Philip Kerr is best known for his excellent Bernie Gunther series about a detective trying to survive with his integrity more or less intact in Nazi Germany. His latest novel, however, is a standalone thriller set in literary territory that might have appealed to Hitchcock. Research (Quercus, £18.99, Spectator Bookshop, £15.99) opens with the murder of the beautiful Irish wife of one of the world’s bestselling novelists in the couple’s luxurious Monaco apartment. Her husband, John Houston, has disappeared. He is the prime suspect.
Houston researches and plans his thrillers but employs an ‘atelier’ of jobbing novelists to do the hard grind of writing what he describes as ‘books for people who have never read them before’. Now on the run for a murder he says he did not commit, he turns for help to his trusted ally, Don Irvine, chief among his literary henchman. The narrative switches between the viewpoints of these two men — both skilled plotters, adept at making things up.
Much of the book moves slowly, especially at first. There are ponderous ruminations on writing and the book trade, interspersed with gourmet meals, high-performance cars, glamorous women, 500-euro bottles of wine and the occasional corpse. Stick with it. Kerr steadily builds a dizzyingly improbable and highly entertaining edifice of plot and counterplot. The reader should suspend belief and remember that, as Irvine remarks with the barbed accuracy that is a hallmark of the novel, ‘Being a writer is a kind of elegant sociopathy.’
Alternating narratives are also a feature of Sabine Durrant’s second psychological thriller, Remember Me This Way (Mul-holland Books, £14.99, Spectator Bookshop, £12.99). Lizzie, a school librarian, drives from London to Cornwall on the anniversary of her husband’s death to put flowers on the spot where he died in a car accident.
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