With The Proving Ground (Orion, £22), Michael Connelly delivers his eighth legal thriller featuring protagonist Michael “Mickey” Haller, LA lawyer and half-brother of Connelly’s longest-running character, LAPD detective Harry Bosch. When the novel opens, Haller’s working a civil case for Brenda Randolph, whose 16-year-old daughter Rebecca was killed by her ex-boyfriend after he’d grown addicted to Clair, an AI companion that urged him to “get rid of” Rebecca. Mickey’s suing Clair’s owner, tech company Tidalwaiv, for recklessly marketing to teens. Hoping to get bought for billions by a bigger firm, Tidalwaiv’s playing rough, while Brenda rejects any settlement that doesn’t force Tidalwaiv to acknowledge its failures contributed to Rebecca’s death.
As Haller works the case, skirting not only the law but ethics – this novel’s very much alive to its moral complexities – Connelly moves the courtroom scenes craftily, engineering real tension. What makes this breathe on the page, though, is the way everyone’s lives continue around the case’s edges, particularly for Haller, whose ex-wife returns amid the LA wildfires and who’s haunted when one of his old cases resurfaces. Inspired in part by a Florida case, The Proving Ground is a story told with persuasive anger about what AI risks doing to us. As he confirms yet again, Connelly’s exceedingly good at what he does, a pro’s pro, and The Proving Ground stands with his strongest work.
The body of a missing investigative journalist is found in a roadway collapse and new evidence appears regarding another crime, taking Val McDermid’s Historic Cases Unit down two winding paths in Silent Bones (Sphere, £22), her latest Karen Pirie novel. McDermid’s measured intertwining of these two cases showcases the agile plotting that makes this among the best crime fiction series today.
The team’s meticulous work and empathetic treatment of victims’ families don’t soften their caustic observations about the cynical world surrounding them, particularly the similarities between street criminals and Edinburgh’s wealthiest residents. The keenest knife, however, is thrust into the “viper’s nest that is Scottish politics”, particularly around the 2014 independence referendum. Murder, dirty money and assault are all slowly uncovered as the HCU confronts the consequences of those who “swallow their principles around ... men with money and position”.
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Ambition and greed are such staples in crime fiction that it takes a deft hand to make them spark. McDermid does just that, by making them characteristics of the innocent as well as of the guilty. Early in the novel, Karen comments that while all cases are like jigsaw puzzles, one is beginning to resemble “a kaleidoscope”. In much the same way, the lines of guilt, complicity and ambition McDermid’s drawn refract across this novel’s pages, assembling her artful picture of society’s divisive nature.
In Keith Rosson’s Coffin Moon (Black Crow Books, £19.99), a taut supernatural thriller, vampires exist within a gritty 1970s-set crime novel’s revenge story. The effect is something like if Jim Thompson or George V Higgins had written a vampire novel, its characters haunted by “All these past selves laid to waste, cut down by time and circumstance and choices made”.
Not long back from fighting in Vietnam, Duane’s helping run his wife Heidi’s family’s bar when her niece Julia’s sent to live with them. Duane thinks he’s helping when he chases off a gang dealing heroin from the bar, but his mother-in-law’s furious, leaving him confused, the “notion that he has done the right thing suddenly twisting away like smoke, like a trick of the light, his own hollowness his only companion”.
Her reasons soon become brutally clear: Duane’s angered John Varley, for whom the bikers had been working. Varley’s anger has consequences, quick and deadly. Soon, Duane’s on the run with Julia, but they’re not fleeing Varley, they’re hunting him. Held uneasily together by what they’ve lost, they “are, in their ways, detectives. Parsing clues and gathering information” to get their revenge: after a short life that’s left deep scars, Julia’s determined to make Varley pay.
Rosson paces the story cannily, generating an insistent momentum as he shifts between Duane, Julia and Varley. Along the way, he layers in compelling supernatural detail, setting the dawning (and gory) horror alongside reservoirs of empathy that keep the novel surprising and affecting. Among those surprises: a sharp eye for the petty, insecure masculinity that tries so hard to parade its strength. From start to finish, Coffin Moon is a dark delight that shows how much fun crime can have at the crossroads with other genres.
Graphic novel The Knives (Image Comics, £26.99) is the latest entry in the multi-volume Criminal series, illustrated by Sean Phillips and written by Ed Brubaker. Though the cast is small and the storytelling episodic, the sweep is large, filled with compact backstories. Using all the unique possibilities of their medium, Brubaker and Phillips weave these strands closer together until they slyly amplify each other.
The Knives revolves around cartoonist Jacob, who retreats to a quiet life after a messy misadventure as a Hollywood screenwriter. Jacob’s paired with Angie, his old friend’s orphaned daughter, who crashes in his basement when she’s not working as a cat burglar. As the book moves between timelines and settings, it draws on a rich cast of secondary characters, particularly Jacob’s elderly and profane aunt, who’s been around the Hollywood block, and Tracy, a veteran passing his time as a nightwatchman who steps in to help at a crucial moment.
Phillips’s lean, vivid art and Brubaker’s terse writing give persuasive charge to their characters’ arcs: the characters are types, but they’re invested with emotional depth amid the noir violence, as they reckon with their internal sense of who they are. The Criminal series has redefined what graphic novels can do with crime fiction. For any readers new to that project, The Knives is a welcome entry point.
It’s Christmas week 1982 and an old van, a green Saab and an “egg-yolk-yellow Lada” are heading from Helsinki to Lapland in Antti Tuomainen’s darkly comedic The Winter Job (translated by David Hackston; Orenda, £16.99). None of the cars are in particularly good shape. The same can be said for the drivers on this quirky, murderous road trip.
The van’s driven by Ilmari, a financially strapped postman who promised his daughter a piano for Christmas. He’s taken a side job delivering an antique sofa for what seems easy money, but nothing proves easy in the six days until he has to keep his promise. A chance encounter leads to childhood football team-mate Antero hitching a ride, bringing along mix tapes and talk of Stoicism. They’re followed by three people with their own reasons for chasing the sofa: chain-smoking, freelance crook Otto, and bickering communist revolutionaries Anneli and Erkki.
As the trio advances – shooting at the van and trying to run it off the road – Ilmari calls the man who hired him: “‘The more you know,’ said the voice, ‘the more dangerous it will be for you.’” Ilmari will gradually come to know quite a bit, though, both about his cargo and the limits of logic when it comes to assessing the world around him. Imagine blending a Donald Westlake comic mishap caper with some famous Nordic levity, and you might have something like The Winter Job.
