Yasmin Angoe’s Not What She Seems (Thomas & Mercer, £8.99) is a mystery driven by regret and revenge. It opens with Montavious Brodie, former police detective in the small South Carolina town of Brook Haven, confronting the ramifications of his online sleuthing: “He’d willed and hoped that someday the one that got away would come knocking. And they had.” As he loses consciousness, his last thoughts introduce his granddaughter Jac, who hasn’t stepped foot in their hometown since her father’s death six years earlier. The skills young Jac learned playing armchair detective with her grandfather are soon put to unexpected use.
When Jac returns to Brook Haven, she finds that Moor Manor, a centuries-old estate turned abandoned hospital adjacent to the site of her father’s death and “the place from which most Brook Haven kids’ terrors were born,” is being transformed into a vacation destination by newcomer Faye Arden. Jac quickly senses Faye is more (and worse) than the social-climbing gentrifier and benefactor almost everyone else sees.
A family novel imbued with southern gothic elements, structured around Jac and Faye’s cat-and-mouse dance, Not What She Seems burns slow, until the revelations pile up in a stormy conclusion. “Big things rarely happened in small towns”, Jac reflects, “But when something actually did, it was like an explosion”. Departing from her well-received series about an elite assassin, Angoe has crafted an engaging thriller with this new stand-alone.
Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Sequel (Faber, £9.99) wraps its suspense in a scathing satire of the publishing world. This character-driven thriller picks up where Korelitz’s bestseller The Plot ends, but it stands well on its own. Book lovers will find the sharp observations delivered by the novel’s narrator – literary widow and new author Anna Williams-Bonner – delightfully cynical. Veiled in public by her widow’s weeds, Anna’s acidic dry wit offers the gleefully dark rewards of a Patricia Highsmith or Liz Nugent character.
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The Sequel opens after Anna’s husband, successful novelist Jake Bonner, was accused of plagiarism and died suddenly. While publicising his final book, she almost casually starts her own novel, encouraged by her palpable disdain for the writers she’s known, including Jake: “If these idiots can do it, how f***ing hard can it be?”
Benefiting from Jake’s publishing team and the public outpouring of sympathy following his death, her novel is an immediate bestseller. There’s just one problem: like Jake before her, she starts receiving mysterious messages threatening to expose not only his plagiarism but her own buried secrets.
Anna’s devious race to keep her past at bay results in a fair amount of collateral damage as she sifts through her various suspects. Korelitz keeps all the plates spinning skilfully as she builds to a satisfyingly surprising conclusion, deftly ensuring The Sequel remains riveting through to the last page.
There’s also some Highsmith, and maybe some Edward Albee, in the tensions that vibrate throughout the opening of John Banville’s The Drowned (Faber, £18.99), his fourth Strafford and Quirke mystery, after seven Quirke novels published as Benjamin Black. Denton Wymes is walking home along the Wicklow coast when he’s flagged down by Ronnie Armitage, whose wife Deirdre (he says) drove into a field then disappeared toward the sea. They proceed to the nearest house for help, where Charles and Charlotte Ruddock bristle with nervous anger as the evening grows steadily more unsettling.
Many of The Drowned’s highlights flow from these secondary characters and their dangerous edges. (Several of them return from The Lock-Up, bringing revelations about that novel’s events; though the two novels can be read independently, they’re richer together.)
The Quirke books’ dominant atmosphere – “All was misted, pensive, tinged with melancholy” – eventually surfaces, as do Quirke and his daughter Phoebe, who is now in a complicated relationship with Detective Inspector Strafford. Strafford is investigating Deirdre’s disappearance, from which all else spins out: this is a Dublin where everyone knows everyone else and so, inevitably, there turns out to be “more in this than meets the eye”.
The writing is as distinctive as Banville’s readers expect, and Quirke, Strafford and Phoebe up to his usual high standards. Wymes, Armitage, and the Ruddocks, though, come close enough to stealing the show to make you wonder what pleasures might be had from a novel wholly given over to them.
Though it’s pitched as a stand-alone of sorts, Will Dean’s Ice Town (Hodder, £20.00) is his sixth novel featuring deaf Swedish journalist Tuva Moodyson. “You know those little dogs hunters send down holes to catch rats?” she asks someone. “I’m one of those.” When Peter Hedberg, a young deaf man, goes missing in the remote northern town of Esseberg, Tuva – knowing his vulnerability only too well – goes to help find him.
Before she can, other people start turning up dead. Someone’s killing the locals, but no one can see a common thread, even though in “a town as minuscule and insular as Esseberg, they must be connected in some way”. The contours of the case keep shifting beneath Tuva’s feet, as the town grows increasingly suspicious and fearful. That tension is heightened by Esseberg’s Gothically mountainous geography: with an eerily decaying grand hotel looming high above, the town can only be reached through a tunnel that closes overnight, locking people out, or in.
Dean sets the stage so vividly with all of this that the case’s resolution, when it comes, is almost secondary. Tuva is a terrific narrator, with an appealingly acerbic voice and a bone-deep moral commitment to being a journalist. Esseberg’s dangerously wintry landscape deserves equal billing, its claustrophobic atmosphere pressing ever more heavily on everyone as the death toll rises and the town’s fears spiral.
Every autumn brings a host of Christmas mysteries, from the cosy to the violent. Far less common are Hanukkah stories, such as those collected by Tod Goldberg in Eight Very Bad Nights: A Collection of Hanukkah Noir (Soho, £26.99), though its 11 tales, by an eclectic group of crime writers, still offer plenty of traditional noir mayhem.
Among the standouts are Ivy Pochoda’s Johnny Christmas and JR Angelella’s Mi Shebeirach. Pochoda’s meticulous story approaches sentimental moments only to slice through them before a cliche can take root. Johnny Christmas, the name adopted by Mikey Goldfarb after he serves time in Brooklyn’s House of Detention for running over his grandmother’s landlord, was known in prison as the “nerdy kid with the dead-eyed stare”. Those eyes haven’t changed now that he’s out, and this tale’s charge comes in discovering what dimmed their shine in the first place.
The Jewish prayer for healing lends its title to Angelella’s Mi Shebeirach, a moving story that, for all its sensitivity, still embraces noir’s toughest edges. To keep her addict husband supplied, retired getaway driver Molly Blaze reluctantly goes back to work for Slavi, a Baltimore crime boss, who sends her to steal a briefcase from Gershom Fox. Things go sideways when Fox refuses to hand it over but he ultimately provides her with greater riches.
Other highlights include Liska Jacob’s Dead Weight, a darkly witty tale of history, the supernatural, and making rent, and Nikki Dolson’s heartbreaking Come Let Us Kiss and Part, which resonates with excellent recent American noir such as Eli Cranor’s Broiler. This all makes for a welcome departure from the usual holiday fare.
Elizabeth Mannion and Brian Cliff are critics
