A decapitated buffalo, a stolen jade statue of a black marlin and a whiff of corruption swirling around a giant Ferris wheel – the opening chapters of Nightshade (Orion, £22), which features its fair share of “freaks and f**kups”, could easily be those of a Carl Hiaasen satire.
We’re far removed from Hiaasen’s stomping ground of Florida, though: this standalone from Michael Connelly takes place on Catalina Island, which, although it lies nearly 50km off the California coast, comes under the jurisdiction of the LA County Sheriff’s Department.
Exiled to the island under a cloud, DS Stilwell has long since realised that Catalina is where he wants to be – but when the body of a young woman is discovered in the harbour weighed down with anchor chains and a murder investigation is opened, Stilwell has no choice but to co-operate with his old foes on the mainland.
But while Nightshade is a standalone, it’s fair to say that it upholds the kind of values that Connelly’s series heroes (Bosch, Haller et al) would recognise and respect: on an island of conspicuous wealth and functional poverty, Stilwell goes to bat for the marginalised against “people with money and power”, all the while acutely conscious of “the sacred bond between a victim and those charged with finding justice”.
Told in Connelly’s deceptively understated style, the story is richly detailed when it comes to island life but delivers its essentials in the pared-back prose of the classic crime novel. Stilwell himself feels like something of a throwback, and perhaps even serves as a homage to classic Californian detectives – private or otherwise – all the way back to the Continental Op. The abiding sense is that of Connelly revelling in the freedom of exploring a brand new environment; it is to be hoped that Nightshade doesn’t remain a standalone for very long.
Originally from Sierra Leone, Hawa Barrie has relocated to Edinburgh to continue her studies as Foday Mannah’s The Search for Othella Savage (Quercus, £16.99) begins. Already traumatised by the abduction and murder of some of her compatriots, Hawa finds herself at the centre of a missing persons investigation when her friend Othella disappears.
Othella, we learn, has been working as an “ambassador” for Pastor Ranka’s Lion Mountain Church, one of many young women encouraged by the Church to entertain wealthy white men, the better to persuade them to donate to the church’s charitable foundation. Might one of the women’s clients be a serial killer? Or is Pastor Ranka’s mission a cover for something truly sinister? The truth, Hawa believes, is to be found in Sierra Leone, where “a rich man with political and religious influence is capable of doing literally anything”.
The backdrop is fascinating, and Mannah’s transplanting of west African culture and beliefs to the Scottish Lowlands is excellently done, but the plot is familiar to the point of being well-worn.
Eleni Kyriacou’s A Beautiful Way to Die (Head of Zeus, £16.99) opens in Ealing Studios in 1954, where Hollywood star Stella Hope finds herself in purdah. Until recently one-half of “Hollywood’s Golden Couple”, Stella – about to be divorced – is already on the long slide into oblivion when she receives a blackmail letter from California.
Meanwhile, aspiring actress Ginny Watkins has just left London for Hollywood, where she catches the ever-roving eye of Max Whitman, aka Stella’s husband. Swiftly disabused of her illusions about Hollywood’s glamour, Ginny finds herself at the mercy of the predatory “wolves” who prowl the boulevards and movie sets, their every perverse whim – up to and including drug-fuelled murder – catered to by their studio fixers.
The parallel plots are neatly linked, but where Kyriacou really excels is in her portrait of an actress as a young ingénue. Ginny suffers the myriad indignities of the aspiring actress that include voluntary starvation, psychological torture, surgeries and punitive contracts, all of which take place against a backdrop of relentless assault and sexual duress that Ginny describes as “like being on a battlefield sometimes, like you’re constantly under siege”.
Set in the village of Drumsuin in the west of Ireland, Sinéad Nolan’s debut The Counting Game (Harper North, £16.99) begins in 1995 with 13-year-old Saoirse disappearing during a game of hide-and-seek in the forest near her family home. The only witness to her disappearance is her nine-year-old brother Jack, but when the English psychotherapist Dr Freya Cummings arrives in Drumsuin to assist the Garda by interviewing Jack, the only clue the traumatised child can offer is that of a “creature” that haunts the woods, a formless monster that we subsequently learn has been preying upon young women for generations.
What follows offers an intriguing take on the concept of collective trauma, as Nolan blends folk horror and recent Irish history (the site of a Magdalene Laundry can be found in Drumsuin forest).
Unfortunately, Dr Cummings is not a plausible amateur sleuth. Unhappy with the pace of the investigation, and undeterred by her complete lack of local knowledge, Cummings ignores the local Garda detective: “If Walter wasn’t going to let me investigate or give him my hunches, I’d have to investigate on my own.”
Exactly why Cummings believes herself better qualified to investigate, or why her “hunches” are more valuable than the insights of the local gardaí, is never convincingly addressed.
Brian McGilloway’s The One You Least Suspect (Constable, £15.99) opens with single mum Katie Hamill earning a meagre living as a bar cleaner in Derry. A tough life that gets tougher when Katie is targeted by the Special Branch and pressured to keep her eyes and ears open for useful information that might convict her employer, bar owner Mark O’Reilly, and his brother Terry, both of whom are major players in Derry’s illegal drug trade.
When Katie refuses to get involved (“The history of Derry was littered with the dead bodies of those who had been accused of informing to the police or Special Branch against paramilitaries.”) she finds herself trapped in a vice, as her self-appointed handlers pull all manner of strings and threaten to have Katie’s daughter taken away from her. Soon Katie finds herself living a Kafkaesque nightmare, desperately twisting and turning as she tries to play both sides off against one another and trying to stay alive long enough to find a way out.
McGilloway’s 13th novel is a suffocatingly claustrophobic affair, a quotidian horror of how easily a person can become a pawn in a deadly game where right and wrong are simply two shades of grey: “They were as bad as each other, the cops and the O’Reillys. I wanted nothing to do with either of them.”
Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the story is that Katie is not a conventionally flawed tragic heroine: there is nothing unique about her or her circumstances, she just happens to find herself in the wrong place at the wrong time and powerless once the machinery starts to grind. The very best crime fiction speaks about the everyday world we wish we could ignore; The One You Least Suspect speaks with the quiet authority of truth.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
