Recommended new crime reads in October
The Silence Between Breaths by Cath Staincliffe
On the 10.35 to London, Euston, a carriage full of strangers ambles along the rails, its inhabitants bored, frustrated, impatient for something. Meg and Diana are going on a walking holiday, but Meg is hiding something from her partner. Nick is fed up with his wife and children and their never-ending needs. Jeff is on his way to a job interview. Rhona is regretting leaving her sick daughter at school for the sake of her job. There are more: a disparate group of humans, going about their day, except for one, who has an unthinkable secret. And when it happens, and the world comes crashing down, it will leave some of them dead, some of them injured, and all of them struggling to cope with the aftermath. A tense, sombre read.
The Ice Beneath Her by Camilla Grebe
In fashion CEO Jesper Orre’s beautiful mansion, everything is just so: black lacquered kitchen counters, glossy surfaces, not much in the way of decoration –except for the decapitated body in the hallway, the head arranged neatly so. Peter, a policeman at the end of his enthusiasm for working homicide, is on the case, even though there seems an obvious culprit – Jesper himself: strict businessman, now vanished. But the case also has similarities with another, ten years earlier – and Hanne, the psychological profiler on the case back then, has been summoned out of retirement to help again, despite Peter’s reservations about the past they share – and despite Hanne’s own fears that the illness she is suffering, and its impact on her memory, will impede the investigation. And still, they don’t know who the victim is. A chilling Scandinavian crime to freeze your nerves.
Slaughter Park by Barry Maitland
The third and final book in the Belltree Trilogy finds Harry Belltree shielding those around him from danger by hiding out in Cape Tribulation where his closest neighbour is a crocodile named Marilyn who, handily, doesn’t need defending from anyone. But he’s soon back in Sydney once he’s caught wind of what’s happened to the wife and baby daughter he hasn’t seen for months. The baby is in the care of her aunt. Harry’s wife, Jenny, was away for a brief holiday, but is now on the run and wanted for murder. But who is the man Jenny has theoretically murdered? What is his connection to Nordlund, the mining company with an unpleasantly recent history with the Belltrees? And what is the connection to Slater Park, now named Slaughter Park in the press thanks to the dismembered body parts hanging by ribbons from a tree? Another blistering book from the Ned Kelly Award-winning Maitland.
Dead in the Water by Tania Chandler
Brigitte Serra and her family have left Melbourne – and the memories of Chandler’s debut novel, Please Don’t Leave Me Here – for a small island in Gippsland and the comfort that being away from the city provides. Here, all that’s outside their door is squabbling koalas and the dark pull of the sea – but then a body is found in the water, and Brigitte’s old boyfriend Matt Elery – now a writer who has written a crime book called Dead in the Water – is in town for a signing. Brigitte’s policeman husband Aidan is on high alert, and now the sanctuary of their home is at risk, not only from unknown exterior threats but also that of Brigitte and Aidan’s own visceral suffering as the present reveals afresh the trauma of violence in their past. The Ned Kelly and Davitt-shortlisted Chandler has written another absorbing thriller, shot with fear, crackling energy, and dynamic, flawed characters.
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
We do sometimes suspect that our favourite authors may be less favourable in real life, and publisher Susan Ryeland both loves and loathes the moment she gets a new manuscript by crime author Alan Conway on her desk. Conway she is no fan of, but his literary invention – post-war German detective Atticus Pund, solving cosy British crimes in the 1950s – is wonderful. And so Ryeland is devastated when the latest manuscript has no ending, and more so when she discovers that Conway himself now has an ending – dead, apparently by his own hand. But, as she – and we readers – examine the manuscript, it seems that Conway has hidden clues to an even more revealing and deadly mystery in the pages of his book. Just hope, dear reader, that no one has the pen poised above your own story as you read Horowitz’s.
The Scholl Case: The Deadly End of a Marriage by Anja Reich-Osang
The day after her forty-seventh wedding anniversary – December 29, 2011 – Brigitte Scholl disappeared. Her husband, the well-known Heinrich Scholl, had spent the day checking in on his beloved south Berlin town of Ludwigsfelde, where he had been mayor for years. That night, he alerted his friends that his wife was missing; later, she and her dog were found in the woods, dead. Now, Heinrich Scholl sits in jail for her murder, protesting his innocence, but the case still grips the German public, not least the award-winning journalist Anja Reich-Osang, who intended to briefly visit the courtroom during his trial for a look into what was happening and, instead, spent years investigating his case. Reich-Osang provides a powerful, beautifully written exposition into a murder that is as much about the world Scholl inhabits as it is about the man himself.
A Deadly Thaw by Sarah Ward
It’s all very unassuming, of course, a book with a version of the word ‘dead’ in the title, a misty cover. So far, so British Crime Novel, but this is a book you can’t shake. A man is found in a disused wartime mortuary, dead on a slab, and the homicide team start their typical assessments, until one identifies the man as one Andrew Fisher – a local who was killed and cremated twelve years earlier, his wife Lena just released from prison after being found guilty of his murder. But where has Fisher been for twelve years, and why did his wife accept her fate? When Lena vanishes, her sister Kat endeavours to find her, along with Detective Constable Connie Childs and a police team working to survive the repercussions of incorrectly idenitifying a dead man all those years earlier. Taut and beautifully written, this is a cracker of a mystery with genuine characters worth staying up late for.
Never Alone by Elizabeth Haynes (Available 17 October)
Gosh, it’s an enchanting notion, isn’t it? A windswept farm in the Yorkshire moors, nothing but lush fields and fluffy sheep out of your cottage windows. And so it is for Sarah, living alone after the death of her husband and her grown children moving on and away from her in the world – just her and her dogs on an isolated property. Then Aiden, an old friend, moves back to town and into the spare cottage on her land, promptly throwing Sarah’s life into an almost welcome disarray – until a friend of Sarah’s estranged son starts to show up more than expected, Sarah’s closest friend vanishes, and a storm closes in. A pulsating, sexy, slow-burn thriller with a brutal British winter as visceral as the pages themselves. One for ruining all fantasies of lifestyle changes to rural England.
