Broken Harbour (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) is Tana French’s fourth novel in a series based around Dublin’s murder squad. Despite the format, she rings the changes by using a different lead character in each book. Here it’s a detective named ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, a man who chases murderers with a monastic sense of vocation and a chilly self-awareness.
The story opens when a seemingly perfect family becomes the victim of a murderous attack at their home. The two young children are smothered; the parents are stabbed in the course of a bloody fight in the kitchen that leaves the father dead and the mother wounded, perhaps fatally. The victims’ home is in Brianstown, a half-built coastal resort that fell victim to the Irish recession. Paradise has gone sour for the family as well: the slump has left the parents out of work, mired deep in debt and stuck in the middle of nowhere. For Kennedy, the location has a private significance. Brianstown was once rural Broken Harbour, the scene of idyllic childhood holidays. But, iof 19th-century architecture in Britainn the end, paradise also went sour for him.
In one way this is a novel about victims. French is an impressive writer who knows just how to manipulate her readers’ emotions. There’s a strong Gothic flavour, a sense of long shadows stretching from the past and darkening the present. At 500-plus pages the book is perhaps a little too long but, as revelation follows revelation, the dark pull of the narrative keeps you enthralled until the entirely satisfying ending.
No one could accuse Louise Welsh of prolixity. The Girl on the Stairs (John Murray, £16.99) is crisply written and tightly constructed, gaining much of its considerable impact by its economy. The protagonist, Jane, is pregnant and has just moved from London to Berlin to live with her German partner, Petra, a businesswoman who seems no great shakes at empathy.
Jane, confined all day to their coldly luxurious apartment, becomes interested in her neighbours, a controlling gynaecologist and his motherless 13-year-old daughter. The girl is showing signs of what may be sexual abuse and rejects Jane’s overtures of friendship. In the flat downstairs is an almost equally spooky couple, a retired teacher with dementia and her husband. The priest of the church over the road is acting strangely. And something is clearly going on in the derelict block of flats nearby, with its stink of urine and rats.
Welsh is a novelist who straddles the shadowy borderline between crime and literary fiction. Here, she subverts and updates the conventions of the romantic thriller while retaining the genre’s central premise: a vulnerable, isolated woman rashly follows where curiosity and compassion lead. The result is powerful, impressive and as black as sin.
N.J. Cooper’s latest crime series centres on a forensic psychologist, Dr Karen Taylor, who specialises in the nastier sort of psychopath and is based in Southampton. Vengeance in Mind (Simon & Schuster, £7.99) is her fourth case. Once again, DCI Charlie Trench turns to her when a fabulously wealthy philanthropist is found murdered and horribly mutilated in his palatial house on the Isle of Wight. Only one other person, Blackwater’s mistress and press secretary, was in the house, whose sophisticated security system shows no sign of having been breached. The mistress claims to have lost all memory of the night’s events, and Karen is brought in to assess her reliability.
It’s not surprising that this in the running for this year’s Gold Dagger for best crime novel. Cooper is less interested in the mechanics of the investigation than she is in the reasons underlying the crimes. Controlled and articulate, she is particularly good on the messy private lives of her main characters, which give a satisfying sense of spilling beyond the confines of the story.
Laura Lippman is best known for her excellent crime series about journalist Tess Monaghan. But she also produces stand-alone novels such as The Innocents (Avon, £6.99), which is set like her series in her native Baltimore. In the present, a drunk kills himself in a car crash, triggering a reunion between his two brothers and two women. Growing up in 1976, the five of them were inseparable. Lippman’s double narrative alternates between the consequences of the reunion in the present and the gradual revelation of what really happened during their youthful friendship — including the terrible events that brought it to an end.
It’s a familiar approach but here it’s handled exceptionally well. The double characterisation, adult and child, is beautifully done. So is Lippman’s portrayal of the emotional intensity and the self-referential group morality of the five characters. Finally, and perhaps best of all, she gives us a vivid sense of what it was like to grow up in a particular part of Baltimore nearly 40 years ago.
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