The best new crime reads of the month
CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH
All the Beautiful Lies by Peter Swanson
In the seaside town of Kennewick, Maine, the body of a bookseller is found at the bottom of the cliffs he loved to walk along. His son, Harry, makes his way from the college graduation he will now miss to farewell the father he loved. Harry feels the heaviness of his loneliness in the world when he arrives, his college days so swiftly finalised, returning as an orphan to his father’s house, where the stepmother he barely knows is waiting for his support.
Alice is just how Harry remembers her: young and disarmingly beautiful, even during this time of loss. Together they mourn the man they loved, until the police arrive once more: the death of Bill Ackerson was no accident. But everyone adores booksellers, don’t they? (They do, right?) As Harry tries to deal with the notion of his father’s murder in the midst of his grief, the unnerving Alice cooks for him, cares for him, her closeness distracting. When a young woman Harry recognises from his father’s funeral turns up in the bookshop looking for work, it changes the course of his thoughts – and the violence on this beach community is not over.
With Alice’s story of her past told alongside Harry’s desperation now, Peter Swanson delicately moves back and forth from past to present, and then – after a shocking event halfway through – swings the point of view again. As a staunch fan of Swanson’s The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, Swanson’s ice-cool writing style tells the story with both clarity and heart. The grief of those mourning for their loved ones feels real in a way many stone-cold book characters never deliver. There is danger in these pages, from the most unexpected of places, and this unsettling book will pull you right underneath its waves.
NEW CRIME FICTION
Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr (available 10 April)
I don’t know how the hell Philip Kerr writes a five-hundred page thriller every year, and makes them so damn good, but here we are again. It’s 1957, and Bernie Gunther, Kerr’s whacked-about, knocked-down-get-up-again semi-hero, has spent the time since the war attempting to become somebody different, and is now working for an insurance company that sends him on the path of a sunken ship. Upon realising the ship has its own past with the war, Bernie has to confront history once more, even while Europe desperately strives to prove that peace is here. Luckily for readers, when Bernie’s around dark humour is always close at hand, while peace absolutely never is.
Mine by Susi Fox
Sasha wakes from an emergency caesarean, numb and alone. Memories of what led her here – a car? blood? – are fuzzy in her mind. Her belly is empty and her husband isn’t by her side. When a nurse finally leads her to her premature son’s crib in the nursery, she sees his spindly legs and tiny face and knows, right then, that this baby boy is not hers. Australian Susi Fox has taken every pregnant family’s nightmare material and made a harrowing, vice-grip thriller, one where a doctor and new mother, full of morphine and exhaustion, fights for her instincts – even when no one else believes her.
Panic Room by Robert Goddard
Crime stalwart Robert Goddard has opened the door (sorry) on another excellent thriller – one that sees disgraced estate agent Don Challenor taking a trip to the Cornish coast to evaluate a lush multi-million-dollar property as a favour to his ex-wife. The property is vacant and the owner wants it sold fast, but Don soon discovers that the property is not so empty as it seems, populated as it is by the unnervingly naked Blake, a young artist who claims to be the housekeeper. The occasionally efficient Don soon discovers that the house is not what it seems – a closed panic room – and that it might be holding a more secretive past than either of its occupants.
The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson (translated by Victoria Cribb)
One morning, as she heads into her usual day in Reykjavik’s police force, Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdottir is called into a meeting with her boss. Now sixty-four, Hulda was destined for an unwanted retirement at the end of the year, but now they want her desk, her cases, and Hulda out early. After decades of her talents being neglected, she has one final opportunity, in the two weeks before she is forced out, to solve a cold case of her choosing. It’s easy for Hulda to decide: she wants to solve the drowning death of an asylum seeker, a case one of her useless colleagues declared a suicide. But Hulda wants to be sure, and at the end of her career and her patience, she will do anything to solve it. This bitterly cool procedural will take your comfortable armchair all the way to Iceland – and to danger.
Killer Intent by Tony Kent
Regrettably the only book in this month’s batch where the title and author’s name rhyme with each other, Tony Kent’s Killer Intent will not relent in its pursuit of fair judgement. (Okay … I’m done.) Kent himself, a champion boxer and barrister, brings political nous and knuckle-splintering tension to the story of an attempted assassination that spirals into something much bigger, bringing into its wake a reporter on one of her earliest coups, a member of the security detail that failed to stop the assassin before six bullets were fired, and a barrister whose Troubled-with-a-capital-T Irish past is never far enough behind him. Kent understands the finer details of violence and the law and ramps up the tension with Killer Intent’s killer excitement. (Okay, that rhyme was a stretch.)
Paper Ghosts by Julia Heaberlin (available 16 April)
Carl is in a care home for dementia sufferers; he was once a vaunted photographer, but now he’s famous for the murder charges he faced, though he can’t remember any of it. Grace is the younger sister of Rachel, whose disappearance saw Carl convicted for her death, and Grace has spent years searching for answers. Posing as Carl’s daughter, she takes him on a cross-country road trip, following the path of his photographs to finally find out what happened to her sister. With photographs aplenty, this complex psychological thriller asks the questions: what if Grace isn’t the only one lying about who she is? Is Carl really suffering from dementia, or is he much more astute – and dangerous – than Grace thinks? And what if he never killed Rachel at all?
Find You in the Dark by Nathan Ripley
Some retired folk have hobbies, like knitting, or woodworking, or perhaps reading crime books. For Martin Reese, his hobby is to buy stolen police files on unsolved cases, find the dead bodies, and helpfully call in the information to the police. It seems like a favour, but for Detective Sandra Whittal, she can’t help but think that someone who digs up bodies might not be too far from causing them in the first place. When a cop goes missing and Sandra lands on his tail, Martin realises that when you’re digging, you can’t always be sure what you’ll find – and his latest discovery reveals that perhaps the person who was leaving the bodies behind did not want them disturbed.
NEW TRUE CRIME
My Mother, A Serial Killer by Hazel Baron & Janet Fife-Yeomans
Dulcie Bodsworth was the perfect 1950s lady – always baking and delivering homemade cakes to her local police station, being terribly lovely to everyone, and adored by her community. Like most picturesque 1950s moments, however, Dulcie was not as sweet as she seemed – she was a murderer, of the father of her children, of more men besides. There was only one person who could see Dulcie for who she really was, and who could stop Dulcie’s violent acts – and it was her own daughter, Hazel. This is her story, one of a woman whose courage in the face of her brutal parentage brought down a horrific killer.
A Scandal in Bohemia by Gideon Haigh
Ned Kelly Award-winner Gideon Haigh tells the story of Mollie Dean, a vibrant bohemian murdered in a Melbourne laneway and whose lifestyle saw society attempt to ignore her existence entirely. Haigh’s investigation is not only about her death, but her life.
Lillian Armfield by Leigh Straw
On the other side of the law is Leigh Straw’s engaging account of the incredible Lillian Armfield, Australia’s first female detective – a woman initially dismissed for who she was and whose work on the streets of 1920s Sydney saw her in the thick of the Razor Gang Wars and much else besides.
ALSO OUT THIS MONTH
Jo Nesbo adds to the Hogarth Shakespeare Project with Macbeth; some consistent favourites and their new titles with Jeffery Deaver’s The Cutting Edge, John Connolly’s The Woman in the Woods, Michel Bussi’s Time is a Killer, Donna Leon’s The Temptation of Forgiveness, Arnaldur Indridason’s The Shadow Killer and Laura Lippman’s Sunburn; get your semi-appropriately-titled girl fix with Lexie Elliott’s disappearing young woman in The French Girl; and keep your eye out for Alex Grecian’s The Wolf, C.L. Taylor’s The Fear, Liz Nugent’s Skin Deep, L.S. Hilton’s sexxxy Ultima, Harriet Alida Lye’s The Honey Farm, John Fairfax’s Blind Defence, Daniel Cole’s Hangman, Olivia Kiernan’s Too Close to Breathe, and Keith Thomas’s The Clarity… and more!
