CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH

Security by Gina Wohlsdorf

On the Californian coastline, a glorious new hotel awaits its opening. Manderley Resort will be the most sophisticated of places to stay, thanks to highly detailed planning: from the opulent surrounds and the luxurious seasonal food prepared by the most melodramatically French of chefs, all the way to the experienced staff and state-of-the-art technology taking care of every little problem that could arise. For example, a stray branch in the hedge maze – Sid the gardener is onto that. Or the strange red mark on the carpet outside room 1516? Vivica, who’s an expert at stain removal, is taking care of that. The dead body in the bathtub – well, you could consider that already taken care of. Tessa, who is in charge of the hotel when the hotel’s actual owner isn’t there to ruin everyone’s day, knows everything about it. Hell, she designed most of it. But she doesn’t know about the body in the tub. And while she knows about the security cameras, she doesn’t know about all of them. How they watch over the entire hotel. How they see everything. How they see that the killer is not yet done.

Security takes the usual omnipresent third-person narrator and turns it into something fresh, tight and thrilling, with surveillance the main character. Some pages are split into parallel stories when the action happens on more than one camera; everyone’s secrets laid bare and their pasts on file – from Tessa, everyone’s friend and no one’s, to the unlikeable, ever-pranking manager Franklin, and the rest, up and down the resort’s floors. With a skeleton crew putting the final touches on the hotel before it opens, and a deadly force in the hotel who seems perfectly happy to turn them into literal skeletons, this is a literary game of cat-and-mouse and a wholly original, blood-splattered ride to be on.

NEW CRIME FICTION

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Decades ago, a teenager was kidnapped and held prisoner in the marshland of rural Michigan. She gave birth to her kidnapper’s daughter. When said child is 12, the Marsh King was captured and imprisoned. Helena tries – how she tries – to live a normal life, to embrace electricity for the first time, to finally go to school, meet other people. But nature, foraging, hunting – it’s always been a part of her. So when the Marsh King violently escapes during a prison transfer, she knows it could be decades until he is discovered, again. And the only way to prove that she isn’t her father’s daughter, that she is trustworthy, is to become exactly who he made her: a hunter, out there in the marsh that she calls home. Helena is strong, smart, flawed, and this book is strong, smart, and utterly gripping.

The Girl in Kellers Way by Megan Goldin

When flooding reveals the body of a girl in her forties buried in the forest, Detective Melanie Carter is given the task of figuring out who killed her – starting with figuring out who the hell she is. Beautifully dressed, even after spending nearly a decade buried in the dirt, Melanie can’t match her to a missing person until someone points her to a long-solved murder. There, she finds a connection to Julie West, the strung-out wife of a university professor trying desperately to hang onto her sanity in the face of her scattered thoughts and memory lapses, and the recollection of narrowly avoiding a deadly, deliberate car accident – one that seems not to be on record. Set in the States but by a debut (and local!) writer, this is a harrowing tale of suspicion and doubt.

Party Girls Die in Pearls by Plum Sykes

When you’re overcome by too many heavy serial killer stories populated by depressing detectives who spend all their time full of angst about real-life personal problems, the antidote is probably something like Plum Sykes. Freshman Ursula Flowerbutton arrives at Oxford on a scholarship to study modern history and write for the paper, and lands herself a title-chasing roommate, a solid crush, a dashing teacher, and a violent murder. Compelled to solve the case, Ursula realises that while everything appears frothy on campus, there’s real danger lurking underneath. Written with a generous serving of ham, dotted with footnotes to bring forth a collegial chuckle and set in a bubblegum-bright, decadent mid-eighties, Dr Dead Write prescribes a dose of this after your next dismembered corpse.

No Middle Name by Lee Child

You know what you’re in for with a Lee Child book. You’ll spend a bunch of time with Jack-None-Reacher, ex-military giant, hero and terror: of no fixed address, but always with somewhere to be and someone to save or ruin. Here, all of his short stories and novellas are collected together for the first time, in a hearty stack of satisfying, no-nonsense thriller writing that will see Reacher in the likes of diners, hospitals, the English countryside, run-down hotels and his own past – all in the time it takes you to get to work.

Marlborough Man by Alan Carter

Alan Carter’s won a Ned Kelly Award and a bunch of fans with his WA-set Cato Kwong series, but now he’s crossed the Pacific to New Zealand. New in town – not that where he lives, on the side of a hill, is exactly ‘town’ – Nick Chester is a sergeant on the police force without too much to do, except waiting to be discovered by his old life and have everything fall down. Meanwhile, he lives in desolate beauty on NZ’s South Island, by the Marlborough Sound, the kind of place where everyone knows each other. Which makes it all the more unsettling when two boys end up dead, and no one can figure out who’s behind it – who the Pied Piper, as the media dubs the killer – could possibly be. And wherever Nick runs, it’s never far enough to be safe from visceral danger. Carter’s laconic style and small-town chills are excellently placed to ease you into a long winter in front of the fire.

Lycke by Mikaela Bley

On a cold and stormy Friday in May, a young girl disappears without a trace from outside Stockholm’s Royal Tennis Hall. The missing girl is Lycke, and assigned to report on her story is TV4’s hot-headed crime reporter Ellen Tamm. As the police begin their search, Ellen starts her own investigation, delving into Lycke’s life: her family, the nanny, the kids who taunted her at school. As Ellen is drawn deeper into a tangle of secrets, lies, and betrayals – and frustrated by the odd behaviour of Lycke’s family, as well as corrupt police, her upstart new boss, and the disturbing threats being made against her – she becomes more and more possessed by the task she has been given, tortured by the echoes of her own past, of the darkness that haunts her. ‘The story of Lycke is a powerful story, which invites you to look for the evil inside your house. Mikaela Bley is the new queen of the Swedish thriller.’ – Vanity Fair

Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach

Ava Antipova is in Paris, living her Best Life (a Furthest From Her Family Life), when she gets a brief, blistering email from her mother: her twin sister, Zelda, is dead, burned alive in the barn. Even before she gets home, Ava is suspicious of the sister who always loved to play games, and wonders if Zelda is really dead at all, a fact exacerbated by her ailing mother’s unwillingness to recognise her. After slipping back into her old life, and her old ways – sometimes even her sister’s ways – Ava discovers letters and emails from Zelda, taking her, from A to Z, from a loving childhood to someone who would vanish and leave her sister in a whole barnyard of trouble. Ava is sharp and scathing, bitter and betrayed, and this is an excellent, entertaining journey through the alphabet of an avenging angel.

The Dark Lake by Sarah Bailey

There’s too much keeping police detective Gemma Woodstock in the regional town of Smithson: too much family, too much pain. Her life weighs on her: the only light in it, the clandestine affair with her partner, until all is shattered with the murder of schoolteacher Rosalind Ryan. Everyone in town knew Rosalind, and for Gemma, the memories of their schooldays together scratch at the edges of the investigation. Her closeness to the situation sees danger lurk closer to both her and her family, while the net of suspicion is cast wide upon a town where everyone sees each other’s secrets. A haunting, disconcerting procedural, not to be read near any type of rural Australian lake.

Fiona Hardy