“It wasn’t fair to say Evelyn Bay was a place where nothing ever happened – things did, of course; ask anyone who had been there for the storm. But not often, and not whatever this was.”
This was the death by drowning of Bronte, an art student from Canberra who stays in the out of season Tasmania resort town to work on a project and waitress at the Surf and Turf. The storm is what Kieran Elliot, returned from Sydney with partner, Mia, and baby to see his ageing parents, cannot forget: the day his brother and a friend drowned, deaths for which many in the town think Kieran bears culpability; the day his girlfriend’s younger sister disappeared. As questions begin to be asked about the behaviour of Kieran’s friends Ash and Sean, and of his dementia afflicted father, Brian, the investigation inevitably takes on a retrospective focus.
Jane Harper's superb new novel The Survivors (Little, Brown, £12.99) exhibits all the qualities that make her such a compelling writer: a preoccupation with the clumsy, anxious joys and sorrows of adolescence and the awkward, haunted relationships of old friends who have nothing left in common but the past; an ability to unfold with steady, deliberate, unshowy brilliance a slow-burning family drama that reaches a devastating climax; a deft facility for artful character and plot misdirection; above all, a gift for setting, in this case the cliffside, the beach, the treacherous series of caves, the deserted town itself, all in thrall to the beauty and power and menace of the ocean.
Sure-footed, technically impeccable plotting and storytelling ensure the mystery holds until the final pages, while Harper’s compassionate eye imbues the novel with a satisfying degree of moral nuance.
Following a glittering trio of distinctive, playful, witty historical standalones, Andrew Martin returns to his popular Jim Stringer series with Powder Smoke (Corsair, £16.99). The opening pages of which see our Railway Detective filch a couple of pints of brown ale in York Station's Parlour Bar, admire from the opposite platform and then banter with wife, Lydia, before boarding a train together and get shot by an oddly familiar muffled-up man.
The mystery that has led to this moment involves the star of a Wild West sideshow, Jack Durrant (by Arizona, out of Sheffield), a London film producer and his actress wife, Cynthia Lorne. When Lorne is murdered, the hunt is on for Durrant; Stringer suspects the husband in this glamorous love triangle. It’s 1924, and “the main mistake people made about the war, it seemed to Jim, was to say it was over”; guns and the men familiar with them are never far away, the dark shadow to a broader culture of recovery and female self-improvement – “for all her Labourism, Lydia was socially ambitious”.
Along the (permanent) way there are explorations of the art and economics of the western novel, an amusing and delightful sex scene in a Leeds hotel, grim encounters with assorted bad lads and a great deal of well-researched railway detail. And of course the killer lines, without which no Andrew Martin novel is complete: “Wright was a very grey man in the early or even middle sixties, but with surplus energy, owing to having always been bone idle”; “He was a recidivist of some kind, all right: you could tell by the shape of his nose, and the particular way in which he was bald.”
Hidden Lies (Pitakus, £13.99) is the first novel from Dubliner Rachel Ryan and what a stylish, spare, well-structured piece of work it is. Still in mourning for her mother, Rose, Georgina's world is further rocked when her son, Cody, begins to talk of a New Granny who gives him sweets in the play park and talks to him on the phone. Husband, Bren, thinks it's all a childish game and chides Georgie for overreacting, making her feel like a bad mother. But Bren is not to be relied upon, having confessed to a recent close encounter with an ex-girlfriend.
Meanwhile, her grieving father needs more minding than she feels capable of, the next-door neighbour is burying something in the back garden and all the while Georgie’s trying to fit in the college course she dropped out of when she fell pregnant. It’s a lot and Ryan skilfully ramps up the suspense until the atmosphere is tight as a drum, with Georgie feeling gaslit and the reader feeling it on her behalf – nice guy Bren pushing her to seek help for her mental health is especially well placed on the caring-sinister scale.
An afterword references Levin and Du Maurier as well as contemporary domestic suspense. Ryan does her illustrious forebears justice and delivers a gripping, propulsive debut.
The Last Thing to Burn (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99) is a vividly written, persuasively staged narrative set in a remote East Midlands farmhouse. The narrator is a trafficked Vietnamese woman and she has been captured by the farmer, Lenn, who tracks her every move on camera, rapes her when she is not menstruating, gives her his late mother's underwear to wear and maims her right ankle in punishment for an escape attempt. The only thing that keeps her going is her sister, Kim-Ly, who works in a chemist in Manchester, whose letters she receives periodically and who Lenn has assured her will be deported if she attempts to escape again. And then a new neighbour from the local village, Cynthia, calls to the door.
Will Dean, whose fourth novel this is, has constructed a powerful thriller, psychologically convincing and attentive to the malign consequences of human trafficking. It comes freighted with high praise by women writers I respect. But I was troubled by what I felt was something unpalatably prurient in the graphic depictions of Lenn’s degraded behaviour and eventually by the ethical legitimacy of the entire enterprise; with the provision at the end of contact addresses for immigrant and trafficking victim supports, it seemed to me that a human rights insurance policy was being taken out for violations of literary decorum.
The year 2021 is the centenary of the great Patricia Highsmith, and Virago, who publish her entire backlist in their modern classics imprint, begin their celebrations with Under a Dark Angel's Eye (Virago, £20), a sumptuous new career-spanning collection of her short fiction, including two newly-discovered stories.
In her bracing introduction, Carmen Maria Machado captures the essence of what she calls the difficulty with Highsmith: that she was at once “a genius, a bona-fide eccentric, a lesbian” and a hateful person, anti-Semitic, homophobic, a racist and a misogynist. (The principal reason she is hard wholeheartedly to claim as the primary influence on the domestic suspense sub-genre is that in the main she chose to write about men. The Heroine, one of her earliest stories collected here, is a brilliant exception).
Why then do so many of us revere this darkly brilliant writer, whose psychological insights into the plausibility and banality of evil have few rivals? In Machado’s words: “You don’t come to Patricia Highsmith for goodness or light or comfort. You come to her for uncanny observations about human depravity; you come to her because you’ve forgotten the sour taste of fear.”
