Recent crime fiction | 28 January 2016

We fully expect con artists to be caught in a sting themselves, but even with that thought constantly in mind I was still hoodwinked by Nicholas Searle’s The Good Liar (Viking, £12.99, pp. 288). The surprises start on page one: Roy Courtnay is in his nineties, with a longstanding pedigree of swindles behind him, and he relishes the idea of one last scam. His mark is Betty, a woman he meets via an internet dating site. Roy’s a slippery character, who adopts, or even steals, new identities as he chooses. It’s all about disguise, and telling a good lie. The perfect lie.

There are dangers, not least existential. At one point he speaks of the difficulty of maintaining ‘the flickering self that was Roy Courtnay’. A series of personas are added one on top of the other, and a journey back into second world war Germany reveals the moment when Roy’s first mask slips into place, as the requirement to lie becomes a matter of life and death.