We are in the age of the nepo baby, and American crime fiction titan James Lee Burke has gifted (or saddled her, depending on your point of view) his writer daughter with the daunting task of following in his footsteps. But Alafair Burke’s novels are markedly different from those of her father: lean and focused, where his are written on the largest of canvases, and with less ire at US presidential ineptitude.
The Note (Faber, £9.99) may be her most accomplished yet. A holiday in the Hamptons for three friends has gruesome consequences. The women are a Chinese-American district attorney, a Black classical musician and the scion of a rich family whose chef husband was recently murdered. An ill-advised drunken prank the trio play on other car travellers appears to result in a disappearance, and soon three lives are being torn apart. Currently, there is no more egregious cliché in the crime fiction genre than toxic female friendships, but Burke’s gift for adroit characterisation and plotting keeps everything fresh and forceful.
Good news: the celebrated Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov has delivered a second outing for Samson Kolechko, a sleuth in revolutionary Kyiv. In The Stolen Heart (MacLehose, £20, translated by Boris Dralyuk), Kolechko is obliged to enforce a strange law: apparently, the selling of the meat from one’s own pig is illegal. But while enforcing this bizarre law, he also has to cope with the abduction of his fiancée Nadezhda, a clandestine criminal working in the police station itself, and the machinations of the secret police and the Red Army. It’s a scenario as paranoid and blackly comic as anything in Kafka, with pertinent resonances for current autocracies. Given the Leningrad-born author’s background as a commentator on Ukraine and Russia, it’s hardly surprising that the novel echoes a satirical line on Soviet paranoia stretching from Bulgakov to the present day.
Is it a good idea to commingle other genres with the crime fiction field? The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (Hodderscape, £22) is a complex, inventive (and notably weighty) whodunnit set in new territory for her: an epic fantasy empire. A lethal war of succession leads to an eccentric female scholar tracking down a ruthless killer amid tumultuous political furore. Hodgson is one of our finest historical crime novelists, so you may find it worth investigating her ingeniously invented society even if you are resistant to fantasy.
Not another novel by a barrister, I hear you groan? But wait! A Trial in Three Acts by Guy Morpuss (Viper, £16.99) is rather splendid, with the experienced barrister author channelling the tropes of both a tense courtroom drama and a classic locked-room mystery. Defence lawyer Charles Konig is a strongly drawn, complex protagonist.
The enterprising publisher Orenda clearly believes that two heads are better than one — the latest of its collaborations conjoins two prime exponents of international crime fiction. Johana Gustawsson is generally regarded as the queen of French noir, while Thomas Enger demonstrates that in terms of its crime writers, Norway has undoubtedly punched above its weight. The duo’s new novel Son (Orenda, £16.99) has psychologist Kari Voss, consultant to the Oslo police, working through her grief over her missing son, when the murder of two teenage girls in the nearby village of Son reveals a sinister secret that may have implications for his disappearance. This is Franco-Nordic noir delivered with total authority.
The industrious Anthony Horowitz is notably flexible in his repurposings of the crime/thriller genre. With continuations of Ian Fleming and Conan Doyle on his CV, he moved on to the Christie-style mystery, spruced up with metafictional flourishes. His new one, Marble Hall Murders (Century, £22), reacquaints us with murder-solving editor Susan Ryeland, now working on a final novel about the celebrated detective Atticus Pünd and discovering that the solution to a crime is hidden within the pages of a book she’s working on. The dividing lines between reality and fiction (a Horowitz trademark) are deliciously intertwined.
Finally, two accomplished (and very different) crime entries: Saint of the Narrows Street by American novelist William Boyle (No Exit, £9.99) and Someone Is Lying by Britain’s Heidi Perks (Penguin, £9.99). The former arrives trailing clouds of glory, and is set in a working-class neighbourhood of Brooklyn. It is an operatically scaled saga of troubled characters seeking a better life amid violence and strained family ties. Saint of the Narrows Street is a tour de force for Boyle, while Bournemouth resident Perks tweaks maximum mileage from her narrative of single mother Jess, deeply suspicious of her daughter’s unpredictable new boyfriend and fearing the worst when the girl goes missing. Perks, as ever, knows how to cannily wrongfoot the reader. A winner.
Barry Forshaw is the author of ‘Simenon: The Man, the Books, the Films’
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