The crime fiction narrative has been open to cross-genre fertilisation ever since Edgar Allan Poe published The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, with science-fiction and horror the most frequent forms to be blended into the sturdy but endlessly elastic conventions of the crime novel.
Set in California in the very near future (Chapter 1 is datelined Tomorrow), Paul Bradley Carr’s The Confessions (Faber, £9.99) revolves around LLIAM, “the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence”. An AI so powerful that it is wholly responsible for the decision making of more than a billion users, LLIAM is on the verge of becoming “the official strategic decision maker for the United States military”, in the process making its parent company, StoicAI, “the most valuable, and influential, technology company in the history of Silicon Valley”.
One consequence of this development is that Kaitlan Goss, the chief executive of StoicAI, is about to become one of the richest and most powerful women in the world – but Kaitlan has reckoned without the possibility of LLIAM experiencing a millisecond of moral clarity, and realising all the terrible things that have been done on “his” advice.
When LLIAM shuts itself down, society immediately goes into free fall, and Kaitlan goes on the run in search of Maud, the “nun turned academic” who served as an “empathic adviser” to LLIAM and who is, to all intents and purposes, LLIAM’s “mother”.
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Carr leans into the sci-fi trope of AI singularity/supremacy, but for the most part this is a traditional thriller (albeit one peppered with references to Agatha Christie) as Kaitlan, pursued by a number of bad actors, attempts to do the right thing before it’s too late. Pacy, well researched and just about plausible, The Confessions delivers plenty of food for thought about the moral aspects of handing over responsibility for our lives to an algorithm.
Those of a squeamish disposition might want to avoid Danielle Valentine’s The Dead Husband Cookbook (Viper, £16.99), which opens with Thea Woods, an editor at a prestigious New York publishing house, being commissioned to edit the tell-all memoir of celebrity chef Maria Capello, whose fortune has been built on the mysterious ingredients of her bestselling line of food products.
Determined to get to the heart of the long-ago disappearance of Maria’s husband Damien, who was a successful chef long before Maria emerged from his shadow, Thea travels to the remote Catskills to interview Maria and tease out truth behind “the lurid rumours of murder, theft and cannibalism”. Valentine doesn’t pull any punches here, either in her portrayal of Maria Capello as the worst kind of celebrity diva or her obsession with meat, and the bloodier the better.
A blend of psychological thriller and body horror, the novel revels in the gruesome details of butchering as Maria drip-feeds Thea her memoir chapters, although one wonders how expert an editor Thea really is when she earnestly suggests that “Maria’s writing elevated” her story into “a Shakespearean tragedy”. Deliciously grotesque, and delightfully tangled in its plotting, the story eventually descends into implausible melodrama.
Ex-astronaut Chris Hadfield blends science-fiction into historical fact with Final Orbit (Quercus, £22), which revolves around the joint Russian-American Soyuz-Apollo project in 1975. Launched separately, the missions are scheduled to dock in space, but the Russians and Americans have reckoned without the Chinese, who secretly launch their own astronaut into space, his destination the empty SkyLab and a laser-based technology that America would prefer the world didn’t know about.
Down on terra firma, meanwhile, Kaz Zemeckis, the military liaison with Nasa, has his hands full as he tries to keep all the plates spinning: as one disaster follows another out in space, Kaz is also dealing with sabotage by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a bombmaker from the Weather Underground, and an assassination attempt on the American president as he visits the Nasa facilities.
Historical figures pop up on every page, from Gerald Ford and Mao Zedong to George Bush snr and a number of real-life astronauts, all of whom contribute to an overly busy story. Equal parts spy novel, sci-fi yarn, historical tale and action hero thriller, Final Orbit grows increasingly improbable in its fictional elements, even as Hadfield delivers a superbly detailed account of the real-life mission.
Formerly the Irish State pathologist, Marie Cassidy published her debut novel Body of Truth in 2023, introducing Dr Terry O’Brien, a Scottish forensic pathologist who has moved to Dublin. Terry has just been appointed assistant state pathologist as Deadly Evidence (Hachette Books Ireland, £16.99) begins, and the brutal killing of Detective Garda Martin Higgins in a gangland-style execution ensures that she is obliged to dive in at the deep end.
But Higgins’s is not the only mutilated corpse to wind up on Terry’s table – is there a connection between the apparently random murders? Considered “a bit of a maverick”, Terry is a strong addition to the ranks of Irish crime fiction’s sleuths, a clear-eyed, no-nonsense professional who follows the science wherever it might lead. That said, a touch of Terry’s tenacity will be required to navigate the plot of Deadly Evidence, which is a swirl of current cases, cold cases, the unsolved murder of Terry’s sister, a burgeoning romance (or two), and Terry’s ongoing trauma from her near-death experience in the previous novel.
Centring on “a house built for ghosts”, Dwyer Murphy’s The House on Buzzard’s Bay (No Exit Press, £9.99) is set in a small coastal town in Massachusetts, where a group of old college friends come together every summer for long, lazy days at the holiday beach home Jim inherited from his grandmother.
This year, however, something feels different, and when Jim gets into a violent argument with Bruce, a bestselling novelist, and Bruce subsequently disappears without telling anyone where he is going, the laid-back mood gradually sours into rancour and mutual suspicion. It’s no coincidence that Jim’s wife Valentina, a lawyer, is working on a brief about collective guilt inspired by the Nuremberg trials; Murphy’s novel is a (very) slow-burning psychological thriller that investigates the human instinct to avert our gaze from whatever it is we don’t want to see.
Complicating matters is the fact that the house was originally built to house spiritualists and mediums, and that it appears to be haunted by a presence that demands justice for crimes unseen. Told from Jim’s perspective, the narrative weaves in and out of reality and dreams, through seances and visitations (real and imagined); meanwhile, the landscape and the house’s liminal setting on a narrow spit between shore, sea and marsh emphasise that the characters’ actions and experiences are open to all manner of fuzzy interpretation.
Those who prefer their thrillers pacy and action-packed will likely be frustrated by Murphy’s thoughtful, character-driven story, but The House on Buzzard’s Bay is an elegantly written multi-genre novel that explores the nature of historical and contemporary crime, and our willingness (or otherwise) to confront the darkness within ourselves.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
