CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH:

The Truth and Other Lies by Sascha Arango

Claus Moreany’s publishing house is on the verge of going under when his distractingly beautiful employee Betty discovers unknown author Henry Hayden’s manuscript in a pile. Frank Ellis becomes a runaway bestseller, subsequent books sell millions, and Hayden becomes a wealthy man living in a beautiful house with his lovely wife, a sporty-looking dog and the magazine spreads to prove it. All is well until the day that Betty, who is not his wife, tells him that she is pregnant with his child. Henry vows to himself: it is time to tell Martha the truth. But Henry has never been a man to care about things like the truth when a skewed version of events will suffice.

The Truth and Other Lies is a marvellous book, the kind that never lets you get comfortable enough to let you think you know what’s happening – author Sascha Arango is always one step ahead of you, and his creation, Henry, is one calculated story away from reality. Being this wrong-footed is quite the delight, as is Hayden, smooth as aged whiskey but with as many secrets as a thirteen-year-old’s diary. I barely want to say more in case I spoil anything for you, but Arango’s icy prose and Germany’s sun-kissed seaside locale make for the perfect read as our own nights get longer, and as dark as Hayden himself.

After the Crash by Michel Bussi

In 1980, a plane crashes into a mountainside in the middle of the night, on the way from Istanbul to Paris. Out of the 169 on board, 168 perish – and one survives, a three-month-old baby girl. But when two separate sets of paternal grandparents – one rich and connected, one poor and sick – contact the hospital to check on her, the world is gripped by her story: a little girl no one can prove is their own. Eighteen years later, the private detective hired to find the truth sits with a gun in front of his notes, no closer to a solution and ready to end his own life, when, finally, the answer becomes obvious – and someone else beats him to the gunshot.

Disclaimer by Renée Knight

Documentary filmmaker Catherine and her husband Robert, having downsized in the wake of their adult son leaving the nest, are in the middle of sorting out a house-worth of mess and memories when Catherine starts reading the book at her bedside, A Perfect Stranger. It starts pleasantly enough, until she realises that the woman at the centre of the book is more than familiar: it’s her, and the story is that of a long-ago holiday shrouded in danger that she hoped to forget, and a secret she was planning never to disclose. So how did the book get into her house – and who knows her secret when the only witness is dead?

The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr

Let’s face it, I almost made this Book of the Month for the title alone: not ‘The Girl from Zagreb’, but The LADY from Zagreb. A+ and a gold star then to Kerr for the title and, of course, for the book itself, another tale following deliciously cynical detective Bernie Gunther whose sardonic travels throughout Nazi Germany have entranced readers. With his ability to make historical Berlin and its surrounds seem real enough to be just beyond your front door, he plumbs the past for a complex series of events, not least Gunther’s task of tracking down a highly desired actress’s missing father in Zurich on the orders of none less than Joseph Goebbels himself.

Fiona Hardy