Welcome to our rolling guide to some of the most notable thrillers of the year. Whatever your tastes — high octane chase stories, murky machinations in anonymous HQs, wartime drama, tense domestic psychological terror — our expert critics will aim to cover it.
John Dugdale has been reviewing thrillers for a quarter of a century for The Sunday Times and the historian and author James Owen has been covering this beat for The Times since 2020. We’ll be updating this article twice a month throughout the year, so do bookmark it. And tell us in the comments below which thrillers you’ve enjoyed.
Book of the month
Our Last Wild Days by Anna Bailey
Loyal May reluctantly returns to the Louisiana town of Jacknife to care for her mother. Soon afterwards her only friend from school, Cutter Labasque, is found drowned. The police think it’s an accident. Despite their complex relationship — the two hadn’t spoken since an alligator on the Labasque farm took Loyal’s hand — Loyal, a reporter, feels compelled to dig deeper. With the help of a gay friend, Sasha (all defiant pink hair and rhinestones), she uncovers drug-fuelled corruption involving a neo-Nazi biker gang. Yet again men are violent and there are strange things lurking in the woods. What lifts Anna Bailey’s marvellous second novel above the southern gothic clichés is the hothouse lyricism of her writing, which is as lush as the setting. “That’s how Loyal’s mother seems to her now — like a house on fire in the night that Loyal can only watch from a distance. No way of knowing how it started. No way of saving anyone, either.” It’ll make you give a damn. James Owen
Doubleday £16.99 pp320
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie
There isn’t much nobility to the life of Babs Dionne, but plenty that is savage. As a teenager in 1968 she killed the cop who raped her. Since then she has reigned over Little Canada, a Maine enclave populated by the descendants of Québécois. It’s poor and, like her family, she loves it too hard and too much. But that hasn’t stopped her from controlling its drugs trade. This draws the attention of a much bigger mobster, who in 2016 sends an impassive enforcer — the Man — to bring about a takeover.
Babs’s hard-won community is coming apart in other ways too since her younger daughter, Sis, a meth addict, has disappeared. Her sister, Lori, a traumatised, equally addicted Afghanistan veteran, looks for her, accompanied by the shades of the dead, with whom she speaks. It’s this streak of the fantastic, along with his characteristic dark humour and screwball dialogue, that brightens Ron Currie’s bloody yet surprisingly warm-hearted spin on The Godfather. Great stuff, and the first in a promised trilogy. JO
Atlantic £17.99 pp368
The Cure by Eve Smith
Not too far in the future, a genetic cure for ageing is found. However, it has unforeseen consequences. The population soars, causing environmental havoc while the young have no jobs and no money. A life limit of 120 years is imposed, Logan’s Run-style, but naturally the rich try to get round that. They also have access to fancier jabs, which can make them virtually immortal. Unfortunately such “Supers” tend to develop psychotic tendencies, one example being the Russian president who unleashed nuclear devastation on Ukraine.
Like most speculative fiction, Eve Smith’s novel is a commentary on the contemporary. That element is perhaps inevitably more original than the plot, in which a crack “Omnicide” investigator, Mara Black, and the sidelined inventor of the vaccine, Ruth Hammond, hunt down the rogue scientist who hijacked her discovery and is cooking up sinister new schemes. Even so, this a thought-provoking thriller with much to say about our obsession with looking youthful. JO
Orenda £9.99 pp300
The Castle by John Sutherland
In the third in John Sutherland’s well-drawn series about Alex Lewis, the Metropolitan Police hostage negotiator heads to a remote Scottish estate with his partner, Pip, for a badly needed rest. The idyll sours when a bogus hunting party tries to capture the playboy Earl of Islay and shoots his friend dead. With Pip wounded, Lewis and the deeply unlikeable earl take sanctuary in Blane Castle’s cellar. On the other side of the stout door, an American, Andrew Winters, claims Islay raped his daughter and no harm will come to anyone else if he is handed over. Lewis is torn between his duty to see the law is followed and his compassion for Islay’s victim. With few cards to play, can he use his skills and gift for empathy to keep them all alive until help arrives? Drawing on his own experiences with the Met, Sutherland reminds us that, beneath the uniform, police officers are as human as the rest of us. JO
Orion £10.99 pp352
The Midnight King by Tariq Ashkanani
Lucas Cole, a successful author of trashy thrillers, leaves behind an unpublished manuscript when he takes his own life. The Midnight King is billed as fiction, but his son, Nathan, realises it is a confession; his father was a serial killer who murdered more than a dozen children in the Nashville area. The damaged Nathan, who has always known the truth about Lucas, resolves to try to find a girl who has gone missing and may be the last victim. Isaac Holloway, a cop-turned-private investigator, is also on the case. The closer he gets to the truth the nearer he is to stumbling on the secrets kept by his childhood friend Nathan. Tariq Ashkanani’s often grim tale takes some abrupt turns, and the use of Cole’s novel-within-a-novel to muddy the waters doesn’t really land. Rather stronger is the undertow of guilt, redemption and the legacy left by parents. JO
Viper £16.99 pp352
Lovers of Franz K by Burhan Sonmez, translated by Sami Hezil
Burhan Sonmez’s unashamedly stagey thriller is a homage to Franz Kafka, framed as the trial (of course) of Ferdy Kaplan. He is accused of trying to shoot Max Brod, the executor who ignored Kafka’s wishes and published his works posthumously. Sonmez, a Kurdish novelist who is president of PEN, which campaigns for freedom of expression, queries how far one should go in the pursuit of what is important to us. JO
Open Borders £12.99 pp112
The Death of Us by Abigail Dean
Isabel, who co-narrates Abigail Dean’s mesmerising blend of crime and romance, is tortured and raped in 2001 by Nigel Wood, a serial rapist and, later, killer. Wood (a police officer, like the real-life serial rapist David Carrick) is eventually caught, and in the present-day sections Isabel and her ex-husband, Edward, attend his trial in their fifties as victims giving “impact statements”. Interwoven with these chapters is a chronicle of their relationship from both points of view, from meeting as teenagers in the 1990s to their marriage gradually unravelling after Isabel’s ordeal.
This flashback strand shows the real, unsimplified narrative of the incident’s impact — Isabel’s chapters are addressed to Wood, as if in court — which is profound and lasting, but nuanced and not entirely negative. As a long-running, on-off love story, it also takes Dean into Sally Rooney territory (mercifully not Colleen Hoover territory, despite a title that looks designed to mimic Hoover’s). She seems very much at home there: the novel — her third — is remarkably psychologically rich, the couple’s dialogue (a kind of English screwball) is a joy, and the secondary characters, such as their quasi-daughter Nina or the detective Etta, are sharply drawn. John Dugdale
Hemlock £16.99 pp357
Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway
After winning acclaim for Karla’s Choice, his homage to his father, John le Carré, Nick Harkaway follows it with a homage to the hard-boiled detective novel. Cal Sounder, his series sleuth, is hired to investigate a woman’s murder on the beach at a rundown American resort, with suspects ranging from a super-rich brat to leftist terrorists. Cal is not your average PI, though: in this nifty fusion of crime and sci-fi, he belongs to an elite of Titans, who are bigger and live longer thanks to injections.
In a novel teeming with memorable characters, Harkaway handles the blend of genres with skill and pizzazz — and whenever the Dashiell Hammett-like mystery plot verges on the formulaic, sci-fi freshens it up. The gumshoe working for the head of a powerful family is a cliché, for example, but (as a Titan) Cal’s client Martha is enormous, aged 400 and spends all her time in water. JD
Corsair £20 pp312
The Liar by Louise Jensen
The cover of Louise Jensen’s tenth psychological thriller strongly implies that its titular liar is Luke, the new lodger in the home shared by Mel, a social worker, and her daughters, Jen, 26, and Amy, 13. After Mel unaccountably goes missing and soapy revelations follow, however, pretty much every adult character — including Jen’s friend Camilla and Mel’s brother, Don, a (ahem) don — is guilty of falsehoods. The book touches on hot-button issues from revenge porn to various forms of abuse, but none is allowed to impede its advance to a well-handled headlong denouement in which one of the women on the verge of a nervous breakdown finally cracks up spectacularly. JD
HQ £9.99 pp331
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Strangers in Time by David Baldacci
In London in 1944 — the so-called Baby Blitz — three strangers come together. They all have missing people in their lives. Charlie is a poor orphan, surviving by thieving. Molly is a middle-class teenager whose parents have disappeared. Ignatius is a widowed bookshop owner. Clearly indebted to Oliver Twist, Baldacci’s first historical novel ably incorporates pro-Nazi traitors, rapist soldiers, sinister shrinks and other evils flourishing amid the fog of war, but he seems keener on showing how his youngsters emerge from the ruins of their childhoods and look towards their postwar future. In fact, it’s arguably a children’s thriller, although not marketed as one. JD
Macmillan £22 pp433
A Spy at War by Charles Beaumont
Thrillers are often quickly written and in a changing world that can make them the nimblest form of fiction. Charles Beaumont’s impressive first novel, A Spy Alone (2023), focused on a ring of Russian assets recruited at Oxford and how Britain’s professional class had been corrupted by oligarchs’ wealth. This sequel shifts the scene to Kyiv in 2022, just as Ukraine is invaded. There Beaumont’s protagonist, the ex-MI6 officer Simon Sharman, is searching for the Chechen hit man who killed his partner in Prague. But Beaumont widens his lens to capture the battle for influence being fought in Whitehall between Sharman’s allies and those pushing Moscow’s interests.
Drawing on his experience as a former MI6 officer, Beaumont scores top marks for prescience. The plot turns in part on the possibility that a Maga-diehard US president might leave Europe to defend Ukraine by itself. Beaumont’s portrait of Sharman, a paladin out of his depth in this new world where money trumps loyalty, may be less original, but a bloody climax among the ruins of Bakhmut has the requisite tang of authenticity. Mission accomplished. JO
Canelo Action £9.99 pp368
Someone is Lying by Heidi Perks
To celebrate her 18th birthday, Issie flies to Lisbon with her older boyfriend, Dylan. When she doesn’t answer messages on the big day, her mother, Jess, becomes ever more worried. The police won’t help because Issie is now an adult and there’s no evidence that she’s missing. Yet Jess has seen how her daughter has changed in the past few months. She flunked her exams, dropped out of her art degree and fell out with her friends. Jess thinks Dylan is controlling Issie, but is she just growing up? When a body is found in Portugal, however, Jess fears the worst.
There has recently been a crop of thrillers that play on parents’ worries about adolescence. Neatly, Heidi Perks’s novel is as much about the mistakes this leads the grown-ups to make as their children asserting independence. Some sly twists, sharp observations about class and an awareness of the subjective nature of truth lift this well above the common run. JO
Penguin £9.99 pp384
White King by Juan Gómez-Jurado, translated by Nicholas Caistor
White King smartly wraps up the preposterous fun that is Juan Gómez-Jurado’s bestselling Spanish trilogy about the savant Antonia Scott, part of the crime-fighting, Red Queen secret project. Someone has been targeting Europe’s other Red Queens, chemically enhanced geniuses who solve unusually complex misdeeds. Lo! Here comes Antonia’s nefarious nemesis, Mr White, who sets her not one but three final problems. Fail to solve them in ever-shorter time and it’ll be bye-bye to her loyal protector, Jon Gutierrez, who has a bomb implanted inside him.
It’s lucky that while haring around Madrid Antonia can think faster than a computer since White is tag-teaming with another warped prodigy bent on revenge. There are also disconcerting revelations to be confronted about the ethics of the Red Queen project. As agile as a matador, Gómez-Jurado skilfully balances exhilarating thrills with the melancholy that is the price of Antonia’s gifts. Strongly recommended too is the TV adaptation of the series, Reina Roja. ¡Ole! JO
Macmillan £20 pp352
Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle
It’s 1986 in Brooklyn and Sav, an abusive husband about to abandon his family, points a gun at his baby son, Fab, and long-suffering wife, Risa. Nobody could blame her for clouting him with the cutlet pan. But now there’s a body to bury and she’s worried that Fab will be brought up in an orphanage if she admits to the killing. Sav needs to stay gone.
William Boyle’s novel charts the consequences of the choices made in the aftermath of that moment. In the years that follow, Risa’s sister Giulia gives up her dreams to help to bring up Fab, while Sav’s friend Chooch, who holds a candle for Risa, does likewise. But one day will someone learn the truth? Perhaps even Fab? Blood, after all, will out. Boyle’s leading character, however, is the Italian-American neighbourhood of his youth, where bars have names like the Wrong Number, its denizens include Jane the Stain and Religious Pete, and violence simmers like a pot of pasta e ceci. Boyle has a poet’s eye for the instants that elevate daily life, and a dramatist’s one for its tragedies. Love is a battlefield. JO
No Exit £9.99 pp320
A Duty of Care by Gerald Seymour
Over the past few years, Gerald Seymour has created the most memorable (if improbable) hero of his long career, the veteran intelligence analyst, Jonas Merrick. Now a good decade past retirement age — two in fact if he really worked for MI5 — Merrick is still doggedly pursuing his hunches. In A Duty of Care, these centre on the evasion of sanctions by Moscow’s elite, who use a family of Albanian gangsters to carry messages to financiers in Geneva.
As ever, it is not the outwardly conventional Merrick, with his caravan and coffee flask, who compels the attention, but the well-shaped spokes to his hub. There is the former ghillie, Croppy, spying on the Albanians from the hills above and the MI6 traitor-with-a-conscience, Frank, rotting in a Russian prison. Merrick has, however, to shoulder the burden of worry, and when things go awry, he does not hesitate to put himself in the firing line. Saga’s answer to Slow Horses perhaps, but plenty of life in it yet. JO
Hodder & Stoughton £22 pp400
Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch
As Paula Hawkins says on the jacket, Hannah Deitch’s captivating debut is “a Thelma and Louise for our times”. What it chiefly adds to the 1991 film is to ask: what if the fugitives became lovers? Evie, its smart young narrator, is a private tutor in Los Angeles. One morning she finds her rich employers murdered and a woman tied up under the stairs. Fearing she will be seen as the murderer, she frees the woman, Jae, and they go on the run. Although there are fight scenes, chases and escapes, this remains primarily a twisted love story — a Hitchcockian cocktail of romance, suspicion and suspense in which each woman may be a killer and liar and each may turn her lover in. Much of its impact derives from the voice of Evie, who beguilingly mixes brainy musings such as, “We appeared to each other as sphinxes,” with accounts of mayhem and life as an outlaw. JD
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99 pp320
The Inalienable Right by Adam Macqueen
His previous political thrillers were set in 1975 and 1984 and now Adam Macqueen has moved on to 1987. As a gay teacher, Tommy Wildeblood is directly affected by Section 28, a clause in a bill banning local authorities from promoting homosexuality. He takes part in protests, but also finds a more potent way of attacking Margaret Thatcher’s government: with his ex-police boyfriend and a reporter he investigates his friend Lee’s disappearance and connects it to a sexual scandal involving one of Thatcher’s aides. Macqueen confidently combines a might-have-been version of history in which Section 28 brings down Thatcher, rather than the later poll tax, with an It’s a Sin-style evocation of the era. JD
Lightning £9.99 pp418
Everyone in the Group Chat Dies by LM Chilton
Four bumbling flatmates, including the narrator, Clare “Kirby” Cornell, are at the centre of this ingenious mixture of comic-psychological thriller and serial killer mystery. When Esme, a roving social media sleuth, joins them, Kirby, a frustrated journalist, gets caught up in her investigation of a 1990s killing spree in their rural Sussex town — a probe that leads to Esme’s death, witnessed by the quartet. Yet a year later Esme, apparently alive, posts the titular threat to the now dispersed misfits on their “Deadbeats” group chat. LM Chilton manages the shift to a less larky mood without any crashing of gears and niftily blends crime elements with satire (TikTok Sherlocks, small-town tedium and folk horror) and the sitcom-like comedy of the Deadbeats. JD
Head of Zeus £9.99 pp368
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The New Neighbours by Claire Douglas
Claire Douglas, who had a big hit last year with The Wrong Sister, follows it up with a tale of motherhood and murder in Bristol. Lena, a nosy single parent, helps her son with a project by recording sounds in the garden. By chance the microphone picks up her neighbours, apparently discussing a crime. While Lena tries to find out what they are up to, interwoven storylines trace the couple’s dark past and show Lena years ago as a trainee midwife. This elaborate backstory, however, is creaky, pace-impeding and sometimes implausible, and the book lacks its predecessor’s power to grip. In fact, the family scenes are better value than those involving crime. JD
Michael Joseph £16.99 pp400
Say Nothing by Erin Kinsley
Crime is often a catalyst. So, when four-year-old Adam is found dead, folk in the Derbyshire village of Risedale must make choices they would rather have avoided. The boy’s distraught father, Tommy Henthorn, who inhabits the fringes of the underworld, can’t divulge where he was that day. Others won’t say what they know about his estranged wife, Gail, or don’t tell the truth, such as the parents of an autistic teenager whose behaviour can be worrying.
Ryan Canfield, the detective leading the investigation, is promoted after Henthorn is convicted of his son’s murder. Yet, ten years on, fresh evidence exonerates him and initiates a new cycle of consequences. Henthorn wants revenge on those who put him away. Canfield is suspended but needs the chance to put matters right. That may let him reconnect with Laura Winrow, a lawyer with whom he had an affair then — and who now represents Henthorn.
Encompassing, as it does, so much that ripples out from a crime, Erin Kinsley’s novel is not short of ambition. It is at its best, however, in its understanding of how complex even seemingly ordinary people are, and clear-eyed about how we let emotion cloud our judgment. JO
Headline £9.99 pp416
The Best Enemy by Sergio Olguin, translated by Miranda France
In this fourth assignment for the Argentinian investigative journalist, Verónica Rosenthal is juggling personal and professional conundrums. Her former editor at Nuestro Tiempo has been shot dead, and soon afterwards so is his wife, but the magazine’s owners want to downplay the deaths. Verónica and her colleagues hunt for a missing tablet that may link their bosses to corruption involving Israel. Her terrifyingly direct manner is still an asset, but she is unsure how to react to finding herself pregnant. Moreover, her partner, Federico, a lawyer who works for her father and is handling the divorce of one of the owners of Nuestro Tiempo, has complicated his life through a fling with a colleague.
One of the pleasures of Sergio Olguin’s slow-burning series, well realised by Miranda France’s translation, is the way it uses Verónica’s inner life to show why she acts as she does — here reuniting with childhood friends one moment, fending off hitmen the next. And as ever in Buenos Aires, those who send the triggermen are rarely those who pay the price. JO
Bitter Lemon £9.99 pp400
I Dreamed of Falling by Julia Dahl
Ashley and Roman have been together since high school. He’s a reporter on the local paper in the Hudson Valley, north of New York, she’s starting to make some money from online yoga classes. They have a young son, Mason, but also an open relationship. Despite that, they keep secrets from one another and when Roman returns home from a guilt-ridden night in the city, he finds Ashley’s body halfway down a steep drop. Did she fall, perhaps under the growing influence of her drug use, or was she pushed?
The thriller elements of Julia Dahl’s story animate a skilfully observed portrait of small-town life and vanishing dreams. Roman is reluctant to give up his hopes of working on bigger stories. To the ire of his once-unreliable mother, Tara, an increasingly independent Ashley may have had plans of her own. A late, unsignalled twist is rather out of keeping with a story otherwise handled with deft confidence. JO
No Exit £9.99 pp256
You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego
The famed thriller writer JR Alastor, who has remained anonymous for years, invites half a dozen fellow authors to his private island off the Maine coast. Naturally, they can’t stand each other but will soon have bigger problems. Mila del Angél, ostensibly the event co-ordinator hired by Alastor (who fails to show), has her own agenda. She wants to get back at the writer who stole her idea, and the house, with its hidden stairways and concealed cameras, offers her the opportunity to do so. Yet someone else is also at work.
One by one the guests start turning up dead, killed in gruesome ways taken from their own books. The telephone lines are down, and no one is coming to the rescue. Ande Pliego plays smartly with the often-implausible tropes of the suspense genre. You Are Fatally Invited works most effectively as a homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. JO
Bantam £16.99 pp384
Whiteout by RS Burnett
RS Burnett was once a reporter for Penguin News in his native Falkland Islands, and he puts his Antarctic knowledge to good use in this gripping debut. It tracks Rachael Beckett, a glaciologist persuaded by alarming signs of warming in the Ross ice shelf to make a perilous journey there in winter to collect more data. Alone and 80 miles from help, a fire in her hut forces her to strike out on foot for the research base. Yet when she tries to raise them on the radio, all she gets is a BBC announcement that nuclear war has broken out. She may be the last survivor on Earth, but her supplies are dwindling and in deadly conditions even small mistakes can be fatal. Whiteout is perhaps sustained more by narrative momentum than by characterisation, but Rachael’s resilience is convincing and her love for the young daughter she has left in London undoubted. Burnett also neatly brings into play one of the great unresolved polar mysteries. Cracking. JO
HarperCollins £9.99 pp288
Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow
In 1987, two years before John Grisham’s debut A Time to Kill, Scott Turow pioneered the modern legal thriller with Presumed Innocent. It was narrated by Rusty Sabich, a prosecutor (played by Harrison Ford in the 1990 film and Jake Gyllenhaal in last year’s TV series) accused of killing a female colleague. In Turow’s sequel, Rusty is again our guide as he comes out of retirement to defend Aaron, his stepson-to-be. Aaron — the black, adopted son of Bea, Rusty’s fiancée — is charged with killing his on-off girlfriend, Mae, while on a camping trip. In a masterly performance, the qualities that differentiate Turow’s books from Grisham’s are evident again: as well as being sexier, they are better written and tend to revel in courtroom process. What’s clever about the set-up is that the closer Rusty comes to clearing Aaron, the more he agonises that a not-guilty verdict will have disastrous repercussions. JD
Swift £20 pp544
Old Soul by Susan Barker
A chance meeting at Osaka airport leads Jake and Mariko to discover they have something in common: they know people who suffered grotesque deaths caused by a body-altering force, or being, called “the Tyrant” after encountering the same nomadic woman. Jake, who lost his childhood friend Lena, embarks on a retracing of the mysterious serial killer’s trail, across countries and decades. His interviews with those grieving for her victims — the Testimony chapters — alternate with the Badlands chapters in which the latest avatar takes a teenager into the desert near the town of Taos in New Mexico to photograph her backdropped by the planet Venus. Barker’s finely written novel is super-sophisticated horror, as indebted to literary fiction (David Mitchell, perhaps?) as it is to gothic gore. If the Booker prize judges are open to genre titles, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see it on their longlist. JD
Fig Tree £16.99 pp304
Nemesis by Gregg Hurwitz
Evan Smoak, aka Orphan X, is a former government black ops hitman who is now a Robin Hood figure “devoted to helping the powerless and terrorised”. His weapons are normally supplied by his friend Tommy Stojack, but in this tenth Orphan X novel the pair are at loggerheads. Initially, the reader seems set for a pure action-thriller in which the feuding gunman and the gunsmith launch tit-for-tat attacks on each other. And the combat scenes throughout are first-rate and deftly varied. But thanks to their respective associates — Evan’s teenage tech aide, who’s a feminist, and a murderous but hapless gang Tommy is involved with — Nemesis also touches on “meme wars”, identity politics and far-right racism, so that, rewardingly, it’smore plugged into the mood and issues of the present than, say, a Lee Child slugathon. JD
Michael Joseph, £16.99 pp512
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The Inheritance by Trisha Sakhlecha
With echoes of the TV dramas Succession and The White Lotus, but also of Agatha Christie and The Traitors, Trisha Sakhlecha’s third novel centres on a wealthy Indian family, the Agarwals, who gather on a Scottish island to celebrate Papa and Mama’s wedding anniversary — oh, and to hear about the sale of their £300 million business empire and each child’s cut. After a prologue signalling that someone will be bumped off, Sakhlecha uses as narrators the eldest daughter Myra, the weekend’s hostess with plans for Kilbryde as a luxury retreat, and Zoe, a British influencer and the wife of the eldest son, Aseem. As the family crisis unfolds, Sakhlecha displays a Christie-like knack for misdirection, framing everyone on the island as at once a potential victim and a potential killer. JD
Century £16.99 pp432
The Collaborators by Michael Idov
When, in 2021, the exfiltration of an anti-regime Russian blogger goes wrong, the CIA agent Ari Falk barely survives. Then his colleagues in Riga, Latvia, are targeted, Three Days of the Condor-style. As he strives to discover who is behind the threat, Falk seeks the help in London of a Bellingcat-type open-source investigator.
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the wannabe actress Maya Chou, fresh out of rehab, is dealing with the suicide of her billionaire father and the vanishing of his vast investment fund. They had not been on good terms — “It was just that kind of funeral: no body, no coffin, no daughter” — but a mysterious note he left lures her to Tangier. There, she and Falk hook up, in every sense, needing to use their complementary skills to escape the assassins on their trail. Her father had emigrated from Russia as a teenager and the answers they need lie in the country’s brief period of hope before Putin took power.
Michael Idov, who penned episodes of the TV series Deutschland 89, gathers stories from the headlines — novichok, Ponzi schemes, Wagner Group mercenaries — and blends them smartly into a hipster spy smoothie. Fun to write, and it really shows. JO
Simon & Schuster £18.99 pp272
Notes on a Drowning by Anna Sharpe
Something’s not right about the inquest into the death of a teenage Moldovan girl found in the Thames, thinks the solicitor handling the case, Alex Moreno. No one wants to dig very hard into the flimsy evidence. It’s all too like the unsolved disappearance 12 years ago in Tokyo of Moreno’s sister, Elisa.
Elisa’s friend Kat Ishida, who was with her in Japan, is now an adviser to the home secretary in a boosterish government. She has come to suspect, however, that his red box might reveal who is bringing vulnerable girls to London. Yet there’s more than a big coincidence at the heart of this pointed politico-legal thriller by Anna Sharpe (a pen name of the author Anna Mazzola). As Moreno and Ishida reluctantly join forces and find themselves in mortal danger, Sharpe deftly charts the changing nature of a relationship mired in guilt and fury.
Her characters actually speak like real people — a rarity in thrillers — and her depiction of the men who do as they please in the corridors of power and behind the shutters of Mayfair has the tang of righteous anger. Moreno’s reaction to hearing a politician say that “a rising tide lifts all boats”? “Drowns those who can’t keep up with it, more like.” JO
Orion £18.99 pp304
Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister
Luke, a ghostwriter acting completely out of character, takes three people hostage and shoots two of them dead before escaping. Seven years on, the police have not found him nor identified the men he killed. His wife, Camilla, a literary agent who is caring for their young daughter, is still trying to move on when out of the blue she receives a text that might be from Luke. The Met still has her under surveillance, however, and others are also watching from the shadows. Someone else who can’t let go is Niall, the hostage negotiator during Luke’s siege, who is perplexed that his colleagues see crimes as problems to manage, not truths to bring to light. He and Camilla start to do just that, but Gillian McAllister’s novel is more compelling as a testament to enduring love than a tale of mystery. JO
Michael Joseph £16.99 pp416
Gone to Earth by Jane Jesmond
In this sequel to the excellent Cut Adrift, Jen Shaw is processing the fallout of her run-in with people smugglers. Not the least of that is the violent death of Nick, the undercover police officer for whom she had feelings. The traffickers have not gone away, however, and threaten the two refugee girls that she and her mother are looking after. Shaw is not one to give up easily, but she soon finds herself fleeing from the police in Glasgow when suspected of murder. Disguised as an addict, she starts to uncover a dark web that embraces corruption, jihadism and child abuse. Half-help, half-nuisance, Shaw remains an intriguingly flawed and well-realised protagonist, while Jane Jesmond’s grasp of the gritty intersection of crime and geopolitics makes the stakes refreshingly real-world. That said, Gone to Earth takes its time to get going, and is at its most sure-footed when Shaw uses her skills as a climber to get away from pursuers over the rooftops and during a claustrophobic climax set in pitch-black tunnels beneath Glasgow. JO
Verve £10.99 pp320
The Troubled Deep by Rob Parker
Cameron Killick has retired from the SBS to the Norfolk Broads with a bag of gallantry medals and PTSD. A specialist diver, he finds the submerged wreck of a Jaguar that has been missing since the 1980s. But there is no trace of the Jilly Cooper-ish rich family presumed to have been inside. Soon others are all too interested in his discovery, and a beating to warn him off brings all his anxieties to the fore; Killick can only sleep soundly underwater, in his bath (breathing through a snorkel, before you ask). If he is to unravel the skeins of a plot involving the Black Monday financial crash and blackmail, he must learn to trust potential allies such as the detective sergeant told to drop the case. Pleasingly, Killick is no superman, and Rob Parker’s novel scores with his descriptions of its watery settings and late revelations about the bonds of love and trauma. JO
Raven £16.99 pp368
An Ethical Guide to Murder by Jenny Morris
Like Harry Potter, Thea is an orphan with a superpower. Or rather, two or three magical talents. When she touches a person she can tell how long they have left to live. But she can also extract years of life from evildoers and kill them. Jenny Morris’s remarkable debut novel resembles Naomi Alderman’s The Power, but she limits the ability to harm and sets the story in the present, not the future. Thea becomes a serial killer with a conscience, carrying out a killing spree with her boyfriend, Sam, with each murder framed as an ethical dilemma: what if, for instance, the target is vile but does more good than bad? What if you find out they are not as evil as you first thought, but someone else’s survival depends on their death? This doesn’t mean that this clever, beguiling novel is schematic or abstract — each potential victim is a believable character and each scenario is fully realised. JD
Simon & Schuster £16.99 pp416
Havoc by Christopher Bollen
Maggie Burkhardt, 81, is a widow from Wisconsin who has become a hotel hopper: sampling five-star hotels across Europe before her stay in Luxor. A nosy observer, she has fun by “liberating” chosen fellow guests (framing a husband as a cheat, for example) through petty crime. However, Maggie is spotted by Otto, who is eight, planting a stolen scarf. That precipitates a conflict between them and somebody ends up dead. Christopher Bollen thus combines two Agatha Christie settings, a hotel and the Middle East, installs a monstrous caricature of Miss Marple and adds touches from horror such as hints of still-active Egyptian gods. However, Havoc’s finest feature is Bollen’s crafting of Maggie’s first-person voice, which tracks her mental disintegration. JD
Borough £16.99 pp256
A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage by Asia Mackay
After the birth of their daughter, Bibi, Hazel (an artist) and Fox (a banker from New York) have settled down in Berkshire. That has meant giving up their weekends of slaying “scumbags” around Europe, which was fuelled by her feminist rage and his hatred of his own class. Boredom gives way to mutual suspicion as they keep secrets from each other — Hazel about her killing of an attacker in a park, and Fox about his parents’ pressure to return to America. Although it’s a pity that (like Morris) she’s plumped for the “guide to” title formula that’s becoming a cliché, Asia Mackay deftly exploits her outlandish set-up to view marriage, motherhood, middle-age and suburbia through a satirical lens. JD
Wildfire £16.99 pp400
The Stranger in the Room by Luca Veste
Ben, a teenager, is stabbed to death after hanging out with friends. Mia, his ex-girlfriend, is aware she will be under suspicion, not least because two other recent deaths (of a teacher and of a school enemy) were connected to her. Ben’s grieving mother, Alison, accuses Mia of being a murderer and lambasts the police for not arresting her. Suspense is skilfully maintained — is Mia guilty, or partly guilty, or a victim of coincidence and hatred? — up to a climax in which the two women come face to face. JD
Hodder & Stoughton £9.99 pp368
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