, with consequences variously comic and thrilling. Kate Atkinson used to be the undisputed master of this sort of mixture of the serious, the exciting and the anarchic, but Bauer is now firmly in her class.
To order Snap for £12.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong (Little, Brown) ★★★★☆
British fans of crime fiction have been living through a mini ice age with the prevalence of Scandinavian crime novels in the bestseller lists, but now that Nordic noir seems to be on the wane I hope that the next fashion will be for Asian crime fiction. There is a lot of good, strange stuff coming out of Asia, and (to generalise) its crime writers have a capacity for analysing the depths of human iniquity with a chilly detachment - that splinter of ice in the heart that Graham Greene thought essential for novelists - which makes the Scandi writers seem, in comparison, rosy with bonhomie.
You-jeong Jeong is South Korea's bestselling crime novelist, and the publication here of The Good Son marks the first time one of her books has been translated into English. The premise looks at first to be a little hackneyed - it starts with the familiar scene of a man waking from a blackout, covered in blood and in uncomfortable proximity to a dead body, trying to work out whether he has just committed a murder. Our narrator is Yu-jin, a 25-year-old who lives in Seoul with his domineering mother. Mother is the corpse. "I was the investigator interrogating the criminal... the two were one and the same," reflects Yu-jin, as he scans his foggy memories for clues as to whether it was really he who cut his mother's throat with his late father's razor.
The ghosts of Jekyll and Hyde hover over the pages, but if the set-up is a bit creaky the surprises soon start springing in what turns out to be an intense, creepy, darkly funny read. There isn't much sense of place; if it weren't for the characters' predilection for ramen, the book might be set in Wisconsin or Whitstable. But that seems appropriate for a book focusing on the claustrophobic dynamics of a mother-son relationship that makes Mrs Bates and her son Norman look well-adjusted.
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Thirteen by Steve Cavanagh (Orion) ★★★★☆
Courtroom thrillers are so inherently gripping that writers and publishers can get away with standards of writing and characterisation below those of the average crime novel. Whenever I pick one up I can rarely put it down until the judge has declared "you are free to leave this court without a stain on your character". Only then does the mourning for hours wasted on tosh begin.
Steve Cavanagh's Thirteen is a distinctly superior example of the genre, and even then one could compile a lengthy list of quibbles - the prose is functional; it's down at the Made in Chelsea end of the glossy-to-gritty scale of realism, despite a good deal of inventive violence; Cavanagh's regular hero Eddie Flynn, a former con artist who has reinvented himself as a brilliant New York defence attorney, is engaging but not that distinguishable from the other numerous progeny of Perry Mason. Still, it is witty and clever, and I suspect most readers will zoom their way through the story as powerlessly as a hamster that has wandered too close to the Hoover.
Cavanagh is an Irish lawyer and Thirteen is his fourth thriller to feature Flynn. It alternates between the perspectives of Flynn, representing a Hollywood heart-throb accused of murdering his wife, and a sinister character called Kane who is trying to wangle his way on to the jury trying the case - which, it transpires, is fairly easy to do if you are blessed with astonishing ingenuity, luck, mastery of disguise and lack of compunction about killing strangers. The book has a granular sense of detail, concerning legal procedure and other things - it tells you not just the best way to break your own nose, but how it would sound ("like breakfast cereal, wrapped inside a napkin and squeezed") – that makes you swallow the most implausible events without a murmur of protest. Preposterous and irresistible.
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A Shot in the Dark by Lynne Truss ★★★★★
Carol Reed's 1948 film version of Brighton Rock begins with a caption assuring potential visitors that Brighton has become crime-free since the bad old pre-war days of vicious teenage gangs depicted in the film. It was this optimistic piece of PR that inspired Inspector Steine (2007-2013), the Radio 4 comedy series written by Lynne Truss about a policeman in the Fifties who has become a celebrity on the strength of having cleansed Brighton of criminals and refuses to countenance the idea that any serious crime can be committed there ever again.
Truss has now embarked on a series of novels featuring Steine, although, perhaps to avoid accusations that she is merely rehashing the radio show, this first book is advertised as "A Constable Twitten Mystery" - Twitten being the supersmart hobbledehoy who clears up the crimes to which Steine turns a blind eye. In a way, the book is oddly reminiscent of Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, in which detectives in Stalin's USSR were obliged to ignore those crimes that could not be acknowledged to have occurred in a "perfect" society - only Truss plays the same idea for laughs.
The book concerns murder among theatre folk - cue spiky swipes at Osborne-type angry young men - but it soon becomes clear that Truss is less interested in evoking Fifties Brighton than creating a sort of simulacrum of it as the setting for a burlesque of the police procedural.
We all know that Truss can work miracles - after all, she managed to make a manual on punctuation (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) a bestseller - but I doubt even Constable Twitten could work out how she has produced a whodunit that exudes heartwarming cosiness while boasting Game of Thrones levels of violent death, or given her cast of amusing caricatures more life than most of the characters I've encountered in fiction this year.
To order A Shot in the Dark for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop