The Outsider by Jane Casey (Hemlock, £8.99)
Tangentially related to Casey’s series featuring police officers Maeve Kerrigan and Josh Derwent, The Outsider focuses on Maeve’s former lover, the undercover police officer Rob Langton. When his prompt action helps to save the life of the crime boss he is tailing, Rob finds himself at the heart of a notorious criminal family. Patriarch Geraint Carter likes to keep people close, and his luxurious country mansion is inhabited by his adult children and their spouses, as well as senior staff members. It’s a macho world where the women, particularly the cowering wife of Geraint’s violent cokehead son Bruno, are essentially captives, and where Rob must continually prove his loyalty. This becomes increasingly difficult when Geraint joins forces with powerful rightwing conspirators intent on stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment by causing carnage in a public place – and the more Rob knows, the more danger he’s in if he’s rumbled … Pacy, gripping and tightly plotted, this book works both as a standalone and as a way into Casey’s excellent series.
White City by Dominic Nolan (Headline, £20)
Dog-whistle politics and undercover policing were quite as dangerous in 1952 as they are today, as Dave Lander, who reports to the flying squad while working for the gangster Billy Hill, discovers when he becomes embroiled in the latter’s plot to rob a mailvan in the West End. The “Eastcastle Street job” actually took place – the stolen money, which would be worth about £10m today, was never recovered, and nobody was ever charged – as did the Notting Hill race riots of 1958, which form the background to the book’s second half. Billy Hill, like many of the characters in this superb evocation of a postwar London struggling to emerge from the ruins, really existed. The slum landlord Peter Rachman, socialite Lady Docker, crime reporter Duncan Webb and many more rub shoulders with the invented characters as Nolan deftly intertwines Lander’s narrative with that of Addie, whose Jamaican postman father goes missing after the heist, and disillusioned Notting Dale-dweller Claire, whose husband disappears at the same time.
The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Faber, £9.99)
When widow Anna Williams-Bonner dazzles the US literary world with a novel inspired by the death of her much-lauded writer husband Jacob, the ease with which she is published and publicised is a source of resentment to less well-connected writers. However, this is the least of her problems – it very quickly becomes clear that things are not quite as they appear: there is something fishy not only about Jacob’s apparent suicide, but also about the origins of his most famous book and the real story behind the manuscript he plagiarised. A woman used to being overlooked and underestimated, Anna is not only talented but ruthless as hell and prepared to go to Tom Ripleyesque lengths to protect herself. Plenty of twists here, as well as a mordantly satirical look at the business of writing and publishing: wannabe authors, look away now; everyone else, buckle up and enjoy a smart, funny and deliciously dark thriller.
The Fate of Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood (Virago Modern Classics, £9.99)
Another dark gem, this time a very welcome reissue of a 1981 novel by Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996). Coldly selfish Rowan Anderson’s marriage is a union in name only. He spends his time in London, paying only grudging, sporadic visits to the Kentish village where his wife Cressida lives with their young daughter, Mary Rose, and, while there, he escapes to the pub as often as he can. Punctiliously domestic, Cressida’s life revolves around the child, but when six-year-old Maureen Sutton from the nearby council estate is raped and murdered in the local woods, she becomes fixated on the case, endlessly regaling Mary Rose with the gruesome details and locking her in the bedroom for safety. As Cressida’s obsession grows, Rowan maintains a wilful blindness to female vulnerability, but when she accuses him of the crime, he realises that, having got blackout drunk on the night in question, he has no recollection of his actions. An unsettling and, at times, almost unbearably creepy tale, with a genuinely shocking ending.
Ink Ribbon Red by Alex Pavesi (Michael Joseph, £18.99)
Pavesi’s debut, Eight Detectives, was an elaborate “puzzle mystery” of the Golden Age type, employing the metafictional device of narratives within a narrative. His second novel involves a not-dissimilar conceit: at a weekend birthday party in a country house, old friends from university are required by the host to write murder mystery stories featuring one of the group as the killer and another as the victim – names to be drawn from a hat – which, given that many of them have dirt on each other, soon brings skeletons tumbling out of closets … As long as you accept Ink Ribbon Red for what it is and don’t look for emotional depth, it’s fun, if sometimes difficult to follow – although even with this proviso, a more-than-usually-hefty suspension of disbelief is called for as the characters are all so utterly perverse it’s hard to imagine them remaining friends with anybody, let alone each other.
