CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH

All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda

While I mostly try to challenge myself with genres for this column, I’ve inadvertently picked two small-town America books in a row for book of the month, and both by women with alliterative M names. But when struck by something as instantly readable as this, it’s hard to put it down, and impossible to resist.

From the moment Nicolette Farrell hears her brother’s message – that they need to sell the family home – she knows she has to go back to her hometown of Cooley Ridge and deal with the other thing she’s been ignoring: a note from her father that says I need to talk to you. That girl. I saw that girl. And the only girl that could be is Nicolette’s high school best friend, Corinne, who disappeared ten years ago and has never been found. Does this mean Corinne has returned? Or is her father’s dementia worsening, and keeping him from staying in the present?

And so Nic drives across the country and back to her run-down childhood home to figure it out and clean out the house – but then another woman goes missing, and the reader is catapulted two weeks forward. From there the story works backwards, with every chapter starting with the day before, revealing what happened in the missing two weeks and ending where it all began. This disjointed sense of time is enough to keep the reader enthralled, and in the same unnerved mindset as the book’s characters, scrabbling to make sense of what is happening.

All the Missing Girls (you know my thoughts on this; even one of the characters says of the twenty-three-year-old newly missing woman, ‘I wouldn’t call her a girl, exactly’) is the kind of psychological thriller that pulls you into Nicolette’s life, drowning you in both her murky experience of adolescence and the haunting she feels in the present day: the crackling of fireplaces, the eyes in the woods, the invincible hope of teenagers until they aren’t invincible, until one goes missing and everyone’s lives are upended. All these years later, and Corinne – the type of person who manipulated those around her, making them so intertwined that their lives and relationships bled into each other – is the subject of the last message Anneleise Carter sends before she vanishes, telling the police that she has something to tell them about the decade-old case.

This is a book rife with tension, with the unknown, as the story plummets backwards in time and clues are dropped as if you already know what they mean; it’s a different kind of unlayering. A throwaway line: of course, you’re supposed to know this. Unless you read everything backwards, and then come blinking back into the real world, where days follow each other again, and no one is in your house… but you should probably check the windows again.

Please note: This title has been in high demand. Stock is expected later this month.

NEW CRIME FICTION

Ragdoll by Daniel Cole

This is a book that looks to be spiralling into a sensation, so get it while you can – but you might want to be sitting down for this description. Detective William ‘Wolf’ Fawkes is back in the system after being sent to a psychiatric hospital after attacking an accused killer, and his colleagues aren’t the only ones paying attention to him. Discovered opposite his home is the dismembered body parts of six people, stitched together to make a ragdoll, and pointing directly at Wolf’s abode. The chaos that follows the investigation – and the subsequent list of six new people to be murdered – turns this book into a darkly funny, chilling and clever thriller. Just don’t snack while you’re reading it.

Dregs by Jorn Lier Horst

At a ridiculously good price, it’s almost entirely impossible to resist buying this slow-burn Norwegian procedural. Chief Inspector William Wisting is on the case when a left foot in a sports shoe washes up on the beach, and then another – that is, another left foot, until there are four in total. While he attempts to figure out who is dismembering all these bodies, his daughter, a journalist interviewing convicted killers, may be able to shed some light on who is behind all this. Wisting is a rounded, measured character, finding his place in the world after the death of his wife and, with that, a new outlook on the world around him. Dregs, with its tides, waves, and pouring rain, is a nuanced Scandi thriller for the autumnal times ahead.

The Unmourned by Margaret Keneally

After the success of their first book starring dashing ‘gentleman convict’ Hugh Monsarrat – whose crimes are easily overlooked by those that require his skills – Booker Prize winning Tom Keneally and his ex-reporter daughter Meg have written a much-anticipated sequel. Monsarrat and his housekeeper, the disarmingly clever Mrs Mulrooney, now resides in Parramatta, also home to the unhappily named Parramatta Female Factory. After the factory’s superintendent takes his supervisory role to the convict women sickeningly far, he is found stabbed through the eye with an awl, which is a satisfying outcome – unless you’re accused of the murder. Convict Grace O’Leary, known for protecting the women, falls under immediate suspicion to everyone but Monsarrat, who can only prove her innocence by finding out who in New South Wales who hated him – which is essentially everyone – was willing to follow that thought to murder.

Where She Went by B.E. Jones

Melanie Black is a television crime reporter who wakes one morning to find herself in bed with a man she doesn’t know. It’s not a particularly shocking turn of events for Melanie, until she realises, when his wife walks in, that he isn’t ignoring her to be a prat, but because he can’t see her, or hear her – since she is dead. As Melanie realises the extent of her new situation – unable to leave the house, and with no idea what happened or even where her body is – she must figure out how she died, whether the man whose house she is now trapped in is her killer, and whether she can do something about it.

Blue Light Yokohama by Nicolas Obregon (available 20 March)

In the chill of a Japanese spring, Inspector Iwata is handed both a new partner and a new case, and neither are very appealing – Noriko Sarai doesn’t like him, and the last investigator on the case killed himself. A whole family was slaughtered, and there are no clues, no motives, no suspects, nothing – apart from the black sun symbol they left behind. Iwata soon realises the black sun may have a past, and that he has to do all he can to prevent it from having a future – while his own future in the police force is at stake. The tough, damaged and mysterious Iwata is one to follow.

Fiona Hardy