The best new crime reads of the month
CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH
Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings
Call your spouse, tell them you have an important work meeting. Slip on a pair of green contact lenses, slide on a black wig, and get in an unassuming taxi. Find the bar you need – the note is written, in code, in a crumpled note in your hand – and slide into a booth. Make sure you always face the door. Order a drink, something smoky and aged. Now you’re ready: reach into your bag, get out this book, and read the hell out of it for a few hours.
Codename Villanelle is a glorious, exciting book with all the pace and plot of a superhero origin movie: a young girl named Oxana, cold-blooded and fearless, murders the men who killed her father. Just before she is executed for her crime, she is released to the ruthless Konstantin, who sees in Oxana’s skills and iciness the perfect assassin – and so, she is put through the brutal training regime that makes her so. On the other side of it, she is no longer Oxana, but Villanelle; merciless killer, a seducer of all, someone in full control. We follow her breathlessly through a series of political assassinations as she slips under the radar, until she catches the attention of Eve Polastri, whose job is to protect, and whose failure to do so sees her career in ruins.
Sexy, fast and good fun, this is a story that begins as fizzy entertainment, as the calculating yet compelling Villanelle mows down or sleeps with all in her path, before adding unexpected emotional depth as Eve struggles with the secrets she must keep from her husband, and the pain and guilt that charge through her. It’s still quite light, but Jennings offers more than enough to sketch a character you care about before sending them to a glittering international locale to shoot someone in the head or prevent the same. And when you’re done reading, and you’re ready to return to your normal life, just do one more thing – make sure you’re not being followed.
NEW CRIME FICTION
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz (translated by George Goulding)
With the fifth book in the Millennium series (and his second), David Lagercrantz continues Stieg Larsson’s tale that has captivated the world. Lisbeth Salander is in prison (at least, for a while), a place many would do anything to avoid. But for Salander, whose experience of the outside world has rarely been pleasant, a Swedish prison ripe for hacking offers refuge for someone with her skill set. Mikael Blomkvist, faithfully visiting Salander, is tasked with investigating a man with connections not only to a murder, but to Lisbeth’s own ruined childhood, as she continues to barrel through life as a bloodthirsty force of equality, trying to solve everyone’s problems while getting closer to those at her own core, and the core of her deadly twin sister.
Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka
Danya Kukafka gracefully plumbs the grungy emotional depths of a small town in Girl in Snow, a book that gets a pass on the title because that is exactly what happens: a teenage girl is found dead, covered in snow, in an elementary school playground. Three people tell the story of the before and after: the schoolboy Cameron, who everyone thinks is the killer, with his habit of standing still and just watching; Jade, the bitter classmate who cannot let go of the grudge she held against the dead girl for all she stole; and Russ, the cop handling the case, who doesn’t want it to be Cameron, since what happened to Cameron’s father is too close to the bone for him. This is an addictive dark read.
The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes
Early in 1920, on a suburban train, Florence Nightingale Shore – Florence Nightingale’s goddaughter – was attacked on a train, before dying from her injuries at hospital. This, sadly, is a true story, but here, in the gilt-edged world of fiction, in steps 16-year-old Nancy Mitford, about to take London by storm, and her companion, Louisa Cannon, who finds in the glamorous Mitford family a chance to escape her life and live as she’s always wanted to. Louisa expected excitement – but she didn’t exactly imagine becoming embroiled in a murder with the enigmatic Nancy, as she does in this sparkling, gripping story of 1920s London, told by a professional early-twentieth-century fictionaliser with a bundle of Downton Abbey tie-in books under her diamante-studded flapper belt.
Bad to Worse by Robert Edeson
If you’re looking for a whip-smart bit of fun that goes from the past to the present and from caves in the Ferendes to the wide-open Arizona desert, look no further than Bad to Worse. Richard Worse is an intelligence analyst and ancestor of Thomas Worse, whose hand in a feud with the Mortiss family (back when shooting on horseback was the way to deal with problems) still echoes through to this day. The modern-day Worse may be able to take down the Mortiss empire once and for all, but it involves saving a pilot who absolutely did crash a plane into a classified zone, no matter what the authorities want him to say, all while Worse’s friend Edvard Tøssentern is investigating some peculiar hierogylphs. This is a fast-talking novel that’s sure to make you grin.
Yesterday by Felicia Yap
There are many crime thrillers that love to make the most out of people’s poor memories. Yap has taken the fuzzy-memory trope and flipped it to deliriously readable, sci-fi levels, catapulting readers into a world where class division lies only between Monos and Duos. Duos can remember two days in the past. Monos can only remember yesterday. Aided by iDiaries (Steve Jobs still exists in this universe, of course), people read about the past and try to store these memories as recallable Facts. But when you don’t write it down, how can you remember it? What happens when you only remember yesterday, while your husband remembers the day before too – and a 30-ish-hours-dead body has washed up in the river, the police think your husband did it, and if it’s not solved by the end of the day, no one will remember what happened? And what of the one person who can remember everything, including the worst things people have done to her – can she get her revenge?
The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda
After Miranda’s brilliant, time-bending first crime book, All The Missing Girls – a story in reverse – comes her next distorted-reality thriller. Leah Stevens has fallen hard out of her career as a journalist, and – with her name now attached to a restraining order and an unravelling investigative piece – she needs to leave town. When she meets up with Emmy, an old friend who needs out of a relationship, they move to a small town in western Pennsylvania. Leah finds a teaching job, Emmy shift work, and Leah hopes for a normal life again – until someone who looks uncannily like her is attacked. Soon after, she realises she hasn’t seen Emmy for a while, and after reluctantly venturing into public and reporting the disappearance, Leah finds herself the one under scrutiny. No, she doesn’t know exactly where Emmy works. And well, no, she doesn’t know Emmy as well as she thought. And Leah’s misjudgements in the past don’t mean that Emmy is just a figment of her imagination – do they?
