The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup
Set in an unnamed city in northern England, journalist Saima Mir’s debut novel, The Khan (Point Blank, £14.99), is a south Asian reworking of The Godfather. Successful lawyer Jia returns to the childhood home she fled as a young woman and takes over the family’s organised crime business when her father, Akbar Khan, is murdered. Jia’s life is one of permanent cognitive dissonance: a second-generation British Pakistani, she knows that she must be not only “twice as good as men” but “four times as good as white men” in order to combat misogyny and racism. She must also negotiate clashing cultural expectations of how a woman should behave, the contradictions inherent in faith and criminal activity, and generational conflict as the old order gives way to the new. As if all this were not enough, the delicate balance of power in the city is threatened when a more recent set of immigrants, this time from eastern Europe, tries to muscle in. Mir offers us a fascinating glimpse into a world rarely portrayed in fiction, as Jia’s opponents, both inside and outside the family, start to learn that they underestimate her at their peril.
Misogyny also rears its head in Anna Bailey’s first novel, Tall Bones (Doubleday, £14.99). Whistling Ridge in Colorado is an insular community presided over by a Christian fundamentalist pastor who considers it entirely legitimate to tell a victim of domestic violence that she should pray for understanding about what she did to deserve it. Over the years, Dolly Blake has become a dab hand with the concealer, as her unstable Vietnam-veteran husband, Samuel, frequently assaults his family. Elder son Noah, who is in love with Romanian immigrant Rat, is a frequent target of his wrath – Pastor Lewis preaches homophobia along with other forms of intolerance. The family’s reputation is such that, when Noah’s 17-year-old sister Abigail goes missing after a party, it’s generally assumed that she has run away. As her friend Emma tries to discover what happened, long-held secrets and resentments come to light. Beautifully written and very moving (your heart will ache for a set of people trapped by ignorance, cruelty and trauma), this is an assured debut.
The characters in Katherine Faulkner’s first novel, Greenwich Park (Raven, £12.99), inhabit a more enlightened and privileged universe, but we know from the beginning – a letter written from prison some 16 months after the main action of the book takes place – that they have made a thoroughgoing mess of things. Helen and Rory, children of a famous architect, met their future partners at Cambridge; Rory inherited Daddy’s practice, Helen got the Grade II-listed house and is now, after four miscarriages, delighted to be pregnant once more, despite husband Daniel spending ever longer hours at work. When he fails to turn up to her first antenatal class, she buddies up with bumptious rule-breaker Rachel, who soon insinuates her way into Helen’s life to the extent of moving in. Meanwhile, Helen is fielding strange phone calls from the mortgage company ... With multiple narrators and italicised inserts detailing a secret sexual tryst in the eponymous green space, this is a tense, pacy read.
Gone Girl meets Mean Girls and The Secret History in Canadian YA author Laurie Elizabeth Flynn’s The Girls Are All So Nice Here (HQ, £14.99). Narrator Ambrosia “Amb” Wellington is thrilled to win a place at the prestigious Wesleyan College, where, as the title sarcastically suggests, quite a few of the female students are mean as hell and, in the case of the “effortlessly cool” Sully Sullivan, sociopathic to boot. Desperate to be like Sully, Amb willingly acts out for her – drink, drugs, hook-ups – and is happy to join in the bad-mouthing of her sweet, wholesome roommate, Flora, but things take a more sinister turn when she falls for Flora’s boyfriend. Flipping between “Then” (college days) and “Now” (the 10-year reunion, heralded with anonymous threatening messages), Flynn keeps the tension bubbling nicely. While the plot may not be entirely plausible and the denouement verging on the absurd, her adult debut is definitely worth reading for its pin-sharp, uncomfortably self-aware rendering of the toxic triumvirate that is immaturity, insecurity and the desire to be one of the cool kids.
The Shinkansen may be a high-speed marvel with not a single passenger fatality in its entire history, but Japanese bestseller Kotaro Isaka’s fictional iteration in Bullet Train (Harvill Secker, £12.99, translated by Sam Malissa) is altogether more dangerous, with no fewer than five assassins travelling on the line from Tokyo to Morioka at once. Thugs for hire Lemon and Tangerine are supposed to be guarding a notorious gangster’s son and a cash-filled suitcase; Nanao, the self-styled world’s unluckiest killer, is supposed to be stealing it; and alcoholic former hitman Kimura is seeking revenge for a near-fatal injury to his young son, which was instigated by schoolboy sociopath Satoshi. Part high-octane thriller, part farce, and laced with philosophical and literary debates, this is an unusual and thoroughly enjoyable read.
