MJ Arlidge’s Eye for an Eye (Orion) opens with a horrific death. Mark Willis is on his way home when three men wearing latex pig masks corner him. He can’t escape. But this propulsive thriller isn’t an investigation into his death – or at least not that alone. Mark was one of a handful of criminals in the UK granted lifelong anonymity and a change of identity because of the appalling nature of their crimes. Somehow his identity has been leaked – and the probation service now fears that eight others in the same situation are also about to be exposed.
Arlidge shifts perspectives between these (somewhat) rehabilitated offenders, the victims’ relatives, still traumatised, and the vigilantes responsible for the leaks. “He would see that they were punished for their crimes, enduring the anguish that they had inflicted on their victims. They would feel the terror, the agony, the fear that was their due.” Eye for an Eye is fast-moving, disturbing and thought-provoking.
Caregiver Kit hasn’t worked since being suspended without pay six months earlier. She’s desperate for a job when her boss offers her a post working for an elderly patient who requires constant attention. Unable to speak, able only to move one hand, Lenora Hope lives in a mansion outside of town. She’s the subject of a rhyme children chant in the playground: “At 17, Lenora Hope/ Hung her sister with a rope/ Stabbed her father with a knife/ Took her mother’s happy life./ It wasn’t me, Lenora said/ But she’s the only one not dead.”
Kit takes the job and learns more about what really happened all those years ago in this “mansion teetering on the edge of the ocean. Inside of which is a woman most people assume murdered her family. A woman who has now offered to tell me everything.” Riley Sager’s The Only One Left (Hodder & Stoughton) is melodramatic, very creepy – and a lot of fun.
Bestseller Shari Lapena’s latest, Everyone Here Is Lying (Bantam), opens with a corker of a premise that had me racing through the book. Nora and William have been having an affair, but she has just ended it and they both return to their respective families. When William gets home, desperate for peace and time to wallow in his misery, he finds his difficult nine-year-old daughter, Avery, unexpectedly there. She’s unpleasant to him. He loses his temper and hits her, hard – then leaves the house. Later that afternoon, when his son, Michael, gets home, Avery is missing. As the police search ramps up, William holds his tongue about the last time he saw her, hindering detectives Gully and Bledsoe’s investigation into what really happened.
It’s a clever twist – I was desperate for the pair to pin the bullying William down on his lies. But the truth proves elusive as they dig into the community, with titbits from neighbours and anonymous phone calls sending them in all sorts of directions. The ending is a little far-fetched for me, but it was a thrilling ride.
How many thrillers these days start with a small town and a girl who vanished years earlier, her body never found? Many, is the answer – with at least two this month. There’s the luminous, unforgettable Kala by Colin Walsh (Atlantic), which we reviewed last month, in which Kala Lannan disappeared from the Irish town of Kinlough 15 years ago. Now her remains have been discovered, and her old gang of friends are reunited and re-examining what really happened back then. Gorgeous and lingering, it is not to be missed.
Lucy Campbell’s debut, Lowbridge (Ultimo Press), is more standard thriller fare, although none the worse for it. Moving between 1987, when 17-year-old Tess goes missing from her sleepy Australian town, and 2018, when her mother, Katherine, becomes obsessed with what happened to her, it is intriguing and compelling.
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