Four Shots in the Night
Henry Hemming
Quercus, £25, pp338
The murder of a British agent in Northern Ireland in May 1986 was not, in itself, an exceptional occurrence. But as Henry Hemming reveals in this gripping and consistently surprising true-life thriller, when the suspected killer was not a member of the IRA, but another high-level undercover British spy known only as “Stakeknife”, then matters became considerably more complicated. Hemming’s narrative combines the in-depth historical research he has brought to his previous books with a mounting sense of danger and intrigue, reminding the reader that this saga is far from concluded.
The Kellerby Code
Jonny Sweet
Faber, £14.99, pp371
Comedian turned writer Jonny Sweet’s first novel arrives shortly after another examination of British class and privilege, Saltburn, but both owe a significant debt to Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series in their presentation of a frustrated outsider drawn into a miasma of jealousy and murder. As you would expect from Sweet, it is often very funny, especially in its presentation of the obnoxiously entitled Robert and Stanza, but his depiction of the protagonist Edward’s descent into psychosis is chillingly well observed and suggests that he could have a considerable future as a novelist.
Masquerade
Oliver Soden
W&N, £14.99, pp634 (paperback)
Half a century after his death, the playwright, composer and actor Noël Coward remains underappreciated. It is to his biographer Oliver Soden’s immense credit, in his magisterial life of the polymath, that Coward emerges not as the dressing gown-clad “master” of cliche but as one of the century’s greatest artistic figures, to say nothing – in revelatory documents that Soden has unearthed – of being an unsung British agent during the second world war. Mixing daring formal innovation with wit that its subject would have purred at, this is surely the definitive life of Coward.
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