The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup | Books

The farewell coast by Joe Ide (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99)
Joe Ide’s first series featured Isaiah Quintabe, a la Sherlock Holmes. Now comes a contemporary reimagining of Raymond Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe. Ide’s creation shares a name, job description and location with her literary ancestor, but has far more history – including a failed police career and a complicated relationship with her LAPD veteran father – and far less history. alcohol (although dad compensates for this). When obnoxious movie star Kendra Jones hires him, he assumes it’s to solve the murder of her director husband, shot weeks earlier on the beach in Malibu, but she wants him to find and return her beauty. – 17 year old girl. Cody, who believes Kendra had his father killed, refuses to come home; the truth, of course, is much less simple and much more dangerous. To complicate matters further, Marlowe falls in love with a desperate mother whose young son has been kidnapped by his father… Stepping away from Chandler’s tight first-person focus risks watering down the whole thing, but The Goodbye Coast is a terrific read – pacy, with tension, pathos, wonderful descriptions of LA and some great one-liners.

Even the darkest night by Javier CercasTranslated by Anne McLean (macLehose£16.99)
Award-winning Spanish author Cercas turns to detective fiction in a mystery whose roots date back to the Civil War. Even the Darkest Night is the first of what promises to be an excellent series, featuring Melchor Marín, a criminal who, inspired by the desire to find out who killed his mother, joins the police force through hard work and falsified paperwork. To escape the glare of publicity after foiling a terrorist attack in Barcelona, ​​he is transferred to the Catalan backwater of Terra Alta where, four years later, the police department finds itself in the media spotlight after a local businessman and his wife were tortured to death. . Sections alternate between past and present – ​​the backstory here does a lot of heavy lifting – as Marín, thwarted in his attempts to solve the case, redoubles his efforts with tragic consequences. The story casts a long shadow over this history of political and personal loyalties and the various means by which justice – of sorts – can be achieved.

Notes on an execution by Danya Kukafka (Phoenix, £16.99)
In the introductory note to his second novel, Kukafka points out that “average men become interesting when they start hurting women” – our fascination with serial killers such as Ted Bundy allows these men to not only steal the lives of their female victims but their stories, and makes us forget what is lost to family and community when women are murdered. A fictional attempt to remedy this, Notes on an Execution is a masterful slow etching of a novel. The story of the killer, an inadequate individual who made poor choices and is hours away from death by lethal injection in a Texas prison, is rendered in the second person, with an extremely rare level of success. His narrative is balanced by the tales of his mother, his former sister-in-law and the detective who manages to catch up with him: a poignant read, beautifully written and inevitably uncomfortable.

The house of ashes by Stuart Neville (Zaffre, £14.99)
More ultra-toxic masculinity here, this time in rural Northern Ireland. Neville’s latest is a dark tale of past and present abuse, shared between the former inhabitants of the titular farm – a brutal father and two sons (“the daddies”) who keep the women (“the mummies”) captive. and intimidated – and the current occupiers. Ex-social worker Sara, whose world, controlled by controlling husband Damien, is shrinking day by day, began to see bloodstains on the kitchen tiles; then elderly and disheveled Mary Jackson appears at the door, claiming the house is hers and asking about missing children. Chapters alternate between Mary’s nightmarish upbringing – the ‘missing children’ are the ghosts of those who have not survived cruelty and neglect – and Sara’s attempts to escape her increasingly hampered existence. . Eventually, their budding, beautifully drawn friendship offers each woman a glimmer of hope.

Anything that gets you through the night by Charlie Higson (Small, Brown, £14.99)
A bit more upbeat and with much better weather, it’s Charlie Higson’s return to adult detective fiction. Robert McIntyre (pseudonym) has come to Corfu to save 15-year-old Lauren from a pedophile who operates under the guise of a dangerously cult-like elite tennis training program, but it’s not easy. Lauren’s father has arrived on the island and continues to get in the way; the child is busy planning his own escape attempt; and other obstacles include a turf war between drug dealers, Albanian gangsters, a psychotic bodyguard and a group of kid-rich teenagers ready to have fun. It’s loud, bright, fast and funny – a perfect read for a dreary month.