CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH

The Scandal by Fredrik Backman

In a small, nearly-forgotten Swedish town in the forest, hockey is the reason the sun rises. After years of financial despair, of closed businesses and schools, and kids who want nothing more than to leave, here is a ray of hope that things will turn around, and that hope is pinned on one thing. The junior hockey team, close to winning the championship, closer still to securing a new hockey academy, promises to put Beartown back on the map and bring people back, instead of them solely leaving. And the team has pinned all its hopes on Kevin Erdahl: hockey prodigy, 17-year-old invincible hero to an entire town.

But Kevin got where he was thanks to Benji, the teammate and best friend who is both terrible and the best person in town. And neither of them will win unless the team is rounded out by someone fast, like Amat, from the kids’ team, who practises every morning while his mother Fatima cleans the rink. And Fatima needs to keep her job cleaning the offices of the coaches. But the coaches, David and Sune, need to come to an agreement about Amat. And the general manager, former hockey professional Peter, needs to figure out what to do about Sune, his longtime mentor. Meanwhile Peter and his wife, Kira, just want to hold onto their children: Leo and 15-year-old Maya, who is beginning to think she is in love with Kevin. But Amat is in love with Maya, and then there is the rest of the town, too, waiting to have their story told.

Fredrik ‘Man Called Ove’ Backman has endless skill when it comes to the layering of characters: of their motivations, of making you know for sure what you think of someone… until ten pages later, when you become absolutely convinced you were wrong. He gives you a town, its people, its passion, and makes you believe in it, makes you feel the roar of BEARTOWN through the pages: the excitement, the desperation, and then, the downfall. The way a whole town sees a threat to the hockey team – their hockey team – and their moral compass spins off-centre. The way a crime can be committed but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not as important as hockey. Unless someone stands up for it.

This is an almost-comforting, slow-burn of a Scandinavian story, with Neil Smith’s translation transporting Backman’s voice so clearly, it seems unfathomable it was originally written in anything but English. There are all the ingredients – ice and snow and blood and guns and tension – but what is really dangerous is the mentality of a small town that thinks that it has everything to lose, without realising what it is that you need to hold on to.

NEW CRIME FICTION

The Force by Don Winslow

When it comes to Don Winslow, you can hear the story in your head, narrated by some tough-talking New Yorker: a raspy voice, heavy and dark with the truth. The story reels past in black-and-white, the headiest of noir, pulling you through. Denny Malone has been busted by the feds – and everyone around him is scurrying, finding a place to hide, because Denny was never supposed to go to jail. He’s a hero to the people, a police officer in control of the land: respected, ambitious, a finger in every pie. He gets good things done. Maybe sometimes he goes about it the bad way, but now, the way has gone too bad, and there’s no coming back from it. If the man at the top goes down, will half of Manhattan’s elite shake free? Denny’s stuck tight; his loyalty’s in too many places. Someone’s gotta get saved, and something’s gotta give. An electric burn of storytelling mastery. You don’t have to take my word for it though: Stephen King says, ‘Think The Godfather, only with cops. It’s that good.’ And Lee Child goes further: ‘Probably the best cop novel ever written.’

The Child by Fiona Barton

One day in March, a small article appears in the Evening Standard. A baby’s bones have been found at a building site, under an urn in what was the garden. That is all the reporter knows, but for three women, those few words lead to something much bigger: Angela, confronted again with the hollowing-out she feels every time a baby is mentioned in the paper; Emma, feeling the world she has built around her start to crumble; and Kate, a journalist, who sees in this an answer that needs a question. Whose baby is it? How did it get there? And what secrets will be uncovered when the three women do everything they can to fight for themselves? By the author of the bestselling The Widow, this is a gripping heartache of a tale by an author who seems destined ( judging by her titles) to knock off a different family member for each book.

The Secrets She Keeps by Michael Robotham

It’s a good month to stay away from crime books if you’re about to have a baby, because things aren’t going well for the little tykes. Meg’s pregnant with her third child, but it was a surprise, and her faltering marriage isn’t coping well with the new changes and everyone’s frayed emotions. Agatha’s pregnant too, feeling the twists and thumps inside her. And she’s watching Meg, hoping to befriend her, hoping that Meg’s seemingly perfect life will rub off on her a little, give her the baby she’s wanted so desperately for so long, the whole experience of motherhood that Meg lives in. But Meg’s hiding a secret. And so is her husband. And Agatha’s hiding one bigger than all of them. This is a tense, nerve-shredding read, played out in mothers’ groups and domestic disputes, by the Ned Kelly and CWA Gold Dagger award-winning Robotham.

Final Girls by Riley Sager

A final girl, like in the movies: the last survivor of a brutal massacre, the pretty girl left standing when everyone around her has been slaughtered. When Quincy Carpenter became a final girl after a college holiday that turned into a bloodbath, she found solace during the following years in Lisa and Sam, Final Girls who had come before, weathered the media storm, and lived to tell the tale. Until Lisa – calm, rational Lisa – is found in her bathtub, her wrists slit. Which means two things: that Quincy is about to be the centre of a media storm, and that she’s about to doubt her own ability to survive this horror, even all these years later. Final Girls is an uneasy psychological thriller, doubt clawing at the pages like surfacing memories, and when Quincy discovers an urgent email sent to her from Lisa just before she died, she realises that nothing is as Final as her moniker implies.

Broken River by J. Robert Lennon

We watch, detached but distressed, as a family scatters out of their small-town home, terrified of something, of someone. A man, a woman, a young child. Their escape is short-lived, and they are found. Not all of them will survive the minutes that follow, but the one thing that stays, upright and waiting, throughout the handful of years that pass afterwards, is the house. No one would buy it, of course. Until one family does. And it is that family who we watch now: a couple trying to escape their own relationship problems, and their endearingly insufferable 12-year-old daughter, morbidly fascinated to find they’re living in a house with such a bloody history. They’re not terrified of anything. At least, not yet. This is an unsettling, horrifying book: a forest, bodies never found, the girl who survived, and the search for answers that would never (thankfully for the reader) end well.

The Student by Iain Ryan

Gatton, Queensland, 1994. It’s hot, it’s messy, the university’s a pit of doom, and the weed is drying out. For Nate, who lives a complicated life involving study and family problems and dealing pot, the last part is a problem about the length and width of the endless sky. Especially since usually he gets his weed from Jesse. And Jesse’s gone. People are looking for him, but not the nice kind of people you like to have a chat with, but more the type of people who leave you looking a bit pranged by the end of the conversation. Oh, and the cops, too. Then there’s his friend Maya, whose body was found by a dog. But that’s probably not where the problem of the missing Jesse is headed. All Nate has to do is find him, or find 35 grand. But when you’re Australia’s most unfocussed and unexpected detective, that’s not easy – though it is fun as hell to read about. The Student is a scrappy delight of a second novel from the Ned-Kelly-shortlisted Ryan.

Fatal Mistake by Karen M. Davis

Going undercover is never an easy task, but Detective Lexie Rogers is no stranger to hard work – and she has the scars to prove it. Barely hours into her first day infiltrating one of Sydney’s drug syndicates, a bomb goes off during an open day at the notorious Assassins Outlaw Motorcycle Gang’s clubhouse, killing a handful of bikers and a police officer. Knowing that she would’ve typically been sent on surveillance for that event – and that the new ‘friends’ she’s making were invited to said event – Lexie realises how close she’s already getting to danger. When it comes to going undercover, there is almost no one you can trust beyond yourself … but even the face in the mirror is hiding some secrets. A twisting, accelerating thriller packed with real-life experience.

My Name is Nobody by Matthew Richardson

I can only assume Penguin didn’t like the title ‘My Name is Also a Footballer’s’ for this entertaining spy thriller, so went for this one instead. And of course, everyone in it has a delectable, hypermasculine spy-type name, from Solomon Vine, the up-and-coming agent shut out of the trade after a prisoner’s catch-and-release goes wrong; to Cosmo Newton, the chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who gets him back in the game to hunt down a missing man; and on to head of station Gabriel Wilde, the man abducted from his home, who needs to be found before anyone untoward finds a way to get all that classified information out of his head. Vine, already in trouble and with no one keeping tabs on him, is the only one who can find his old friend – and figure out what really happened that day when a prisoner was shot and he copped the blame. A solid espionage tale, perfect for a night in front of the fire reading about people being tortured for information … while the most torturous thing you need to decide is whether to pour a gin and tonic, or a whiskey sour.

Get Poor Slow by David Free

I am, of course, terrified at the idea of reviewing a book by a book reviewer – especially one who’s written a book about a book reviewer accused of murder. Ray Saint is dealing with chronic pain, not enough prescription medication, and a bit too much non-prescription medication. His caustic book reviews are met with delight by many and ire by more than a few. His not particularly well-funded life was rough even before Jade Howe’s dead body turned up. Ray was the last person to see her alive, and now the cops (and half of Australia) have their eye on him: he of the slight lapses of memory, owner of fingerprints all over her room. Ray must scrape himself from the ground again and sharpen some barbs to find out who really killed the Jade he’d come to like – and prove to everyone, as well as himself, that just because you’re a bit cutting when it comes to shoddy literature, that doesn’t mean you’re cutting when it comes to a dead body.

Fiona Hardy