Mathilde “likes dogs, but she hates children. Especially girls.” Mathilde “refuses to work with small-calibre firearms, which, she firmly believes, are good only for bourgeois soap operas and adultery”. Mathilde is also 63, a small, stout hero of the French Resistance (it’s 1985, so there are still a fair few of them around) – and a much-in-demand contract killer. No one suspects her. But, after she wipes out her latest target on Paris’s Avenue Foch with “the sort of gun that could stop a stampeding elephant in its tracks”, the readers of Pierre Lemaitre’s truly delicious Going to the Dogs (Mountain Leopard Press) start to realise that her mind isn’t quite what it was. And a contract killer who can’t remember if the name she has written on a piece of paper is her next target or her new cleaner isn’t the safest person to have around. Brilliantly translated by Frank Wynne, this book is a sort of French take on Richard Osman, if Osman were a lot darker and kept on bumping off characters you’d been made to care about. Deft, funny, sharp, and very French – Lemaitre’s detective muses that “there is a certain poetry to the rain falling on the Seine” – it is an absolute delight.
Will Dean returns to his series detective, deaf journalist Tuva Moodyson, in his latest outing, Ice Town (Hodder & Stoughton), a locked-town mystery in which the bodies of local people keep turning up in Esseberg, an atmospherically creepy location in Sweden’s remote centre that can only be reached through a tunnel that closes at night. “There is a special kind of murk that accompanies snow and extreme chill up here. A unique variety of silence.” Tuva is drawn to the case because a deaf teenager from Esseberg has gone missing with no money. “He’s out there and people are screaming his name trying to help him and he can’t hear them,” says his desperate grandmother. As the deaths mount, residents start to leave, the tension grows, and Tuva tries to make inroads into this strange and closed community. “Less than a thousand people. Everyone in everyone else’s business. I think half the town’s been on the verge of a killing spree for decades,” an outsider tells her. I’m not sure I totally bought the payoff, which felt a little preposterous after such a great buildup, but our hero takes it all in her stride and is as compelling as ever. Overall, Ice Town is a thrilling, chilling read for a wintry evening.
Benjamin Stevenson is unashamedly tapping into the demand for festive mysteries with his latest novel, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (Michael Joseph). His series character Ernest Cunningham – not a detective, just a regular guy who keeps solving murders – starts by thanking the “literary god [who] had the foresight to drop a corpse at my feet at Christmas time”, and then reminds “the cynics out there” that even the likes of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle “aren’t immune to a little yuletide cash grab”. Duly warned, there’s lots to enjoy: Ernest is called to Katoomba, a small town in Australia’s Blue Mountains, by his ex-wife Erin, who has been arrested for the murder of her new partner, Lyle. Only problem is, he’s got to keep it secret from his fiancee, Juliette, who won’t be delighted to learn he’s at Erin’s beck and call. Once Ernest is up in Katoomba, attending a magic show (it does make sense in the context of this particular murder), you guessed it: more bodies start to stack up. This is light and fun, if you don’t mind the archly knowing air of it all; the sort of thing to pop in the stocking of your fellow mystery fan on Christmas Day. Which I’m sure is exactly what Stevenson intended.
The Peacock and the Sparrow (No Exit Press) by IS Berry, a former CIA officer, tells us the story of almost-past-it American spy Shane Collins, who is on the verge of being forcibly retired from his mission in Bahrain. As Collins drinks heavily, meets sources and deals with the fallout from a series of bombings, revolution threatens, and he starts to fall for a beautiful local artist, Almaisa. I’m sure all the tradecraft aspects of this novel are spot-on, and Collins is a believable and vibrant rendition of a spy. The problem is, he’s so unpleasant to spend time with – “She had none of the triviality or false femininity of American women; neither did she have the humourless affectation of European women,” he thinks of Almaisa – that his company starts to wear after a while. Still, this debut comes garlanded with awards – the 2024 Edgar for best first novel, the International Thriller Writers Award for best first novel, numerous prize shortlistings – so others clearly aren’t bothered. It’s gritty, it’s realistic (I assume); I just couldn’t quite care enough about Collins’s travails to make me love it.
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