Regular readers of this column will know I am a sucker for a “small community rocked by a horrible crime” story, particularly if it takes place in a setting unfamiliar to me. (See Jane Harper, who does this for Australia.) Now I’ve a new writer to shout about: Nilanjana Roy’s Black River (Pushkin Vertigo) takes place in the small village of Teetarpur, just outside Delhi. “There is nothing Teetarpur is famous for,” writes Roy. “The village lies at the edge of the Delhi-Haryana border, an hour’s drive down silent, forested roads covered in powdered summer dust. Its soul has remained half a century behind the capital.” Munia is a shy, sweet eight-year-old, “a brown scrap, so easily overlooked”. But she is the apple of her single father Chand’s eye. Almost as soon as the book starts, we see her murdered – hanged from a jamun tree – and then watch the village turn into a mob as her corpse is discovered, with suspicion falling upon a homeless man who was with her body. Sub-inspector Ombir Singh investigates, tries to prevent mob justice and, with his limited resources, digs to the core of a crime with long tendrils and dark origins. Roy brings rural India and Delhi to vivid life as much as she does her characters. The death of Munia is shocking and devastating: it is the mystery that drives this thriller but also its heart, as Roy tells of Chand’s prior life, and his love for his daughter. Riveting.
It is bittersweet to crack open the 28th, and final, Inspector Banks novel. The mighty Peter Robinson, who died last year, created one of the most convivial, compelling detectives in Alan Banks: compassionate, intelligent and music-loving, he was the sort of man you wanted to spend time with. Standing in the Shadows (Hodder & Stoughton) is a worthy addition to the Banks canon. It opens in 1980, in a Leeds living under the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper, where student Nick discovers that his ex-girlfriend has been murdered, and that he is the prime suspect. We then move to 2019, when a skeleton that is most definitely not Roman is discovered on an archaeological dig near Scotch Corner in North Yorkshire, and Banks and his team are called in. Robinson handles his two plots with characteristic skill: the voice of student Nick is brought to enjoyably irritating life; and it is a pleasure to be back in Banks’s company, whether it’s watching him with his friends and colleagues, listening to his thoughts on music or waiting for his intuition to kick in and for him to see to the heart of things. Robinson was an author at the top of his game, and Banks a detective at the top of his. Both will be sorely missed by their readers.
Rachel isn’t really called Rachel. It is the name Aidan Thomas gave her, after he took her years earlier and imprisoned her in a shed in his garden. Aidan is a serial killer, who has murdered eight women. Rachel is the ninth, and she is determined to stay alive. “Rule number one of staying alive in the shed. He always wins.” But after five years in one room, things are changing, and Rachel needs to be ready for her chance to escape. Clémence Michallon’s debut novel The Quiet Tenant (Abacus) is a nail-biting terror of a read, slowly revealing how Rachel, already a little bit broken, ended up where she did: “When you found me, it didn’t surprise me. Of course you found me. You had to happen to someone, and you happened to me.” And then following as her courage incrementally ratchets up, as, brainwashed and terrified, she starts to eye, and then discard, her opportunities to escape. I finished it at very high speed, heart pounding, absolutely loving it.
It’s time to get cosy with the second in former Church of England parish priest Richard Coles’s series about Canon Daniel Clement, A Death in the Parish (W&N). Set in the English village of Champton St Mary, this time around Daniel is not only trying to steady a community still recovering from the murders of Coles’s debut Murder Before Evensong, but also dealing with the merger of his parish with that of neighbouring Upper and Lower Badsaddle. This brings new associate vicar Chris Biddle with it; he shocks parishioners by wearing dungarees, while his children have aspirations to be goths. Those waiting for a death to be thrown into the mix will have a fair few chapters of village life to get through before they reach the ritualistic killing that Daniel and his good friend Neil Vanloo, the local policeman, need to solve. And Coles can have a heavy hand with the similes (custard skin is “as wizened as a Saint-Tropez grandame’s face”; Daniel’s car is “moving so slowly they would have been overtaken by the Vatnajökull glacier”). But he is also gloriously astute on the details of village interactions, quietly smiling at the “C of E way of correcting someone by replying with the right word to their wrong”, or at the difficulties of getting men to sing in church as the tune rises higher. And Daniel, the “still centre of a turning world”, mild, kind and deep, is an enjoyable protagonist to spend 400 pages with. This is another slice of quiet, but charming, cosy crime.
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